Signing young players

[Xavin]

Hello,

Im a veteran FM player returning for FM24 (last time I played was for FM21). I find one of the aspect of the new game unbearable to the point that I just want to go back to FM21 unless there is a fix. Whenever I try to sign a young player they never want to deal with me before they are 18. 
I have been playing with Ajax and in 5 years I have won the league 5 times and the CL 3 times, Ajax is the biggest and richest club in the world and I am the most famous manager in the world yet whenever I try to sign a 15 or 16 years old they are absolutely not interested in playing for me. This is completely stupid.

I have been playing a bit with the game and it seems it has to do with their contracts, if they have signed any contract recently they will decline all talks even if their clubs would be keen to sell them. Once they get to 18 it's usually easier as the youth contract are getting close to expiry and then of course I can sign most of them. I understand that in the previous FM it was maybe too easy for a low club with no reputation to buy all the foreign wonderkids but the current situation is just ridiculous. Imagine Real Madrid trying to sign a 16 years old playing for getafe and the player is saying no thank you Im not interested.

Anyway the post was not to complain but to know if there is a way to fix that with the pre game editor? Of course with the ingame editor I could transfer any player I want to my club but this is not what Im looking for.

Thank you

Edited July 21 by Xavin

[santy001]

There is a period of several months following the signing of a new contract where a player isn't then going to look to sign another contract. That was already the case in FM21. There are no barriers to signing EU players as a club in the EU prior to 18. At Barcelona I'm signing players as young as 15 regularly. When looking at South American based players or in other parts of the world they won't negotiate at 15/16 because the time until they can join the club is so far away. If the player is prevented from joining you until they turn 18 they won't be open to negotiations usually until a window or so before they can actually make the move. 

[Xavin]

It used to be way way easier to sign young players in the previous versions of the game. I should run an experiment and check out of 100 how many are ready to sign for me and trying to find the breaking point in contract length. 

[santy001]

There isn't any disputing it used to be a lot easier. In reality there is a lot of problematic aspects involving the signing and moving of clubs for players at those ages and so it makes sense to an extent the game has pushed it back to what is more clear-cut allowed by rules. A lot of transfers that happen in real life at these ages often either have enough money involved that no one complains or the team losing out on the player kicks off.

In English football at least the latter usually results in a young player being left without a club and being embargoed for a number of years so that they cannot sign with any team, which effectively ends their career. 

[XaW]

18 minutes ago, santy001 said:

There isn't any disputing it used to be a lot easier. In reality there is a lot of problematic aspects involving the signing and moving of clubs for players at those ages and so it makes sense to an extent the game has pushed it back to what is more clear-cut allowed by rules. A lot of transfers that happen in real life at these ages often either have enough money involved that no one complains or the team losing out on the player kicks off.

In English football at least the latter usually results in a young player being left without a club and being embargoed for a number of years so that they cannot sign with any team, which effectively ends their career. 

Also, in 2020 FIFA implemented some more rules regarding players under 18 moving countries too.

https://www.fifa.com/legal/media-releases/fifa-publishes-its-guide-to-submitting-a-minor-application

If I've understood it correctly, international transfers for players under 18 are not allowed, with a few exceptions outlined in the linked document. It's mostly based on if the family moved for non-footballing reasons and the like (in order for clubs to not just move the whole family to sign a player). Feel free to enjoy the joys of a legal document outlines a process at your own leisure!

Essentially, the game handles this by making under 18s transfers very limited both financially and by interest.

Now, in real life, there have been several high profile transfers that seems to break this, but I imagine that expensive lawyers find loopholes in the FIFA rules, and I think FM does it right by not allowing misuse of the law to happen, even at the cost of "realism" in this case.

[NineCloudNine]

1 hour ago, XaW said:

Also, in 2020 FIFA implemented some more rules regarding players under 18 moving countries too.

https://www.fifa.com/legal/media-releases/fifa-publishes-its-guide-to-submitting-a-minor-application

If I've understood it correctly, international transfers for players under 18 are not allowed, with a few exceptions outlined in the linked document. It's mostly based on if the family moved for non-footballing reasons and the like (in order for clubs to not just move the whole family to sign a player). Feel free to enjoy the joys of a legal document outlines a process at your own leisure!

Essentially, the game handles this by making under 18s transfers very limited both financially and by interest.

Now, in real life, there have been several high profile transfers that seems to break this, but I imagine that expensive lawyers find loopholes in the FIFA rules, and I think FM does it right by not allowing misuse of the law to happen, even at the cost of "realism" in this case.

Just maybe worth adding that these rules were brought in to counter absolutely rampant exploitation and trafficking of young players. It’s a rare example of FIFA doing the right thing for the right reasons.

[Xavin]

I'm not saying that part of the game didn't need fixing but they overdone it a lot I think. 

If you are playing with Luton it makes a lot of sense that players would refuse to sign with you at a young age even if you are playing in the Premier league. On the other end when you have won so many titles, are the best manager in the world in the best club in the world I think 90%+ of the players should want to sign with you right away. 

Bearing in mind the cannot move to the country before they are 18 if they are non EU and so on 

[scythian12]

As far as I understand this mechanic was brought in so as to stop top AI sides pinching anyone with a PA 150+ immediately the moment they spawned from their youth clubs, even if some RL framework is cited as the reason. There was essentially no way for the player to partake in wonderkid development unless playing with a 8500+ rep club.

[fc.cadoni]

Recently, FC Aris has been "bought" (?) a 17 y/o player (Clayton Diandy) from Senegal. He can't sign a professional contract with the club, until turns 18 y/o (29/7/24). 

[wazzaflow10]

13 hours ago, scythian12 said:

As far as I understand this mechanic was brought in so as to stop top AI sides pinching anyone with a PA 150+ immediately the moment they spawned from their youth clubs, even if some RL framework is cited as the reason. There was essentially no way for the player to partake in wonderkid development unless playing with a 8500+ rep club.

Isn't it the other way round? Its to stop the human from snapping up all the high PA players before the AI can determine if they want them. I'm quite sure this has been cited as a reason why when asking why U18 players don't even show up in scouting anymore. It turns it into a crap shoot for the human to be looking at the right time in the right place rather than being able to track the best players from spawn to when you can sign them.

[Xavin]

Yeah it feels more like a poor attempt at protecting the IA. It's like I have the best scouts in the world and I cannot put them on assignment because it will take them forever to find the next wonderkids. I have to manually scout all the under 16 years old in all the top clubs or use the youth intake page to manually scout them. It is mega painful and on top of that we are limited to ordering 50 reports at once. 

[wazzaflow10]

4 hours ago, Xavin said:

Yeah it feels more like a poor attempt at protecting the IA. It's like I have the best scouts in the world and I cannot put them on assignment because it will take them forever to find the next wonderkids. I have to manually scout all the under 16 years old in all the top clubs or use the youth intake page to manually scout them. It is mega painful and on top of that we are limited to ordering 50 reports at once. 

I don't think we should be allowed to essentially spawn camp when the AI can't. The AI doesn't scout the same way (I don't know why - must be processing times). The bigger factor is your scouts are really good at finding high PA players and then human's are really good at sorting out which players are actual high CA/PA players long before the AI can. It's rare a human ever makes a truly bad signing because we have nearly perfect information about a player. My scouts have both these players as leading PL strikers 4 stars for Gaari and 4 1/2 stars for Josete. Yet a human would never sign Gaari as a leading PL club.

There's a huge disconnect between what scouts report about a player's ability and their actual attributes. They should be in sync from the human's perspective when you view a scouting report and a player's attribute profile page. It makes squad building easy when you can reliably find the high PA players and then just sort through the players who's actual CA and attributes match the scout's opinion.

 

[Xavin]

Il y a 17 heures, wazzaflow10 a dit :

I don't think we should be allowed to essentially spawn camp when the AI can't. The AI doesn't scout the same way (I don't know why - must be processing times). The bigger factor is your scouts are really good at finding high PA players and then human's are really good at sorting out which players are actual high CA/PA players long before the AI can. It's rare a human ever makes a truly bad signing because we have nearly perfect information about a player. My scouts have both these players as leading PL strikers 4 stars for Gaari and 4 1/2 stars for Josete. Yet a human would never sign Gaari as a leading PL club.

There's a huge disconnect between what scouts report about a player's ability and their actual attributes. They should be in sync from the human's perspective when you view a scouting report and a player's attribute profile page. It makes squad building easy when you can reliably find the high PA players and then just sort through the players who's actual CA and attributes match the scout's opinion.

 

Well I think the human player should have the option on how he wants to play. If people prefer to wait that their scouts find something good for them, if people want to "cheat" using FM scout good for them to and if people find joy in aggressively raiding the data base by manually raiding the data base they should be allowed to do so. 

When it comes to not making bad signing I'm not so sure.

Yes we are much better at making decision than the IA but even, with the best scouts I sometimes sign players that are pretty bad simply because the PA estimation was way off or because the personality was middle of the road (so not great but no big red flag) but for some reasons the players don't turn out great despite the mentoring and the coaching. 

I think the worst offenders are the high CA young players. The PA rating is based of the CA rating so you could have someone with 115 CA at 16. The scouts could tell you he has a 5 stars potential but in reality his PA is maybe 135. 

So you buy the player thinking massive potential and very good stats for a 16yo but in reality he will never be good enough to play at the highest level. 

[XaW]

20 minutes ago, Xavin said:

Yes we are much better at making decision than the IA but even, with the best scouts I sometimes sign players that are pretty bad simply because the PA estimation was way off or because the personality was middle of the road (so not great but no big red flag) but for some reasons the players don't turn out great despite the mentoring and the coaching. 

I think the worst offenders are the high CA young players. The PA rating is based of the CA rating so you could have someone with 115 CA at 16. The scouts could tell you he has a 5 stars potential but in reality his PA is maybe 135. 

So you buy the player thinking massive potential and very good stats for a 16yo but in reality he will never be good enough to play at the highest level. 

This is realistic though, isn't it? How many huge talents haven't fizzled out into nothingness over the years after a big signing? 

[Costav]

1 hour ago, XaW said:

This is realistic though, isn't it? How many huge talents haven't fizzled out into nothingness over the years after a big signing? 

I agree 100% on the fact that it should be like this. To maintain the game as realistic as possible, it should be the space for "failure" from the human perspective. Otherwise it will always be easier to overperform compared to the AI. 

We almost have 100% perfect information availability (100% is achieved by those who use the in-game editor to see CA/PA values of players, never understood where the fun is in doing like this).

19 hours ago, wazzaflow10 said:

I don't think we should be allowed to essentially spawn camp when the AI can't. The AI doesn't scout the same way (I don't know why - must be processing times). The bigger factor is your scouts are really good at finding high PA players and then human's are really good at sorting out which players are actual high CA/PA players long before the AI can. It's rare a human ever makes a truly bad signing because we have nearly perfect information about a player. My scouts have both these players as leading PL strikers 4 stars for Gaari and 4 1/2 stars for Josete. Yet a human would never sign Gaari as a leading PL club.

There's a huge disconnect between what scouts report about a player's ability and their actual attributes. They should be in sync from the human's perspective when you view a scouting report and a player's attribute profile page. It makes squad building easy when you can reliably find the high PA players and then just sort through the players who's actual CA and attributes match the scout's opinion.

What I think could be a very good improvement in judging players in other teams is to keep a degree of uncertainty regarding the attributes of the player until he is signed and he does (at least) a short period of training with the new team.
If you think about it, you only know "perfectly" the player once you see him every day in training sessions.
It will increase the possibility to make "bad choices" from a human point of view. 

I've playing FM since 2007 and I honestly remember very few bad signings in almost 20 years of playing the game. I don't know if it's just me or not, but IRL the number of bad signing is so much higher than what happens for human manager in FM.

[Xavin]

Il y a 4 heures, XaW a dit :

This is realistic though, isn't it? How many huge talents haven't fizzled out into nothingness over the years after a big signing? 

I'm not complaining at all. The fact that we don't have perfect scouting is completely fine by me. 

I was just making the point that if people want to manually scout everything in a very aggressive fashion they should be able to do so. 

[XaW]

Just now, Xavin said:

I'm not complaining at all. The fact that we don't have perfect scouting is completely fine by me. 

I was just making the point that if people want to manually scout everything in a very aggressive fashion they should be able to do so. 

Ok, it seemed to me you were complaining about how scouts got it wrong, but guess I misunderstood your post.

[wazzaflow10]

4 hours ago, Xavin said:

Well I think the human player should have the option on how he wants to play. If people prefer to wait that their scouts find something good for them, if people want to "cheat" using FM scout good for them to and if people find joy in aggressively raiding the data base by manually raiding the data base they should be allowed to do so. 

If people use FM Scout that's on them. I"m referring to in-game mechanics. There's no choice right now really if you play the game naturally. Your scouts won't find or recommend any player who isn't interested in your team. It creates huge holes in your scouting network because of this feature. Again what we've been told is this is to prevent players from essentially spawn camping newgens without going through a lot of manual effort. It seems odd if a scout is assigned to Brazil they wouldn't at least check out a game or two of a 16 year old Endrick because he isn't currently interested in joining but that's how the game works currently. Maybe the games they saw he didn't play well and thinks good but not the best or maybe he scores a hattrick and becomes a must sign.

 

5 hours ago, Xavin said:

I think the worst offenders are the high CA young players. The PA rating is based of the CA rating so you could have someone with 115 CA at 16. The scouts could tell you he has a 5 stars potential but in reality his PA is maybe 135. 

That's related but a different issue. The fact is you as the player know with 100% certainty what his attributes are on the player profile screen. So his CA/PA rating by a scout at 16 is somewhat irrelevant. By the time a player turns 18/21/24 you can see if their attributes are good enough for your squad. It negates the whole point of scouting outside of just being a filter of who is interested at this moment in time. 

My point is that if a scout views a player as an PL or La Liga or whatever league standard player the attributes on the player's profile screen should match that rating. The actual CA and attributes are still there and used for the ME so nothing under the hood changes. But the game really could be much more immersive and challenging if what we perceived for player attributes was related to form, training, coach/scout JPA. Right now a player who had a bad season or is on a poor run of form you can be sure that eventually they'll revert to what their attributes dictate. With my suggestion there's some fear that well maybe they're on the decline or not that good. Do I get reinforcements in the winter/summer? Do I try to sell this player? Do I ride it out? It makes it much harder to sign and horde the best players because the player you signed might suck and the player you sold might be world class.

Just to further the point - if you take part in the staff meetings. Don't you find it odd that your coaches will tell you player X has gotten better and is now viewed as a "Leading League Player" instead of a "Good League Player" and yet nothing has changed with regard to their attributes? Its the most meaningless piece of advice in the game.

And just to throw a lifeline to new players I'd be totally fine if this was a toggle-able option at game start like the fog of war for scouting.

[turnip]

Having a player's attributes (that you can see) be based on how good your scout is, is a terrible idea. As is changing them based on form and training.

Spoiler

Players' performances - and how their attributes affect this - is already impacted by things like form, training and morale. At least in the current situation, if you sign a player who should be good, and they play terribly you can at least run through a basic list of issues that could be the cause (form, training, morale, adaptability, unfamiliar role, etc). In your situation, it'd be borderline impossible to actually do anything about it (except quit-->reload to before the signing, which I guarantee most people running into the issue would do). 

There's already ambiguity built into the game, and some of that comes through in scout reports (the over-reliance on reputation to determine how good a player is). We don't need more.

 

Young players not being willing to join your club is an irritation, but hardly game-ruining. Stick them on your shortlist for a year, scout them again when they're removed and the scout report will tell you if they're ready to consider discussing terms. And that's sometimes very wrong, by the way. I've agreed terms with a bunch of players who my scouts thought had no interest because they were too young. It's always worth testing the waters if you have the transfer budget for it. 

[wazzaflow10]

On 24/07/2024 at 16:35, turnip said:

Having a player's attributes (that you can see) be based on how good your scout is, is a terrible idea. As is changing them based on form and training.

Sigh. I really shouldn't engage because you're so off base with your reply but here goes.

That's literally how we do it in real life. Do you think scouts have some magical vision to know what each players actual CA is? Every year there's players who play well and get CA boosts and players who play poorly and get CA nerfs by researchers.

This isn't a player had one bad match and went from world class to League 2 standard. But a long string of under/over performance should have an effect on your perception of how good a player is. Notice the word perception. Nothing about the player's actual attributes for the ME is changing. Your whole concept of what is being discussed is incorrect based on your reply. This is simply a skin that is integrated into the fabric of the game. Many people already play attributeless or partially obscured attributes.

Its a series of events that actually already exist in the game. Unless you're skipping the staff meetings, they tell you constantly there's changes in players abilities all the time. It'd be useful except you can see that their abilities haven't actually changed. So really we're just making the game match what currently exists in reports. And yes if a player's reputation matches that of a world class player their attributes to the human should look like a world class player. They still can for ME purposes have decent premier league attributes. You just don't know if the player you have is actually world class or you're making him look better than he really is with 100% certainty.

There's very, very little ambiguity in this game other than the RNG factor that determines a small part of the match. I have no idea who or what you're quoting but its not on topic. I like how you think the only solution is that people will quit. That sounds like your own projection. You could, you know, play the game and determine maybe the player isn't as good as you and your scouts thought. Maybe you have to buy another player like a real manager. Maybe you have to tweak your system to get the best out of your star signing. Maybe you just signed Kleberson. The point is you don't know for sure and nothing is stopping you from doing all the things you normally would to get a player to play better. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't.

If you're unfamiliar with the OOTP series there's plenty of people who play with ratings don't match actual. I think that series is only modestly successful last I checked, certainly not one of the top sports management games out there. They must have tons of people quitting.

In FM, you know exactly how good or bad every player is and a pretty damn good idea how good each player can be. Making it more ambiguous would make it significantly harder to build a squad which is one of the top requests on the forums here. We phrase it as make the AI better but the AI is only a small part. The AI will never catch up because the human will never make a mistake. It is virtually impossible to make a truly bad signing in this game unless you're doing it intentionally. I understand if you want to have perfect knowledge - some players rely on it because they have to have the best players to win. The feature should be toggle-able at game start like fog of war.

 

On 24/07/2024 at 16:35, turnip said:

Young players not being willing to join your club is an irritation, but hardly game-ruining. Stick them on your shortlist for a year, scout them again when they're removed and the scout report will tell you if they're ready to consider discussing terms. And that's sometimes very wrong, by the way. I've agreed terms with a bunch of players who my scouts thought had no interest because they were too young. It's always worth testing the waters if you have the transfer budget for it. 

Quite the opposite actually. Young players are often too willing to move to teams they shouldn't. Fulham shouldn't be able to sign multiple wonderkids one year into the game. Maybe you get lucky one player has a better PA than you expected but it should be much harder to sign young players in general. The issue is the game has made it difficult to scout them before they are interested to stop the human from doing what you just described. I don't care if someone wants to play wonderkid hunter. That's your prerogative in a single player game. Its not fun after a while to play that way because there's no way for the AI to keep up.

[Jonthedon26]

23 minutes ago, wazzaflow10 said:

If you're unfamiliar with the OOTP series there's plenty of people who play with ratings don't match actual. I think that series is only modestly successful last I checked, certainly not one of the top sports management games out there. They must have tons of people quitting.

I love the OOTP series and have stated on these forums numerous times that they should have player ratings/scouting system similar to that in OOTP

[wazzaflow10]

3 hours ago, Jonthedon26 said:

I love the OOTP series and have stated on these forums numerous times that they should have player ratings/scouting system similar to that in OOTP

Yeah I haven't played a new version since 17 but one of my favorite parts was not really knowing if the player I just signed to a massive contract was actually worth it.  I don't need it to be 1:1. I think OOTP is too variable in its ratings. I don't think we need to have a system that goes 70 OVR to 20 OVR as frequently as OOTP did. I also don't want it to just be a rush to get the best scouts so some work needs to be done to prevent or neutralize that factor to a degree. 20 shouldn't be 100% right and 1 shouldn't be 0% right. It should just be part of a weight that goes into what they tell you. If you scout a player and they have a few bad games while they're being scouted - maybe they're not rated as high. Or maybe the player has a few incredible games and gets overrated! It shouldn't always happen of course so that way you can't tell if they're over/under rated. But I think the best way to combat humans being able to dominate the AI in the transfer market is to give us the chance to get it wrong way more frequently than we currently do. I'd love to see if people think the AI is too good at squad building when they're not given perfect information about players.

JPA is a pretty meaningless attributes when you can see the actual attributes. I just need scouts to find players then you can just filter those scouted. Who cares what they or the coaches think the players level is in the report? Its just a cosmetic label.