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One of few things remained untouched since Hattrick started back in 97 is the youth squad system. Even though the youth squad design is very simple and doesn't require any real skill, many users consider the youth pull as one of the best moments every week. To no surprise really, after all it is fun to win on the lottery and that's also one of the reasons why this feature has been untouched for so long. Fact is it will remain untouched too, for those of you who just can't live without your weekly lottery. But for you who want something more there will also be a totally new youth squad system the season after next season (at the end of March).

An improvement of the youth pull system has been very wanted from the Hattrick community and it's also been one of the things we in the HT-team have discussed the most. Therefore I'm very happy to say it will soon come true. The new youth squad design is a mix of different ideas from the community, ideas of our own and also some things we felt have been missing in the game. One can say the new youth squad system is built around four foundations:

1. It should still contain some kind of lottery as it's hard to beat the excitement of a lottery after all.
2. It should offer more depth and challenges than today's system, and create a stronger bond with your youth players.
3. How players develop and how good they can be should be less predictable than today
4. A possibility to play youth matches whenever you want. This to enable an ingame tournament/series among friends, colleagues, etc.

In short it will work something like this:
To find youth players you hire scouts. You will only be able to hire a limited number of scouts. You can tell them to look for any kind of player or a special kind of player (defender, midfielder, etc). Every week each scout offers you a player, one scout/offer at the time. You'll only be able to pick up one youth player per week, so if you accept the first offer you'll not see any other offer and if you dismiss the first offer you'll not be able to accept it later. It's also worth mentioning that if your scout looks for something particular he's got a smaller chance to find an amazing talent.

When a youth player arrive to your youth squad he'll be 15-16 years old, but you will not be able to promote a youth player to your senior squad before a certain age. There will also be a maximum amount of players and a maximum age for the youth squad.
The youth players' skills will not be set in stone, they'll be floating. This means you'll have to explore your players and through match ratings see in which position they play the best. Skills will be more exact the more you train and explore your players, but exactly how good they are will first be known when you promote them to the senior squad. Except from the normal skills, youth players will also have values for potential and character.

Your youth players will form a team, which will play matches of their own. You will be able to create your own series and you’ll also be able to choose the weekly match time yourself. Regularly the series take a break and you'll be able to play against any other youth team of your choice.

The game engine for youth matches will be similar to the ordinary game engine, but some things will be slightly different. Training will, just as usual, depend on what you train and what position the player had in his last match, but you will also receive extra points (depending on what you've done the last week and also depending on your senior squad's results) which you can use to train some players some more. You will not be able to spend all your points on one thing though.

There will still be a maximum level for how good a youth player can get in a certain skill. We will have two parallel systems (the old "lottery" and this new one) and it wouldn't be fair if players could get better in one skill in one system and not the other. However, in the new system you'll have the advantage of designing your own players and make their secondary skills better. So, if you for example got a forward and notice that his scoring skill probably can't get any better because it's so close to maximum, you can choose to give him passing training in order to improve him further. In other words, this new system will also favor multiskilled training and multiskilled players, and most likely will players in the new system be better (similar primary skill but better secondary skills).

I think you get the big picture now. At the end of next season you'll get a more detailed description of the biggest implementation in Hattrick for a long time. An implementation worth waiting for, and something I'm looking forward to. I hope you do too.