How to Find and Develop a Strong Youth Team

In order to have a strong youth team there are two important parts; signing/scouting good prospects and then training them as they grew older.

If we look at my team, I have...

- 1 15yo
- 13 16yo
- 23 17yo
- 10 18yo
- 7 19yo
- 5 20yo
- 3 21yo

... all of whom have 4* potential or higher, with Judging Potential 4. Let me explain how I got to this stage.

Finding Good Prospects


Apart from signing graduates from my academies, I spend a lot of time searching the free agent list for "fresh" regens. Fresh in the sense that they have not played and been released by a previous manager. It is important to note that some regens may appear to have had a previous club, however that manager may be now deactivated which is why they are on the free agent list - so don't discount these kinds of players.


How do you find these players then? Two simple things you can do while scouting is to have effective Views and Filters setup:

I will explain my reasoning for some of the View tabs:

Sorted by Free Agent Since. This will make it easier to see which regens are the newest so you don't spend time looking at a player multiple times unnecessarily. I think it is slight bugged however as the times are not exact - but they do show the correct day and sort in exact order so that's good enough for me!

Academy Club. This quickly indicates to me if they have played for another club previously and been released. However, if you see a lot of players from the same Academy Club (likely around off-season) appear on the FA list at the same time, it is likely that it's because the team has deactivated which means it may be worth checking these kids out.

Apps. One for senior and one for youth. Used to quickly see which players have played for another club and been released. The reason I include these in View and not Filter is because a player may have been signed on trial, played some games and not been signed. I don't want to exclude these types of players however if you check the FA list often enough you won't need to worry too much about people trialling players before you see them.

The Filters are pretty self-explanatory, the essential ones being age/free agent/trial. I'm using the region filters as my team is Asia only :)

Picking Good Prospects


- I check the FA list about twice per day and often find 5-6 new Asians each time.

- I trial each new regen for 24 hours and gain a 7% assessment of them.

- I nearly always have all 10 assessment spots used on assessing free agents. It takes 60 hours after the trial to get an initial assessment with JP4.

- If I trial them soon enough I have a good chance of trialling them again before they retire from the GW (if they haven't been signed by another team). At around 20% I cancel the assessment and trial them if I can.

- Based on their ability and assessment I decide whether to bid or not :)

Developing the Prospects


Currently I have 5 U17 squads simply to give games to my unused U17s. I try and make sure each team has friendly fixtures in place ready to be auto-resolved. I try to ensure that EVERY youth has a green progression arrow for the Overall Progression view tab.

I fill my main U17 team subs with players of 4.5* potential or higher so if I'm easily winning matches I can bring them on and hope for a good avg rating.

Another interesting thing you can do is to 'loan-swap' with another youth manager who has JP4 or JP5. This means both of you can get an extra assessment of your players while they are on loan. Having more than one assessment allows you to have greater insight into what his potential is.

If they are ready for the senior team, give them a chance. If not, let them play in youth games and achieve a good rating. 6.8 is the magic number :)

Hope this guide gives you a little insight into finding and developing those youngsters. We all know that bringing kids through into the first team is a great part of FML, however I hope the blog post does not increase the number of managers going for Asian regens in Nunez! ;)