WhiteCat33

In my experience it's not uncommon to get down years from 4-6 as these are the first actual players your HOYD finds. Youth players are at the club for ~3 years, so it can take a few years for him to actually solidify his network. I know in my current save years 5 & 6 have been pretty underwhelming (especially from a personality perspective). I'll be giving my guy till year 8 till I start critically looking at what he's been producing.

300 Games makes me the invisible man

Awesome first half, now to beat the slump.

For me I've been able to extend everyone's contract but for some I could only do it once they were in their final year of contract. Maybe that's the issue?

Smart, nothing worse than finances falling apart and you can't fight the board as they take pittance fees for all your best players.

Sounds exactly like the season I just had and I feel you on losing players for nothing. @BigJack if you haven't already take that payout. There are so many ways the AI can fleece you, the most egregious being player exchanges, which happened multiple times in England. @benrollo sad to see your big man go, but that's a great fee for your league. Hope you can get an upgrade out of that. Also dude your infographic way of summary is phenomenal, really enjoy your posts!

15 should be sufficient. IRC the U18 head coach also has a heavy influence so maybe there? I know I need to upgrade my U18 head coach in england as he only has 8 WwY, but there's no good personality options who want to join us. You've played NIR way more than I have, would you say this is what you experienced in FM22, or does this seem worse?

Bummer your staff isn't generating more positive personalities. Maybe its the Working with Youngsters stat? Would you say the quality of your players is improving since your top flight stint or stagnating?

Indeed, especially since that CB always was like 'get better players' and wouldn't negotiate a contract even though the Agent kept saying he'd come to the table. Leaves us and plays literally 1 game all season in League 2. To add to it all I got the dreaded degradation this summer: Lost Youth Facilities AND Youth Level Now I have to spend 400k just to get us back to where our facilities were, but no way we can afford to re-up youth level.

Guiseley AFC Season 5 2027-2028 - VNL:N Matches | Squad | Transfers | Finances | Supporters | Facilities League: 11th of 24 After last season being our second fall on the final day out of playoffs I took this year as the rebuild year releasing all our remaining legacy players. Throwing in a 17 year old GK combined with the departure of our star CB meant we were going to have problems defensively. What I didn't count on was for our offense to just click this year and for us to hit 92 goals for the league best while allowing 66 which was 11th worst. Cups: FA CUP - 3rd Qualify Round ; FA Trophy - 4th Round Honestly played the B squad for every cup hoping to get out as soon as possible. Transfers: Legacies - The only big choice of a departure was the GK. Kyle Trenerry was only 27, and a bang-average GK with the most 11's I've ever seen. He played well enough, but with a Balanced Personality and Team leader I didn't like that negative influence on personality & determination in the squad. Year 1 Stars: I'm officially 0 for 2 on Sell-Ons as both of these guys were passed off on a free in under 1 year Starting XI: This year we have an A squad that can compete well with the league. Instead of going by position I figured I'd showcase the 11 by class: Year 1: Sebastian Gołębiowski 01f - Pressing Forward: My Polish monster up front. Even though his personality degraded to balanced from F Professional he keeps improving mentally & physically to the point where he absolutely dominates the CBs at this low level. And he even got his finishing up to 3!! Proof skill isn't anything as he had 25 Goal contributions in 35 starts this season with an impressive 7.4 rating. Locked him in to a contract till 2033 so he's here for the long haul! Joe Vaughan 01c - Right FB: Welsh U18 international & Vice Captain he has become a quality FB even if his technical abilities leave a lot to be desired. Charlie Thornber 01m - Left FB: If he was Fairly professional he'd be the Vice Captain instead as he's equally as important for the other flank. Luke Farrell 01g - Left Mid / Center Mid: Farrell was retrained to LM as his passing is too poor for CM and he's finally starting take to the position. Another leader, but he lost his ambition which isn't the worst to keep him at the club. Year 2: Adem Çiçek 02h - RM / CAM: This English/Turkish versatile either footed speedster is my captain as he's my only Resolute personality & has decent leadership (13). His mentals are just now getting okay, but just being fast got him the most assists in the VNL:N (12) and a 7.28 Rating. Still has potential left and with his personality he's got the best chance of reaching it. Macaulay Brownhill 02a - CM/CAM: I knew When he arrived he'd be our playmaker and he hasn't disappointed. Rieves Burbeary 02f - CB: The better of our 2 CBs he's acceptable but that 5 pace is not good in FM23's ME where balls over the top are very powerful. He still gets good match ratings, but I hope he improves a little more. Year 3: Curtis England 03a - GK: I took a risk here with a Fairly Sporting personality, but he's developing plenty well and is rated about equal to our old GK now. Thankfully he's improving significantly (as GKs do if they get lots of playing time). He is also the only player form this year who starts, so he's repping his class as the star pupil. Year 4: Aaron Davies 04i - AF: I could never imagine that Davies would turn out this good for us. He was the 3rd highest scorer in VNL:N with 26 goals in 33 appearances, which is nuts for a 16-year-old. Wales took notice and he has made every U18 call up actually starting in a few games. Even with Balanced personality he's developing great, specifically increasing his speed and Attacking mentals. He's the kind of striker we need for promotion. Derek Loughrey 04c - CM: A good Professional CM who has been a regular for Irelands U19s. He doesn't get the greatest ratings, so his development isn't spectacular but he doesn't get red cards like my old CM so that's a bonus. Gary Ingham 04h - CB: He's actually a more balanced CB than my other one with 11 pace he isn't as easily beaten with boot-ball and given another year he should have a lot of 11 attributes for defensive mentals. Youth Academy: YI Preview: The sea of A's we all are getting Youth Intake: Got good potential and some good personalities at the top, but the CA leaves a lot to be desired Bechman 05a has a good personality, height and is either footed “Gets Crowd Going” is an interesting player trait; bummer on the determination but I enjoy getting in a foreign player. Hansen 05b is an all around inferior version of him, but we desperately need CBs so two fairly professional is all it takes to be a win. Cullen 05c is another physically awful CM, we have depth in CM so he probably will just stay in U18 This is the first intake where I’m taking just a few of them instead of the vast majority. Down to 7 I think have realistic prospects. Club Infrastructure: Double boost to JR Coaching to max it. Since we didn't go on a cup run this year we didn't make money so nothing else was improved. I'm keeping Recruitment where it's at for now. Thoughts: This year's intake was weak, but it provides us a fresh batch of defenders for our B lineup. We now have the depth I think, we just need to develop the players for a couple seasons and then hopefully we can get out of this bottom league. Slow and steady right? Note - Imgur glitched on me so I'll update the rest of the screenshots later

You are looking in the right spot It just isn't instantaneous. Over time you'll notice a higher monthly spend in the "Youth Setup" section you highlighted. The cost ramps up as your reputation increases as well as your scouting range. So even if you max out the sliders at a low level when you're still just scouting your nation it won't bankrupt your club. Over the Summer and start of this season I bumped my JR Coaching from Good to Excellent (+2) while not changing the recruitment range. It's April now and by the end of the season it will easily cost me 3x more for my Youth Set up this year.

Excited to see how MacFarlane helps you next season, what a roll @SuperRedditch! If he develops right, might be the first International for the FM23 challenge. Congrats on the trophy @BigJack, man I can't wait till I join you getting out of this division.

Good to see some professionalism appearing, still a ton of unambitious sadly. And it looks like your new HOYD actually found those DM hiding somewhere in Northern Ireland! Bummer their so awful. Only up from here?

what a great early roll for your GK. Hope you can hang onto him

Media Handling just gives more specifics on the hidden attributes, so it is equally important to personality (just sometimes doesn't tell you much). @v1n1akabozo i posted earlier in this thread of how to interpret these two in concert and links to pages to help give you the attribute ranges. Another important thing is the "Tactical Style" you want to avoid Catenaccio & Park the Bus (imo) as these generate low skill defensive players. Any of the others have worked for me. My current HOYD changes between Vert Tiki-Taka / Tiki-Taka & Fluid Counter-Attack. No idea why.

Doesn't get more DM focused than that. If he doesn't find them then there aren't any in Northern Ireland.

Hope this plus your impressively fully Professional staff begins to improve your personalities. Always painful when half the intake is unambitious. Still shocking how few DMs you're getting; saw he has the 4-2-3-1, maybe its still registering like the old version with two CMs when the game picks players for your intake?

Going professional will make a massive difference, but you can still get good (for lower level) dev for good personality youngsters. Assume poor personalities won't develop at all. I'll echo the others getting at least a 7.0 rating helps development significantly. As a tip if you're bringing them on as a sub make sure they get on the field before the 75' as unless they contribute to a goal you need 15 min to get a rating. Then the praising and criticizing, though tedious, will make a huge difference. I don't fiddle much with the training regimes, but once you go professional you can get a major benefit by micromanaging. Lots of guides online if you want to go that route. Also remember your coaches are still pretty bad at judging potential so there isn't always PA to be reached.

Guiseley AFC Season 4 2026-2027 : VNN Matches| Squad | Transfers | Finances | Supporters | Facilities League: 8th Place Finish This was an incredibly frustrating end of the season. If you look at our League Position you can see we had an amazing mid-season being 1st in the league from Matchday 14-29, then fell off hard in the winter slump but held in the playoffs until the final day of the season (AGAIN) where we fell just outside of playoffs. This time though it wasn't just that we were in bad form. But somehow my same tactic and same players that conceded 5 penalties in the first 43 games of the season conceded 6 in just 2 games at the end of the season. I even play with 'stay of feet' and no one has hard tackling selected, just a couple press positions. This took us down to 20th for penalties conceded In the 3rd to last game of the season my GK saved 1 of the 3 penalties so we lost 2-1 In the 2nd to last game of the season my Gk saved 0 of the 3 penalties (two of which in the first 10 mintues of the match) so we lost 3-1 And then it came to the final game of the season (like last year) where we had a very winable game against 13th place Tamworth while we sat in 6th of the table. And even though this time it was us who got a penalty our CBs made some awful errors that didn't give penalties just go-ahead goals for unmarked forwards and even with a mad press in the final minutes we lost 3-2. Cups: FA Cup - 4th Qualifying round. Yeah we bowed out real early here, so not much to say. FA Trophy - Semi Final! We played great in this competition, but this was to the detriment of our end of league form for sure as we had to face Southand United in the semi-final who are 1st in the Vanarama National League finally making their first recovery from their double demotion in 2020 & 2021. They smashed us 7-3 on Aggregate as they have a very fast quality striker who my CBs just couldn't deal with no matter what I tried as he got 5 of the 7 goals. But to get to the Semis we had to beat two Vanarama National league sides Gillingham (4th) & Chester (12th), so was an almost too good performance. Finances: Just wanted to mention that we are having no problem financially in this save. Probably its because we've had at least a moderate cup run each season but we have made between 100-300k per season and sit with a very comfortable 672k balance this summer. This has made it possible to ask and recieve another JR Coaching upgrade up to "Good", but no facility upgrade as of yet or professional status. Squad: Youth Academy Youth Intake Preview: Lots of potential players apparently Youth Intake: Intake moved up 2 weeks from mid-april to March 30th so thats a good sign! And I'd say my HOYD delivered pretty well this year. Start with the stand out CA player from Ireland Derek Loughrey: Professional, good mentals and some okay physicals. I’m losing my starting CM this summer so he will go in directly. The other big player we’re losing is our Vice captain CB, so Gary Ingham is perfectly timed and will start in our backline even though he’s not the greatest, we have no CBs so he will do. And we finally got a striker! Slow, but I have speed and height in my PF, here we actually get some finishing as his 11 is greater than the sum of my 3 other youth strikers who are all under 5. We got another CM with Iain Hughes who has great mentals, but absolutely no physical ability. He will be a playmaker and is our only FK taker. Thoughts: After that season I'll be tossing all remaining legacy players and will be just looking to build and go professional now as this team needs to age and improve it seems before we can manage the full depth of an English season.

Enjoying your region challenge! I will be following along and have to say that youth bug is actually pretty neat.

What formation is your HoYD preference? You'd think with how seemingly all the AI formations use DM this year, they would be more common in intakes.

@Ray46 i also enjoy how the limitation actually makes you think about who the 'best worst option' is during these early seasons. I've had the same CD dilemma at Guiseley with this season being the first (and last for a while) where I've had two players who'd actually choose to play at cb. I played almost entirely youth only last cycle, and this thread is a big contributor. Great niche community 👏

Welcome to the new better AI, expect to do this every season. Adds another layer of difficulty to our challenge. Well done surviving! Bummer on intake personalities, but at least they will fill out your roster and you never know one may surprise and not be totally useless

Indonesia is out there, would make for a very different experience! I tried isreal last cycle, but it didn't click for me. Slovenia was the big save for me with 2 Euro Cup titles, could see Slovakia as even better with more challenging domestic competition. I can already tell I'm going to take pauses from england once workshop databases come out. I forgot the true slog of 46 league games plus cups. Planning to try luxembourg 🇱🇺 for a micro nation. I visited for the first time last month as my girlfriend is getting dual citizenship there. Such pretty countryside.

Thinking back on my RAAL save I did get first year promotion as well as the board would inject 1.5-3 M a season to keep the club out of bankruptcy till I could start monetizing youngsters. Eventually I just couldn't break into European spots as I had to keep selling everyone to balance the books. You all talk about ground maintenance at the start and IRC we had to add undersoil heating to our stadium which was the huge early expense. I really hope they address this instead of letting it persist for another cycle.