Youth Academy / Regens / Free Transfers

[SpHSpH]

OK - here is what I have decided (I am writing this here somewhat for my own benefit ... but I hope that it may help others as well ... just trying to do some more "give" to make up for all of the "take" that I get from the OS community). I am thinking about the addition of new players from three angles ... (1) Youth Academy, (2) Regens, and (3) Free Transfers ("Bosmans"). Here are my thoughts for each of the three options ...


---YOUTH ACADEMY---

This is the easiest one for me to understand - because the youth academy system is mostly unchanged from the recent versions of FIFA. And there is an extensive thread on the OS boards about youth academy and player growth. I use two of the three scout slots (I find that having three scouts reporting gets tiresome in terms of keeping track of the prospects).

Pescara (now in SerieA) : E3/J3 and E3/J4
Swansea City (EPL) : E4/J5 and E3/J5

I send each scout out for a 6-month and a 3-month search (I try to time it so that the final scout report occurs in April ... so that I can have signed the prospects to my academy before the May update). Two scouts x nine months of reports = Eighteen scout reports per year. With an "around 50%" hit-rate for finding a useful prospect per report ... this means I add around nine players to my academy each season.

You can pretend to offer a contract to anyone in your youth academy who is 16 or 17 years old. When you go to the contract offer screen - you will see the player's estimated value. You do not have to actually follow-though with the offer of the contract. I think the estimated value scales with the player's current OVR (which is somewhere in the range that you can see in the youth academy scene). I use this data, along with the average of the potential range, to decide which youth academy prospects are keepers (or those that get cut). The highest estimated value that I have seen (for a player before I signed him to my senior squad) was 1000000 pounds (when I signed this guy he was a 70 OVR ST at 16 years old).


---REGENS---

The regens begin to appear in the second July (after the completion of the first season). On July 1st, I go to "search players", and I set the age limits to 17-19. I do not like to get too many hits in one search, so I usually also set the position (GK or LB or RM or whatever) and I pick a league (SerieA or La Liga or whatever). I have some "house rules" for myself just to keep my two careers unique ...

Pescara searches in [ SerieA / La Liga ]
Swansea City searches in [ EPL / Bundesliga ]

Some things to look for to know if you have found a regen player ... (1) There is no picture - the regens all have the simple silhouette ... (2) The regen player will always be listed as "for loan" ... (3) You should go to "Approach Napoli to Buy" and it should say "This player has just moved clubs".

I add any of the regens that I find to my shortlist (it seems that there is no limit to the number of players that can be on the shortlist? I have not found one yet). Then I have my Global Transfer Network scouts (I have three of these ... and they are all low-rated ... but it does not really matter for how I use them here) scout the regen targets. I am not scouting them for their skills (since the regen targets were all listed as "for loan", many of their skill ranges are already shown) - I am scouting them to get an idea of their market value. It takes 10-14 days (or whatever) for your GTN scout to learn the regen's market value (it will show up in the shortlist now) - after I learn the market value, I end the scouting of that regen and ask my scout to move on and scout a different regen.

My mid-August I have learned the market value of all of the regens on my shortlist. I think this value works just like what I have observed with the youth academy players (see above). So ... a regen with a market value of 45000 pounds is probably pretty dumpy ... but a small number of them show up with a market value of 200000+ pounds ... these are the guys who will maintain my interest.

I need to wait until the January window before I can actually attempt to sign any of these regens (because "this player has recently joined this club") ... but now I have a focused collection of potential regen targets to pursue when the January window opens.



---FREE TRANSFERS (BOSMANS)---

Any player who is 23 years old or older can be signed on a free transfer if his contract is expiring. Again – this is something that you have to wait for the January window to act on. You can agree to terms (the terms simply being the length of his contract with your club and his weekly wages) with the player in January – but you have to wait until the following July for the player to join your team. You can “prepare” for the January transfer window during the fall months.

I use my GTN scouts to look for potential free transfer targets (after I am done using the GTN scouts to determine the market value of the regens that I have previous found). I go to the scout instructions panel … and I choose a position, an age range of 23-30, a contract length of 0-1, and “first-team quality”. I send my scouts to various European leagues (again, my personal house rule to keep my two careers unique is to limit which leagues I scout).

Pescara searches in [ Italy / Spain / Portugal / Greece / Croatia / etc. ]
Swansea City searches in [ England / Germany / Belgium / Netherlands / etc. ]

My GTN scouts find an arbitrary number of players of various quality (this might scale with the star-level of the GTN scouts … remember that my GTN scouts are low-rated) … the main point being that everyone that they find is 23+ years old and on a contract that is expiring at the end of the season. This group of players now becomes the second pool of interesting options during the upcoming January transfer window … with the understanding that, if I want to acquire the player without paying a transfer fee, I will have to wait until the next season before he actually joins my roster.

One caveat … simply because a player is on an expiring contract in September, this does not mean he will still be on an expiring contract when January arrives, his current team may re-sign him to a longer deal before I get the chance to gather him as a free transfer. My pool of Bosman-targets is bigger than it needs to be, so that I can allow for some of those players to no longer be free transfer options by the time I make it to January.

I personally feel like I have less “loyalty” to the Bosman players than I do for the players who come up through my youth academy or the young players that I transfer in as regens. This means that I often use the Bosman players to fill in specific gaps in my roster, and that I am more willing to part with them if one of my younger players is ready to take a spot in my starting XI. (Therefore … I might be able to transfer the Bosman player back out again after only a year … and maybe for a profit!)

///// ///// ///// /////

So – there you have it – that is what I am doing to build my team. Things are different than what I was used to from previous FIFAs … but I think that I can be excited about doing things this was with FIFA14. I just wanted to put this out there to see if any of you could find it helpful, or if you had any thoughts on what I could do differently/better. Thanks!