Youth Development Unraveled: Part 1

There has been quite a bit of confusion over youth development on FML but we have now had some confirmation from Rob Cooper (SI) about how it works. With that in mind I thought it would be a good idea to collate the main points here.

So the factors which influence youth development are:


* Player's Age
* Player's Potential (1-200)
* How much football they are getting
* Standard of football they are playing (senior/youth & competition reputation)
* Average Rating
* Manager's skills (coaching)
* Player's Ambition (hidden attribute)
* Player's Professionalism (hidden attribute)
* Player's Work Rate
* Whether the player is injured
* The player's morale

Some explanations in relation to above:

Potential Ability (PA) – Every player in the database has PA between 1-200 and a Current Ability (CA) between 1 and their PA level. PA does not change and if a player’s CA hits their PA then they will have become as good as they possibly can. As an example, Cristiano Ronaldo will have a PA around 190 and his CA will also be around 190 as he is a world class player at his peak. On the other hand a player like Henri Saivet may have a PA of 190 but a CA of 120 because he has not hit his peak yet. Yeah I know he is a duffer on St John but couldn’t think of another example!

As attributes increase so does a player's CA, once all the PA points are used up then a player will have peaked and no more progression is possible. I’m going to cover this in much more detail in part 2 because it’s not quite a simple as that!

It is worth discussing how Judging Potential works now. JP sees one thing, and one thing only – it sees a players PA. I don’t know the ranges but I would *guess* that a player with around 170+ PA will be 5*. The really important thing here is that high potential does not mean the player will become good. If he has low professionalism and ambition, which are hidden attributes you can’t see, then you have a big problem straight away. Couple this with low work rate and determination (this affects other hidden attributes) then your 5* youth which you are paying 15k a day to could be complete garbage. You also need to pay close attention to the starting attributes, if a striker has 5 finishing, he is never ever going to gain enough to become world class, no matter what JP tells you.

Side note on determination coaching – it does not work (confirmed) do not bother learning it, if you have you should hopefully get a point refund in a future patch.

The other most important piece of information that has been confirmed is regarding the standard of football your youth are playing at. Everyone has heard of the magic 6.8 but it seems this is not entirely accurate. Rob has confirmed that average rating is the most important factor in youth development rather than the standard of football! So averaging 7.5 in the youth team is apparently more beneficial than averaging say 6.8 in the senior team. Crucially though, if your youth player CAN attain an average of 7.5 in the senior team then he will develop better than just playing in the youth team. The obvious thing though is just to play them at a level they are comfortable at.

Also it is to be expected that younger players will have a lower average rating, so if you have a 15 year old averaging 6.8 in the U21s I suspect this is just as good as a 21 year old averaging 7.20+

Competition reputation is important to consider here because if you DO have youths that are good enough to play league games and crucially, are able to attain a good average rating then you should start seeing more progression. Senior friendly competitions are useful but official UFFA competitions carry the highest reputation and thus the highest development potential.

I would seriously be striving to attain at least 7.00+ with all your youth players for the best development. There are ways you can ‘fiddle’ this a little. Do you have potential star DLC ? Then play him DL because fullbacks tend to average higher in the match engine.

Rob has confirmed that playing in different positions has no bearing on shaping youth development. Consider your corner takers and free kick takers for assists, penalty takers etc – anything you can use to boost up a players average rating. You obviously can’t do this for everyone but if you want to focus on a couple of players it is very useful.

A lot of people seem to think coaching is not important but I think this a very big mistake to make because it can make the difference between an attribute increasing and it not!

Here’s what Rob Cooper said:

One other thing I meant to mention is that even though the attributes are displayed in the 1-20 range on the screen they are actually stored in the 1-10,000 range behind the scenes to give extra accuracy during progression. Because they are rounded down to be displayed a small change behind the scenes can manifest itself as a fairly big change on the screen. For example a player with 19 for finishing on the screen may have 9,050 behind the scenes. If they then drop to 8,950 during processing this is only a drop of 1 or 2% however on the screen it is the difference between 18 and 19 and so a red arrow is displayed and it looks like a drop of 5%. Rest assured though that for all processing the 'real' figure is used.


The skills have a 5% bonus per level, so Coaching 5 will boost positive changes by 25% - what this means is that if, behind the scenes in the 1-10,000 range, a player's finishing increases by 400 points it will actually increase by 500 points (the 400 plus the 25% boost.) If the player doesn't improve though the skill won't make him improve.

So you can effectively get extra progression for nothing! if you are just a couple of hundred points off something then it’s possible that coaching could make the difference between finishing 19 and finishing 20. It’s free as well!

As this has already turned out to be much longer than intended Part 2 will cover the relationship between attributes and CA - attribute weightings etc, red arrows! and free attributes.