Youth or experience? It’s always a bone of contention. Does a manager go with a policy of recruiting veteran war-horses, or gamble on the potential of hungry youngsters?

As Electronic Hearts manager I was greedy for success after a less than stellar start to my career. For every win, I was losing two; and even if my exotic strike force put three in the back of the net, I’d ship in four whilst my defence took a second-half siesta.

 I’d painstakingly saved my transfer budget for when a gem was placed on auction, having resisted the urge to splash out on anything but the most modestly priced players when putting together my initial squad. My miserly approach to the transfer market had left me with a squad of mediocre also-rans, and it had impacted on my results. The 20-somethings that made up my defence were leaking goals, and if they were at their ‘peak’, then I needed to bring in a commanding presence to organise my defensive line- a player John Motson would describe as ‘a seasoned campaigner’.

My patience was to pay off, as none other than Argentine rock Walter Samuel was placed on a transfer auction by Cavemen, a team managed by Richard Usher. Surely a centre-back who had Inter Milan and Real Madrid on his CV would give me the experience, stability and star-power I needed to shore up my defensive line, and create some much-needed consistency.

The gameworld I was in had reached it’s 5th year at this point, so Samuel was in the twilight of his career at 32 years of age. Still, once the news was out that he was on auction, there was considerable interest and a number of early bids. The minimum bid was a meagre £1, a common practise in the FML world. Just like Ebay, a low starting price attracts attention, and once bidders are chasing a player, they tend to want to snare him. The manner in which market forces dictate the value a player commands is genuinely effective and is very much indicative of how organic the gameworld feels as a direct result of the mass human interaction. It doesn’t matter if a player is worth £1m in theory, if in practise no manager is willing to invest that much in securing his signature. The player’s actual value is entirely dictated by what we, the user base, collectively deem appropriate. So, in the case of a promising young striker who has been scoring regularly, an auction can end with a final figure hundreds of times higher than what his acquisition fee is.  At the other end of the spectrum, a washed-up, under-performing defender with one eye on his pension book can sell for the price of a bus ticket.

In the case of Walter Samuel, the frenzy of activity meant that the leading bid had reached £20,000 within minutes. This was some way short of his £400,000 acquisition fee (his ‘true value’ as calculated by the game), but the trend in the transfer market was resolutely towards long term investment. £25-30,000 was a reasonable price for a player who should have 2 solid seasons of play ahead of him, so I placed a max bid of £25K, and sat back. Well, I tried to sit back, but I found myself shifting to the edge of my seat as a bidding scramble ensued. Anyone who’s used eBay to buy a much-wanted item and ended up frantically refreshing their screen to guarantee they aren’t outbid will have a good idea of how heated the chase for a key signing can be. Determined to not lose out, I contacted the manager who was bidding back-and-forth against me to see if a sneaky compromise could be reached. He replied to my enquiry as to how much he would be willing to pay by saying his upper limit was £27k, and if he was worth more than that to me I could take him. Minutes later, my Final bid of £27,500 was enough to bring Samuel to the Electric Empire.

In my mind’s eye I could picture the scene: a world-renowned galactico pledges the final days of his career to a plucky, up-and-coming club hungry for success. He arrives at the ground to a clamour of press and paparazzi, there’s a photo shoot of him proudly holding his new Electronic Hearts jersey, whilst the die-hard fans chant his name.

Well, my day-dreaming of a new era was short lived, as Samuel’s lack of match fitness meant that, if anything, defending became more erratic. The leadership I was looking for was probably not going to materialise from a player who’s nick-name as a youth was ‘El Silencio’ (the silence) due to a lack of on-pitch communication. The teams at the top of the totem pole were using attacking formations with two pacey strikers being supported with attacking midfielders tucked in just behind. My defensive line was clearly getting short-changed for speed, and ageing legs was just not going to solve the problem.

Like all world-class managers, I knew when to cut my losses. After a week of getting trounced, I knew it was time to take a leaf out of my good friend Arsene Wenger’s book and establish a youth policy dedicated to nurturing the world’s finest young talent. And so, Sparks  was founded, an academy promoting excellence through a combination of high-protein, low-glycemic-index dietary supplements and intensive one-on-one coaching from the world’s finest coaches. Well, this is what I told the starry-eyed youngsters I was roping into long-term, low-paid contracts. So, surely it would just be a case of playing these youths for a few games and then cashing in once their value had rocketed. Simple. Meanwhile, Samuel made a quiet exit, leaving at a knock-down price of only £1 in an auction won, ironically, by a team called ‘Boca Genius’.

This is where the skills feature of the game really grabbed my attention. At any time in Football Manager Live, a manager can be training in one skill. There are around a hundred different skills, ranging from physiotherapy skills like ‘leg injuries’ that reduce the time it takes for a player to recover from such a problem, to coaching skills like ‘set piece training’ that improve your squads dead-ball abilities. There are 5 stars for any given skill to complete, and whilst ‘goalkeeper training’ may be a 40 minutes job to gain a single star, getting a 5th star in ‘Scouting’ takes 27 days!  Not all skills are available immediately, making for a very interesting series of decisions as to just what kind of manager you want to be, and making your decision accordingly. By selecting to train in ‘judging potential’, I was investing time I could have spent improving marking and defensive organisation chasing the promise of capturing a superstar. After achieving three stars later that day, I noticed something changed: when looking at the profile of a young player, there were stars there, where previously there had been none, telling me how much potential the player had.

Of course, by this time my quest for young stars had spiralled into a shopping spree that was more like capturing pokemon- I was out to catch ‘em all, and had already signed about 30 kids from across the globe. At wages of £200 a day, I could get 130 for the price of Walter Samuel!  However, my new-found power to judge potential made it apparent that whilst two of my players were “potential superstars”, I had signed a 16 year old Danish striker who was “unlikely to improve”, and a couple of defenders who had only 1 solitary star. Maybe Sparks Academy will succeed in the long run, but that’s a story for another time. A world class manager is big enough to admit when he’s made a rare mistake. I’m off to beg Walter to come back.