Amateur Reserve Teams when first team is professional?

[woolymuffler]

I just started a save in Austria (Floridsdorfer AC in 2nd division) and found that the reserve team is fully amateur (players have no contracts and a value of zero). I'm trying to understand the intended purpose of this setup with a youth team (U18) on standard youth contracts, an amateur reserve team and a fully professional first team.

Is the expected progression that players go from being paid youth to unpaid amateurs before eventually becoming full professionals? Or is the amateur team just a completely separate entity and my youth players will either be good enough to go fully professional with the first team or be released (and the amateur team signs free agents independently)?

How have others actually used this amateur team in game?

 

[woolymuffler]

Going to bump this once (after an edit to title and body of post) just in case people were skipping over it due to talking about Austria in title (not really an Austria specific question).

[turnip]

Dinamo and Hajduk have similar set-ups (or at least they did in FM18). And yeah, your actual good prospects can go into the First Team, although I wouldn't expect many young players to be keen on replacing a Youth Wage for, err, nothing.

Once I'd had some success, though, I was able to sign some promising (if low Reputation) players to the Amateur team, on Amateur terms. Which clearly has some benefit to you as the manager (and me, later, when I'd moved to a different club)

[woolymuffler]

Thanks for the reply! So it sounds like (in general) it's not that useful other than for match fitness purposes for the first team and maybe having some emergency cover players. I figured that any youth player that was good at all would probably not agree to join the amateur reserves in game.

 

I would be curious how this works in real life (do youth players really "graduate" to being unpaid amateurs if they aren't ready for the first team?) but obviously someone who is actually familiar with this sort of setup would have to chime in.