A Bit of Home Cooking

In my rather long history of playing Football Manager Live I have had several different "approaches" to the game. When I started out playing in the beta Gameworld 3 and later for my first several seasons in Clough, my approach was what I think you could call the "traditional" strategy for the game - to get as many good players as I could by any means necessary and try to win as many competitions as I possibly could. Despite a reasonable level of success that included an FA Championship, I began to get disillusioned with this approach to the game. While I enjoyed competing at the top level, I didn't feel any sense of attachment to my players. This effect became more pronounced as the seasons advanced and the Real World players retired and regenerated players began to take their place. My players became only a name, a position, and a set of attributes rather than a collection of individuals that I could feel attached to and proud of.

In order to combat this apathy, I tried a number of alternative approaches to the game by imposing rules on myself and my team. First, I created a single-nationality squad of entirely Dutch players. While this was fun for a while, I found that it was very hard to compete for a number of reasons. Firstly, the number of Dutch players in the database was relatively small compared to the major nations. In order to build a competitive team, there were really only 4-5 players per position that I could target. This limited supply of players meant that people could drive their asking prices much higher in the knowledge that my options were limited. Secondly, limiting the effective size of the database that I could access for the purposes of playing the game really left me with less to do than I would otherwise have.

My third approach was the one that I stuck with and the one that I will be talking about today. It was introduced to me by a mod and friend from Clough gameworld who loosely took this approach from the beginning of the gameworld. I have codified it into a specific set of rules for my own use. I think it presents a very good challenge for even the most experienced FML players while still maintaining a level of flexibility whereby one could conceivably have one of the very top teams in the gameworld if they were able to plan accordingly and make wise financial decisions.

I call this approach the "Homegrown" approach to the game.

WHAT DEFINES A "HOMEGROWN" PLAYER?
To be honest, the definition of a homegrown player is a bit flexible and open to interpretation by the user.  When I used this approach in Clough, I made it very simple on myself and said that any players that my team purchased from other clubs had to be at or below 21 years of age.  This did lead to a couple of shifty purchases that, while following the letter of law, didn't necessarily honor the spirit of it!  I remember 2-3 players that I bought at age 21 just weeks before the "aging" code kicked in and made them 22.  However, looking back, nearly all of my players were purchased from the FA market as new regens or purchased from other clubs around 17-18 years of age.

For my second try at the Homegrown approach in the newly launched GW Völler, I was determined to make my rules a little more stringent to match the UEFA definition of "homegrown":

UEFA defines locally-trained or 'homegrown' players as those who, regardless of their nationality, have been trained by their club or by another club in the same national association for at least three years between the age of 15 and 21.

Enforcing this rule is a little more complex than simply limiting purchases to U21 players, but not by much.  Basically, if you are to purchase a player from another club, he must be at or under the age of 19.

There are some other exceptions that I allow myself for simplicity's sake when following my homegrown approach.  Firstly, I allow myself to sign free agents who have not been a part of any other club in the past (this includes the free agent players who become "unlocked" for the first three seasons).  The reasoning behind this is that your youth academy system needs several seasons of initial lag before it can kick in and in order to stay competitive, it is almost required that you purchase some additional talent above and beyond your starting pool.  I look at these new free agents the same way I look a the veteran players in my initial starting pool - we can imagine that they were once academy products of the club given that they have no prior history in the game.  Note that only free agents who have not been on another team are allowed - if a great 25 yr old striker shows up on the free agent list but was on another team last season, I don't allow myself to sign him.

So, to coalesce the above paragraphs into a simple series of applicable rules:

1. Your entire squad must consist of homegrown players at all times 
2. A homegrown player is one who spent at least 3 years at the club between 15 and 21 years of age.
3. Free Agent players of any age can be signed and used as homegrown players only if they have no prior history at any other club.

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF FOLLOWING A HOMEGROWN APPROACH? 
For me personally, the benefits of following a homegrown approach are threefold:

1. Increased attachment and identification with players
2. Additional challenge
3. Increased satisfaction with success due to points (1) and (2)

The increased level of attachment is an intangible benefit but for me personally it heightens the playing experience greatly.  Looking at your side several seasons on and seeing players that have been with the side since age 16 is a great feeling, as is looking back at a player's history when he reaches retirement age and seeing only your club on his history!  Another great moment is when your youngsters are finally ready to make the leap from U21 play to the senior level.  I even like looking back on the former youth players that I sold on to other clubs and seeing their performances and how they have matured into solid first team players!

The additional challenge of applying any set of rules to your approach in FML can not be doubted.  Following a homegrown approach will be difficult and require keen planning and financial management because any decisions that you make will have knock-on effects for seasons to come.  What do you do when you get an exorbitant offer for your star 19 year old striker?  Do you sell him and re-invest the funds to make your youth program stronger or increase the size of your stadium, or do you hold on to him because he is an irreplaceable homegrown talent that could lead your team to greatness?  How much do you bid for that promising 18 year old defender on auction?  If you miss the chance to sign him now you likely won't get that chance again!  For me, it is making the crucial decisions like this that add some interesting layers to the game.

Finally, when you eventually DO achieve success - whether it is winning the Premiership, achieving promotion from League 3, or making it to the final of your FA cup - it is so much sweeter with your group of homegrown players than it would be otherwise, take my word for it!  You can feel pride that the players that you signed and coached for so many seasons have achieved something of real note and that you did it as a stable team of homegrown players rather than a squad full of mercenaries signed on wage auction! :)

Location, Location, Location

As an addendum to my previously published Youth Academies Explained post, I've decided to publish a little bit of the research that I did when researching the viability of the different nations for youth academy placement in my gameworld, Völler. I'll also reveal the methods that I used when gathering this information so that you can, if you choose to, research the academy options in your own gameworld.

DON'T BUILD IN SWEDEN : AN EXAMPLE
As a simple example to demonstrate how I have performed the calculations for each nation, we will use the example of Sweden in gameworld Völler. Sweden is, by my numbers, one of the worst nations that one can build in at the moment and hopefully the following calculations will demonstrate why that is.

As a very simple metric, if we are looking to build in Sweden, we need to know how many other academies are already present in this nation and what kind of demands for youth players they are generating. In order to see this, we need to use the World pulldown on the top title bar and select Infrastructure. This will show us how many academies there are in each nation. You can see from the image below that in Sweden in GW Völler, I can calculate exactly how many new youth players they are demanding per season:


From examining the complete youth academy breakdown, the total number of youths demanded per season is easy to calculate:

total = [#5*]x16 + [#4.5*]x14 + [#4*]x12 + [#3.5*]x10 + [#3*]x8 + [#2.5*]x7 + [#2*]x6 + [#1.5*]x5 + [#1*]x4

total = 5x16 + 4x10 + 4x8 + 2x6 + 3x4
total = 176

So the total number of Swedish regens demanded each season is a whooping 176. Even without further investigation, you can probably guess just from this number that Sweden is not an attractive place to build a new Youth Academy. However, for the sake of this discussion, further exploration is needed - Sweden is an extreme example and it may often be the case that just looking at the total number of youths demanded doesn't give you a conclusive answer on what you can expect if you were to build in that nation.

While we know how many regens from Sweden youth academies are demanding, we don't yet know how many youths the system is "expecting" to create per season. This is a VERY important number in youth academy selection however - 99% of youths that are created beyond the expected number will be low potential garbage (1 star to 2 star potential range). So how do we arrive at this number?

One thing that has been mentioned explicitly by SI staff with regards to the youth generation system in FML is that the number of youths being generated by the system is representative of the gameworld database as a whole. This means that by totaling the number of Swedish players and dividing by some "magic factor" we can determine how many Swedish players the youth generation system "expects" to create in a given season.

In order to arrive at this number, I first totaled up the number of Swedish players in the database from ages 17-45. The reason I choose 17 instead of 16 is because I didn't want the academy products themselves to throw off the database numbers too greatly - over time changes to the database due to youth academy products can filter through to change the number of expected regens but I wanted to make sure that all of the dross that the academies were generating who would probably be retired in a couple seasons didn't pollute the actual DB numbers that I was gathering. I counted a total of 437 Swedish players in the DB. My choice of a "magic" factor was arrived at from a beta thread in which Ov stated the number of "expected" players in the beta gameworld - I attempted to more or less equalize the numbers I was seeing from Völler GW with the "expected" numbers that he presented in this thread. This led to a "magic factor" of 15. This number makes sense as it is roughly the career length for a player in FML (15-30 yrs old). Admittedly though, this is probably an inexact approximation for the actual number of youths generated so don't hold me to these numbers ;)

'Expected' Youths per season = max(# of DB players / 15, 16)
'Expected' Youths per season = max(437 / 15, 16)
'Expected' Youths per season = max(29, 16) = 29

This indicates that although the Swedish Youth Academies in Völler are demanding 176 regens, the system is only expecting to generate 29! This means that 84% of the Swedish youths generated by the FML YA system will be "filler" - low potential players that have no chance of making it on a senior side!!

It's worth pointing out that if there is at least 1 YA in a nation, the expected number of regens for that nation will NEVER be less than 16. This is what makes obscure nations a better choice than overpopulated nations in some instances - as touched on in my previous post.