4. Youth Training Is A Lottery
It's often a dream for a long-term FM player to shape a club from the top down, and to its credit, FM lets you do this. The ability to control and optimise the variables of a club and turn it into an efficient footballing machine upon which you can stamp your own distinct identity is a unique thrill, and for the happy few who've actually managed to turn Hornchurch into the next Barcelona, there's no better feeling. Yet integral to this transformation is the youth system, and for my money, there's so much more they could do with it. At the moment, it just seems as the very first part of your grand quest the development of your youth squad is all based on luck, not judgement. It's something of a lottery despite having a glowing reputation and an excellent youth set up, I can often go for years without a player of a potential Premier League standard graduating into my youth set-up, and it just seems as if there's very little I can do to swing the odds back into my favour. Indeed, the only options you have for junior coaching is asking to cut it down in the boardroom, and I think that's a shame. If you could somehow find a way to interact with the coaching system beneath your under 18s, that would be fantastic. After all, coaching doesn't begin at 16 clubs often have training going down below 10 years old, so being able to keep tabs on and guide a preteen prodigy might make those successes more frequent and rewarding.