[Suggestion] Board Interaction - upgrade youth system so that we can meet competition requirements

[BeeInExile]

One of the reasons to maintain a good youth system is to enable you to meet competition requirements, but you cannot make this case to the board in-game.

When going to the board to request upgrades to youth recruitment, coaching, and facilities, sometimes the board will refuse. If you are in a competition that requires a certain number of home-grown players (e.g. the Champions League/Europa League/Conference League), when you go back to the board to argue your case, one of the options to discuss the issue further with the board should be “we need good players coming through our youth system to help with our squad registration requirements”. The AI would then look at the number of Home Grown Club (HGC) players in your first team squad. If the number of players is very low relative to competition requirements (e.g. below the 4 you need for European competitions), they would be more likely to accept your request.

Clubs have struggled with getting enough HGC players into their squads in real life (e.g. here discussing Man CIty and Tottenham): https://www.skysports.com/football/news/11661/12052427/do-premier-league-clubs-need-to-sign-homegrown-players and bringing through academy players will presumably be the main longer-term solution.

Edited June 9, 2022 by BeeInExile
Adding [suggestion] to title

[BeeInExile]

As a side note, since this post recently got more attention, one advantage of adding this option would be that it might be a way to deal with clubs that have chosen not to have conventional Youth Academies, such as Brentford (until this year). As I understand it, Brentford's board were hard-coded to refuse the option to Improve Youth Recruitment in an attempt to simulate the B Team model. However, the decision to not have a conventional youth system was driven by being a relatively small player in a region with lots of bigger teams with better facilities - it wasn't really an ideological opposition to youth systems as such. I suspect this would be true for other teams who have adopted the B team model. Having this option available would mean that teams with a B Team model who in game become one of the biggest clubs in their league (which qualifying for continental football surely would signify) would be able to upgrade their youth team systems in accordance with their new status.

Or just tie upgrades to youth system to relative reputation - if I'm the most reputable team in London, I should clearly be able to expand my youth recruitment to hoover up all that interested talent.

[Zachary Whyte]

Thank you for the request. This is going to be reviewed and may end up in a future FM.