You hate it. I hate it. We all hate the youth academy in this game. At its worst, it’s a painful reminder that regens ruin the game, or at its most useful, it’s a way to finance your team when the game doesn’t properly compensate you for your achievements. Let’s try and fix this.

I have experimented with an approach which has been a lot of fun over the years. It’s relatively simple (though it might look like a lot) and should create a pathway through your team that’s akin to real football.

What this guide boils down to is the following; You create a squad of 15 players who you will classify as your youth squad. Most will be loaned out, whilst you will play the rest. However, if you want to learn a bit more about the thinking behind this, as well as how to apply it in full, then keep reading.

Also note, this is not about ‘optimal youth development’. This whole guide is to get you to think about your youth academy in a different way and apply some more realistic principles to make it fun for you.

Meet your New Youth Squad

Here’s what you’re going to do. First, you need to fill your squad with 15 players:

• Three 16 year olds
• Three 17 year olds
• Three 18 year olds
• Three 19 year olds
• Three 20 year olds

These 15 players are your youth squad! When you join a team, you should have a few players who will fill out this quota. To fill out the rest, you will want to cherry pick some of the players from your actual youth academy and sign a few free agents. Failing that, you can always wait until January when the youth academy refreshes.

You can not start with any 16 or 17 year olds in your games. The game is broken by design, so just cut these players from your playing squad. Instead, do your best to set them up with loans. You can do this from the youth academy window (so they only get promoted once they secure a loan) or you can just sign them and take your chances.

This leaves you with nine 18/19/20 year olds in your main squad. Of these 9 players, decide who is going to be a starter on a weekly basis and who should be loaned out until you can make room for them. If you want to keep your save more realistic, then you can limit yourself to only three players from this group to become starters.

The main thing is that once you set up your first Youth Squad, then you’re sorted for the whole save. Each season you promote three 16 year olds, the 17 year olds are now part of the 18 year old allocation and are available for selection, and the three 20 year olds become ‘senior’ members of the team. It’s a conveyor belt that will keep moving forward.

Developing your Youth Squad

Obviously, the goal here for you is to either create your own homegrown players who can become legends for your club, or to create a profit generating machine. Whatever your goals, it’s important that you actually develop your young players. Here’s some things to consider:

1. If you are going to loan a player out for a season, you should investigate the team which has approached them. Take a look at their squad and see whether your player would be a starter. If so, then he’s going to play and get minutes. If not, then it’s a wasted loan as he’s better off on your bench.
2. It’s not enough to just play, you also want them to perform well! A match rating of 6.5 and above is going to do wonders for their development. So if you are just starting out with your save, where chemistry is low and the play is sluggish, you might want to limit them to bench appearances to increase their odds of having a positive impact on a match until the whole team performs well.
3. It’s important players have the ‘Youth Prospect’ team role as this will boost their growth trajectory. Just something to look out for if you dip into the free agents market.
4. Personally, I only like to promote players I have not heard of. This is quite easy given the size of the database. Don't forget that you can go to 'Youth Team Training' under 'Team Management' and preview the faces of all the players. Nothing worse than a 16 year old who looks 45.
5. Finally, don’t forget that you can sign experienced players to your squad to boost experienced gains both on the pitch (with the captains armband) and in training. Read into Team Roles if you want to learn more.

In practice, all of this is very simple. It involves some planning and management at the start of each season, but other than that, it comes down to just playing a handful of players under the age of 20 throughout the season. It's not complicated at all but hopefully this gives you some ideas and a means of developing youth players properly and in a way that better resembles actual football.