Youth Academies! It seems almost everyone has one. They’re now a staple part of the FML Manager’s way of life but this isn’t to say they haven’t had their issues. You’ve been very vocal about them in fact!

We took all your feedback on board and felt that these were the areas that needed our attention:

Academies work over a 28 day period (Individually of the season).

• There is no indication for when a graduate is about to be promoted.
• A perceived ‘lack’ of quality vs investment.
• Graduates are ‘estimated’ causing confusion over how many graduates a user should have, especially when skills are brought into it.
• Users are completely tied down to all their players and have to resort to free transferring a lot of them (as they don’t get sold).
• Absolutely no players turning up onto the free list (removed an exciting aspect of the game).
• The feature isn’t as ‘interesting’ as hoped.

So, what are we going to do about it?

Looking at the issues above we decided, at first, to concentrate on fixing the core issues.

Because of this we can confirm that, since the compensation update, you are now receiving the correct amount of graduates.

However, every single day we’re still receiving requests (via support tickets and on the forums) to check to see if academies are working, so we’ve continued to monitor them. What this shows to us is that, although the system is working as intended, there are still some improvements that need to be made to help you all understand exactly, what you should and should not be getting through the Youth Academies. So. to improve matters and make the system really solid and easy to understand, whilst also adding further excitement and depth to the game we’re going to:

1. Make the academy system completely transparent – No more having to guess when your allocation is going to arrive, you’ll get a full quota at the same time, every season.
2. No more having to pay the deadwood in your side – Academy players will no longer be receiving a wage until they graduate.
3. No more random ‘academy seasons’ – Academies will come in line with the gameworld seasons, with all players graduating and joining your teams at the same point every season. This will allow you to properly set up your youth teams for the forthcoming seasons.

With the above changed, the issue of transparency and understanding should be resolved so we need to look at the future and where we could go to expand and improve further. Free agent youth was a particular bug bear (and still is) even before academies arrived into the gameworld. High wages and the best teams getting a lot of the best players for starters.

Before Youth Academies came into the game we know that picking up a wonder youth from the free list and watching him progress was one of the most exciting parts of the game. Since academies have come in, this no longer happens – so what should we do about this? These are a few of the ideas we’ve had so far:

1. No more upkeep fees – Let’s make at least one academy a good thing for you guys to have, upkeep fees removed.
2. Get those players on the free list – If we remove the running costs, we can’t give you absolutely everything. So instead we could limit the amount of players you can allow to graduate to your full squad by introducing a new pre-contract system. You could be allowed to select 25% of your current allocation (per academy) to graduate. You could then pay a fee for additional pre-contract slots (up to a maximum of 50% of your allocation) to retain more players. All the rest would then graduate onto the free list, where everyone can bid on them in wage auctions.
3. Make the players younger – Academy players could be made even younger, with proper progression, a new look and even realistic height growth spurts! So that these younger players would have some where to play, we’d introduce a new under 15’s tier.
4. Improve progression – Hugely important of course – We’d need to make sure that these younger players, as well as the older ones, progress correctly. We plan to put a lot of work into the progression system, with players starting at a lot lower level and lots of interesting variations.
5. Make the YA’s more exciting – This may be controversial, but any players under 15 would not be able to identified using judging potential. We could even change the way these players’ attributes are displayed to add a new dimension to bringing through those young superstars!

These are just some of the ideas we’ve had so far, and we think that, introduced together, they could add a whole new dimension to the youth progression aspect of the game. We want your feedback though so head over to the Future Discussion Forum to read more and help shape the future of Football Manager Live!