Bygfoot Football Manager

Hi all!

My question is about youth academy, and its importance in the long-term success of your team...

My experience with bygfoot 1.9.2 and 1.9.3 lead to a negative conclusion about that : youth academy can be very expensive, and is almost never useful.

I can try a basic calculation : the cost of the academy can be fixed to 5% of your income, and the coach to "average" (defaults settings). If I remember weel, the manager costs around 20 000 for 2 weeks, and the total cost of the academy depends of your income, for instance 5 000 if you earn 200 000 for 2 weeks (in bottom leagues). Total cost : 25 000 / 2 weeks, that is around 300 000 / year, depending on the length of the season.

Generally, young players are very, very weak. Even with a ETal of 50 or 60, they always start at 18 years old with a strength of 20, sometimes less (by the way, in my opinion, they are too old when they start in the youth academy). Even in bottom leagues, a player with a skill of 20 is useless, and have to be kept in the team for at least 5 or 6 years. Of course, there can be some exceptions, with exceptional players, or mabe with exceptional youth coaches, but generally, you cannot keep these players : the first contract duration is ~ 1 or 2 years, and you will have to pay them much more then, without make them play. But if you want to sell them... well, you should try to avoid heart diseases, since it is often hard to get more that 60 000 per player. In order to make your youth academy useful, you then have to sell at least 5 young players each year, which is clearly impossible with the default settings.

Finally, my question is: is youth academy designed to be useful, or is this just a kind of toy? It really seems impossible to chose a "youth academy" strategy, with a lot of investment in youth, but also large money income due to youth sold, or maybe to get very good players with low wages because they come from the youth academy. They are far too weak to be used in order to substitute other players, and the 4-years contract is too short to let them stay in the team if they really will become outstanding players. Or maybe I simply missed something?

yes I know what you mean. I tested the youth accademy quite some time back now when it first came out and it was only usefull in the lowest league, But thats exactly where you needed it due to finances etc. But since then some values have changed , not by much but enough to render the youth accademy useless.or a "toy" as you put it.
I havent had the chance to sit down and nut through some calcs like you did to see exactly where its going wrong.

The main problem I think is the time scale. while the entire games seems to take at least one more season to get places than it used to(which is a good thing, its not as easy anymore) the YA just dosent work. Too much can happen in 5 years and the YA is too slow. eg. it takes ages to get your requested defender which by now you dont need anymore.
You need at leat 25% to get anything decent and that cost adds up. i think you could still use the YA in the lowest league to some good as long as you are prepared to WAIT..

I mentioned once b4 to change the YA into more of a "players holding pen" somewhere where you can speed up the skill level or find/search for loan players and of course recieve Youths. But that will take some developing

Happy to see that I'm not the only one...

In my opinion, the "bug" is that young players are too weak. I perfectly understand that, at 14, their skill remains low (<20), but at least in very good players, the skill must grow rapidly in the following years : at 18, it should be at the same order of magnitude as at 28. For instance, for a top skill of 60, the expected skill at 18 should be maybe around 40 or 50. In the real life, extraordinary players can be very good at 17 : if I remember well, Pelé was known in the whole world at only 17, and Zidane played for the first time in League 1 at 19 ; this seems really impossible with the current Bygfoot skill system.

Ideally, it can be an interesting idea to study the career of real players (average, good or exceptional players) in order to get an idea of the evolution of their "talent". I think a shortened carreer can be realistic in some cases (consider Ronaldo for example), which is probably not yet possible in Bygfoot.