davidrobbo - Comments

I've been playing Football Manager, and before that Championship Manager, since 1992, when a group of school friends and I would huddle round their Amiga after school, each waiting an age for our turn. Apart from my family and my football club (COYB) it's been the longest relationship in my life. So any gripes contained within this piece are coming from a place of years of blood, sweat, tears, and mostly love for the game. It's also my first forum post on here, so this may have been discussed at length previously for all I know and I'm here reinventing the wheel!

One of my favourite aspects of the game is youth development. That's true in real life as well as in the game; I love academy football, looking at who is going to be the next big thing, watching players growing into stars and saving your club millions in the transfer market. On Footy Manager I spend hours combing the game for the best youngsters and developing them, and that's always been my transfer strategy, which ever club I'm managing. But in recent years I've grown a bit frustrated at how difficult it is to develop youngsters into good, let along top class, Premier League standard players. Not so much in terms of how to develop them (though I'm sure that's an area of continual learning and improvement), but because the standard of players playing in the U21/U18 leagues, and of most of the regens that subsequently appear in the game, seems far below what you'd expect in a game that seeks to mirror real life football.

This year I figured I'd try to quantify it with some simulation games, as an unemployed manager, on the FM23 beta. I actually did the same last season as well but misplaced the data, but what I've done is compared the current, real life state of play (using FM data at the start of the season) to three saves that I allowed to run until December 31st 2028. I kept it fairly narrow because of time constraints, but I think the numbers speak for themselves (with the caveat that the data could change before the full game is released, though I don't think that's likely to happen)

I looked at 9 top international teams; Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, England, France, Holland, Italy, Portugal, Spain (I didn't include Germany due to the License Fix). At the start of FM23, these 9 countries between them have 160 players at the age of 24 and under with at least one international cap. By December 31st 2028, across all three saves, only 27 new players aged 24 and under have an international cap with the same 9 nations. That's 9 per save, and encompasses anyone under the age of 18 at the start of the game, plus every regen that has appeared during the course of the game. Six and a half years into the game, almost every single player in every single national squad was already an international when the game began. A drop of of 160 to an average of just 9 is huge, and it certainly doesn't reflect the nature of international football in it's current state. Most of those 9 came from Spain and Belgium; Argentina, Brazil, England, France, Holland, Italy, and Portugal had an average of 0.5 capped players aged 24 or under per save, compared to just under 17 such players at the start of the game.

Then I looked at the so called ‘big 6’ Premier League teams, plus my own team Everton. At the start of the game, there are a total of 61 players under the age of 24 who would be considered first team regulars across those 7 clubs. Across the three game saves, by December 31st 2028, there are 60 players aged under 24 who would be considered first team regulars. That's 20 per game save. Whilst the drop off isn't as big as the international comparison above, six and a half years into the game there's just a third as many players under the age of 24 as at the beginning of the game.

To me this is clear evidence that the level of the youth players and the regens within the game simply does not match the reality of the standard of academy players at major clubs. Looking at my own club, Everton, we have a bunch of academy players that are very highly rated, most having recently been signed to long term contracts, and who are on the verge of a first team breakthrough; the likes of Reece Welch, Stanley Mills, Lewis Warrington, Isaac Price, to name a few, with Ishe Samuels-Smith in the younger age bracket. But at the start of the game most of those players have what I can only describe as pitiful stats, that would be nigh on impossible to develop into a player anywhere near a first team standard. Reece Welch, who has this season made his full debut for Everton's first XI, ended up in each of the three game saves being sold to the Jamaican Premier League. In FM22 it was the same story with Anthony Gordon; in a season where he broke through into the Everton first team, playing 40 times, his stats in FM22 were pretty poor, to say the least. 

To be fair it's something that you can take care of through the pre-game or in-game editor, but it can be really time consuming as you have to edit so many values, and try to balance improvements between both countries and clubs so you're not favouring your own team and are keeping the game competitive. And really, it would better if you didn't have to do that, as this does appear to be a pretty big blind spot in a game that puts a lot of stock in being realistic. And yes, I'm fully aware that running games and collecting data was probably a huge waste of time. Either way, I'll still be buying the game regardless; it's pretty much the only computer game I've played in the last 20 or so years! Thanks for listening to my TedTalk.