Hello and welcome to the latest FML development blog. It’s time to spill some infobeans on the latest developments you can expect in 1.4 and to start with we will be talking about one of the most hotly anticipated features – youth academies.

Building on the groundwork laid by the introduction of stadiums, the youth academies are a further extension of the infrastructure you can build around your club. Initially a club will be able to construct 1 academy, with the option to build further academies being unlockable through the learning of new academy operation skills.

Building an academy is very simple, however building the academy that will give the best rewards for your club, is not so straightforward. Fortunately, we will discuss both.

First, the simple part. Constructing an academy is a simple case of choosing a name for your academy, a rating (1* up to 5*, with half star increments) and a country to build the academy in. Then it is a case of selecting a construction company (either your own skills of the friendly the SI Construction Company) and you are away.

Construction time and cost depends on the size of the academy but as a guideline the cost is much lower than building up a stadium and will take less time before it is open for business.

On the subject of the academy rating, this rating determines the size of the academy, and so influences the number of players you will get through the ranks – it does not ensure better quality players than your rivals, just that you will get more. It will also determine the running cost of the academy – the bigger the academy, the more it costs to run. However, there are no repair costs with academies.

‘Ok’ you’re thinking, ‘I will just set up an academy in Brazil, one in Spain and one in France and let the wonderkids roll in’ – well hold on my friend, things aren’t quite that simple. You see the location of your academy is very important, and things aren’t so straightforward as to build them in the traditional football strongholds.

Whilst it is true that the best players will tend to come from the traditionally strongest countries the number of top players generated will not vary from what we see in the live worlds at the moment. These regens will have to be split amongst all the competing academies from the country in question, meaning that if you choose to set up an academy in Brazil you may find yourself competing with many other academies to get the top players.

Of course you still have a shot at the top players and chances are you’ll soon enough get a good prospect through your ranks, but another strategy is to take the road less travelled and set up somewhere more obscure. By setting up in a country which traditionally produces less top players you might have a lower overall pool of quality but you will also probably have less competition as well, meaning that you may actually get better players through on balance. Only you can choose the correct strategy for your side of course but be aware that there are different strategies which may pay off for you.

It is worth noting that the players will never dry up in a given country – if a lot of users set up an academy in a particular country enough players will be generated to fill their academies, however these players are less and less likely to be top prospects. The real stars are also likely to be spotted quickly, so bringing in more and more academy players will tend towards lowering quality. If a country is ‘oversubscribed’ in terms of academies then you will really be struggling for quality and the savvy manager will think about moving operations elsewhere.

Right, so the academy is built and is ticking over nicely. What next? Well, the players start to ‘graduate’ of course. You will be given a rough guide as to how many graduates you should expect from your academy per season and gradually these players will start to arrive. The graduates will be placed in your first team squad and put on a 1-season contract, ready for you to begin assessing. In this way they are exactly the same as if you signed them from the free agents list, however there are two important differences.

1 – They don’t contribute to your squad limit until they are 21, meaning that you can have as many graduates as you like without it impacting your training of others players.

2 – They can be released immediately without other players getting upset about you treating your players harshly.

Ok, so that is a whistle-stop tour of the academy system – as you can see it is pretty simple to get the hang of, though it does reward users who spend some time analysing the best areas to set up their operations as well. Time to get analysing youth generation trends!

P.S. Top tip – my ‘strategy’ of focussing youth developments on Cambodia is not really paying off thus far!