Tazskool

Tuesday, September 12, 2006


FM new features blog - part 5 of many
Current mood: stressed

Today blogs is about the youth revamp that is coming in Football Manager 2007. A full round up of this weeks blog, with screenshots, will appear on Friday at our website at www.sigames.com

Youth Revamp

Youth teams in Football Manager and Sports Interactive titles have been very well served over the years by a system called "regens". This was, basically, the regeneration of players as they retired, and had evolved massively over the years to the point where it couldn't be taken any further. But it still wasn't perfect.

So, out go "regens". And in comes a whole new system of youth player generation, and database stability. It's internal codename is "Fred" because if it had a more descriptive name it would give far too many trade secrets away, but what it means is a lot more youth players in the game and a system much more akin to that of real life, using real life rules, so youth teams at active clubs should always be well populated with players. Just like real life, only a small proportion of these players will "make it" into top players, with many dropping down the leagues into non-league obscurity, but each year your youth team (if your club has one) will be topped up with new players and if you don't have what we deem "enough" at the starting point of the game, you'll be given more in the first couple of days of the game starting.

Obviously, as with everything in our games, all areas of the game are linked, so if you have poor youth facilities, you will be less likely to find the next world superstar, but that doesn't mean that you can't, just that it's less likely. Some years you might get a whole heap of potential first team players, some you might get none, but the stability of the database over the long term stays the same, so you shouldn't find that in 2020 players in the third division are better than the international players of today.

We've also used real world contract rules to ensure that you can offer players "pre-contracts" to try and save your players being snapped up for next to nothing by bigger clubs as has happened on previous games. As long as you're on the ball and keeping a close eye on your youngster or, if you trust them enough, letting one of your staff looking after the youth contracts, you should never lose a potential superstar for nothing again.

It's also important that you nurture your young talent to get the best out of them. And to do this, you need to interact with the players, but there's more info on that coming on Thursday!

Cheers

Miles