Could we please have national academies and the chance to ask our national associations to build national academies to improve results in the long term?
There's several factors that affect newgen quality, among which are:
- Nation Youth Rating
- Youth Facility
- Youth Coaching
- Youth Recruitment
- Reputation
Several countries have a national academy to boost their youth development and provide a conveyor belt from youth teams to the national team. It'd be a really neat feature to be able to emulate that in-game, as a country could have a Youth Academy that'll help produce newgens that can then be poached by clubs and boost the nation's clubs and the national team in the future. This would be of particular importance to countries which have clubs with poor infrastructure as they can get a few more players getting generated from the national academy which would hopefully have better facilities, coaching, recruitment and reputation (countries in Africa, Asia, Oceania and North America especially, where clubs have poor facilities and where there's not much prize money for clubs to improve facilities with).
I'd say there's different kinds of national academies:
1. National Academy Club style: Players are contracted fully to the academy, use academy facilities, academy has youth teams & play in youth leagues, academy has a pro team in pro divisions (Singapore's National Football Academy + Young Lions club, Philippines' PFF National Training Center + Azkals Development Team club, etc.)
2. National Academy Youth Club style: Players are contracted fully to the academy, use academy facilities, academy has youth teams & play in youth leagues (France's Clairefontaine, Myanmar Football Academy, Qatar's Aspire Academy, Morocco's Mohammed VI Football Academy, etc.)
3. Partial style: Players are contracted to a club but are also part of the academy (so train at the academy part-time, maybe benefitting from the academy's facilities and coaching staff for 2 days/week of their development and their normal club's for the rest), use club & academy facilities, play in academy or club youth teams, players would go to a club to become pro (Uruguay's Complejo Celeste, etc.)
4. No academy: Country doesn't have a national academy system
The possibility to ask the national association to:
- Set up a national academy
- Improve coaching at the academy
- Improve recruitment at the academy
- Improve the academy's facilities
Would add another dimension to international management and would more accurately show how some nations choose to develop their country's players and offer an additional way to improve national teams in the long term for those long saves. Would definitely make my experience at National Team management much better!
It'd be really good to be able to reinvest the money won at international tournaments by the association into setting up these national academies, currently it's almost like you're always at the whims of clubs performing well and reinvesting in their facilities to improve a nation's NT performance, whereas in real life, associations can also do things like national academies to improve NT performance in the long run.