Community » Hattrick Press

10 tips on making your youth team more effective for you.

Written by Sublevel4

This is a guide to managing your youth team. It is primarily aimed at managers who don't know much about what their youth teams can offer, as well as offering some up to date tips to help you get the most out of your team. There is always more to discover, but this should get you started.

Although some managers prefer the lottery for pulling a random youth into their senior team each week, or simply don't have the time or inclination to manage a youth team, the latter can complement your senior team, if you know what you are doing. if you fancy giving it a go, here are some tips.

1: Decide what your primary reason is for having a youth team.

Youth teams can be used in a variety of ways. There is no right or wrong way.
Probably the most obvious reason is to use it to build talented players who can make the jump to your main team. Here you will be looking for players in positions where your team is relatively underpowered and/or positions that your senior team is training.

Another option is to use your youth team to build great players to sell. The very best youth players are always in demand and can command substantial transfer fees, if they are pulled out of the youth team when they turn 17 and sold immediately. Just one of those can really bolster your finances.

A third way is to play the youth team on its own merit, to help you understand the pros and cons of using different formations and tactics. You can develop the team and try to dominate your youth league. This is not directly profitable, nor does it help your main team much, but it remains an option.

Finally, there is an option somewhere between the first two, where you simply train your best players, keeping some to use/train and selling others.

2: Get as much info as you can on your players.

Your youth scout will give you some basic info to start with, but your youth trainer will give you additional information immediately after each game. Usually, they will disclose the current level of one of the players using the Primary training and the potential level of one of the players using the Secondary training. In addition to that they may give you one other current or potential skill of any player playing. They will also advise you of any skill pops for players whose current skill is visible, as well as offering hints about which players could benefit from what training, who might become one of the best players in the current youth team squad, along with spotting which players have a specialty and a couple other things.

In order to improve the usefulness of your post match youth training updates,
AdTheMad (2376740), who is Assistant National Coach for the England U21 provided some tips:-
1) Always select the 'play creatively' tactic. This will increase the number of potential Special Events (SEs) triggered in each match and in turn the probability for revealing more players with hidden specs in your youth team.
2) Select as many players with a known spec in your lineup as possible. If you have more players with specs in your team than your opponent then this will increase the probability for your team recieving SE chances instead of your opponent.

3: Use Friendlies to train differently

Your friendlies give you 50% training, compared to league matches, so less training is lost when you use friendlies to train something different. Often this is as simple as identifying your best player(s), deciding what additional information about those players would be useful and adjusting your training to suit. Remember to adjust it back straight after the match. For example, if you have a Winger that can reach 'solid' before turning 17, but you don't know his Defending, Playmaking, Passing or Scoring potential, use a friendly to find out more. These are the games to try this winger out as a forward training scoring, an inner mid training playmaking or as a defender training defending.

AdTheMad suggested that it's worth revealing potential skills for two reasons. Firstly to confirm just how good he could be and secondly to help plan to give him the best possible youth team training to reach his full potential.

He suggested a trick to force reveal a potential skill by using the secondary training choice selection. Here is an example:

Let's say we want to know our solid winger's playmaking potential.

1. Choose playmaking as your secondary training and perhaps go with Passing as your primary training (Note: Training an identical training type twice (i.e. double playmaking) will cancel the potential reveal).
2. Only play other players in other midfield training positions where their playmaking potential is already known. This will 'force' your youth coach to reveal our winger's playmaking potential as he's the only one left in a training position available to reveal.

So, we could play 532 like this:
GK
WB CD CD CD WB
Our solid winger as an IM, with known PM potential players as the other 2 IMs
FW FW

4: Younger players are usually better prospects.

With very few exceptions, you should prefer to accept 15yo players offered by your scouts. This won't always be possible, but if it is, you have at least a whole season to find out what to train them in and provide that training. Training in the youth team isn't as quick as in your senior team, but 1 season, especially if you know one good skill from the start, is often enough to build a useful player.

There are, of course, exceptions. If your scout offers you a very good (solid+ potential) 16yo, then it can definitely be worth accepting such a player. It is a gamble, but If you are lucky they will be closer to 16 years old and 1 day. If you are unlucky closer to 16 years old and 111 days, although with the right skills/specs, players who can promote that are a little bit older than the optimum can still be worth training.

AdTheMad makes the point that the aim is always to promote at age 17.0. Youth team training takes twice as long as senior team training, so keeping players in the academy with slower training will most likely reduce the potential transfer value and interest from potential buyers.

5: Specialities make a big difference.

Regardless of whether you intend to sell or keep your youth team players after they promote, specs can make all the difference. If selling, they could be the difference between actually finding a buyer or not, as well as often increasing any potential transfer fee. If keeping for training, they could one day make the difference between you winning and losing a big match.

6: Skill levels of promoted players.

Ideally, you should be promoting players as soon as you can, preferably with a relevant spec and either at least one Solid skill, or 2-3 Passable skills (with Goalkeepers a passable primary can be enough). If you are selling, you probably won't make much profit (or perhaps sell at all), with less than this. Exceptions to this rule of thumb include players from a smaller country in HT; players with solid leadership; or, if they have JUST the right skills to complement their spec (e.g. a combination of inadequate+ Playmaking, Passing and Scoring can still get a Technical or Powerful player sold, even without a solid skill, or an Unpredictable player with passable Defending/Passing and perhaps some Set Pieces which are sought after by GK trainers).

AdTheMad recommends we focus upon training one amazing prospect (or a select few) than trying to train all of your youth players at once. That one amazing prospect could be worth millions if trained optimally, but if you try to train all players at once it is likely that a lot of them won't be worth anything on the transfer market.

There is a very helpful tool to help identify which of your youth team players is the best, and to help identify potential amazing prospects here:- (https://www.rate-my.academy/)

7: Don't "double train" unless you absolutely have to.

In the youth team there is an option to train the same skill with both primary and secondary training. Unless you desperately need one specific pop (like getting a player to Excellent before they turn 17), then it generally isn't worth doing this. Your secondary training, which to start with only has 66% of the effectiveness of your primary training, is further diminished whenever you select identical primary and secondary skill training. All players contribute to ratings using their support skills and these need training too. Even if you wanted to get a defender to Excellent just before he turned 17, using Defending as the primary training and Defensive Positions as the secondary will give you more bang for your buck than using pure Defending for both.

glynzales (4354082) has done some fantastic research on youth academy training and the relative effectiveness of different combinations of primary and secondary training which can found here (17350846.1) and he has recently published a study about 'individual training' to help understand what skills are likely to be trained by positions whenever 'individual' is selected for either primary or secondary training here (17462345.1).

In the cases where double training will give you pretty much the same for your key trainees, you can still miss out on training and skill reveals for the "additional" trainees that a different secondary training would otherwise benefit, for example the players who could benefit from Defensive Positions training (GK & IMs), miss out if you choose defending for both primary and secondary training.

8: The best skill-set doesn't necessarily include the skill that your main team is training.

The training in your senior team is extremely quick at lower skill levels as well as at lower age levels. If you are training with the idea of promoting into your main team, don't just look at the primary skill for that position. A youth player with Solid/Excellent Defending, Passable Passing and Weak Playmaking could be a very nice player for you to train at senior level in Playmaking. It will only add on 4-5 weeks of Playmaking training to get him to Passable and when you have finished training him, having a Solid/Excellent and/or a Passable secondary skill will make him contribute more to the team and will attract higher bids if you decide to sell him.

9: Be patient.

It takes time for your youth team to become effective. You start with street kids, and the best youths will be found by scouts, whom can only be called once per week. There is luck involved and scouts find more rubbish than gems. A decent estimate, would be to assume that it takes about 2 seasons before you can promote your first strong youth player. All scouted players must stay in the youth team for at least one season whilst they train and your first few scouted players probably won't be that great. Having said that, it is definitely worth it. Once up and running, you can regularly promote decent players from your youth team.

10: Pick the right time to scout players.

Every HT country has a set time that the weekly Financial Updates are run. You can scout for players immediately after this, until the next financial update, & you can only agree to select one scouted player into your youth team each week.

The pool of talent is refreshed during the night, so theoretically you are more likely to get a good player early in the morning than late at night. During the day youth players that have been scouted and brought into youth teams are replenished every two hours, & although it is difficult to be certain exactly when those refills occur, calling scouts in busy regions later in the week is an option to consider because of a higher turnover of players replenished in their scouting pool.

Finally, AdTheMad would like everyone to use the Rate My Academy link under heading 6 & to select 'share your player data' which will massively help U21 scouting. It will also help identify hidden specs that are not reported by the coach. You can also compare your prospects to all the other prospects currently in youth teams all over the world.

There is more to learn, but this should hopefully get you started! For more information and tips, don't hesitate to join us on the Global forum: (17465382.1).