Football Manager 2011 Guide — How to develop youth and turn prospects into stars

Hey guys, after much demand I have decided to put a guide together for raising youth. Many of you reading my Newcastle story have been impressed by the rate at which my youngsters have progressed…well today I will share all. To be honest it’s all common sense and simple, but you must combine every tip mentioned to get the right results. The combination of many simple aspects are what makes for a great environment to raise youth. The difficult part is holding the experience to know when a youngster should be played, loaned out or has missed the boat all together. There are many guides out there and it is impossible for me not to repeat some stuff already mentioned, but all I am doing today is talking about how I raise my youth.

Preparing your club

Before you do anything, we need to get the club prepared. Below are some pointers on what you should be doing and the relevant posts to help you build a club with the correct environment to raise youth.

• Coaching staff — You need to hire the right staff in the right areas and also assign them the appropriate training categories. View this post by Excessive to get the perfect back room staff.
• Upgrade your facilities — It is critical that you upgrade your facilities ASAP, the better your training and youth facilities the quicker your players will improve. This is self explanatory, but be sure to request for these upgrades every season in the boardroom, just note that a bad bank balance will see the upgrades fall through. Below are what my facilities look like, it took 4-5 years of bugging my board but we finally got great facilities and if you don’t take the time to do this, you may as well not read on because the other tips will never be fully effective.

Training

Now that you are prepared to invest in the clubs facilities over time and have purchased the best backroom staff, we will assign those coaches their best training categories. Click on each coaches name within training>coaches to see what category they are training, now see which category suits them best going from there attributes (you should buy coaches to suit specific categories such as attacking, defending etc.) You can see how suited a coach is to one category by the star rating and should pick a maximum of one training category per coach unless you don’t have enough coaches. You will notice that selecting more than one training category per coach brings their star rating down. After you have assigned coaches one training category (and if you bought the correct coaches,) your training overview should look similar to mine. To be honest, my training should be a lot better than it is.

You will notice some red rectangles in the image above, these highlight what makes a player improve. You need the best coaches to increase your star rating within each category, you also need great facilities and a workload that gets the players sweating but doesn’t overload them. We have already dealt with the categories and facilities, but we haven’t talked about the training schedules and workload.

Training schedules

There are many training schedules out there and I’m sure many are better than mine…in fact I’m sure you could develop your own with ease. To be completely honest I got lazy when the game first came out and downloaded a set of training schedules. I can’t remember where from or who made them, so I apologise for this but have spent ages trying to find the link on google with no avail. Either way I still felt like you guys should have the opportunity to share in these schedules so have made them all available for download below. The workload is just right and while it trains the players hard it doesn’t push them to injury. Just be aware that some lazier players may say they don’t like the workload, if this happens change to a schedule with less workload.

Full back schedule — click here to download.

Centre back schedule — click here to download.

Central Mid. schedule — click here to download.

Winger schedule — click here to download.

Striker schedule — click here to download.

How to download — Go to, my documents>sports interactive>Football Manager 2011 and create a file called ‘schedule’. After this is done click on each individual download link and save/download it into my documents>sports interactive>Football Manager 2011>schedule. Now load up the game and head over to ‘training’, then click on the ‘schedules’ tab and then click ‘manage schedules near the bottom. This will open up a new screen, at which point you should click ‘import’ and then import each schedule one by one. To find these schedules just take the route path shown above. After all schedules have been imported you should see them alongside the default schedules.

Now you should assign each and every player to the schedule that best suits their position. Some gamers have role specific schedules, pre-season schedules and one specifically for youth but I have always found success in the the five schedules above…and you know what they say, ‘why fix something that isn’t broken’. By the way, any players under the age of 17 will be left training under the default youth schedules and goalkeepers should be left in the default goalkeeper schedule. I have tested other schedules and there just isn’t enough workload to play with at that age.

Individual and position training

Very important to a youngsters development, you very rarely find players that are strong in every area or play in the exact postion you want. If you sign a new player and feel like one particular area could halt his progression, train him individually on that attribute/area. I did this with almost all my players and the results are very beneficial. I will go into more detail on this later but the same applies to players that aren’t ‘natural’ in the specific position you want. If a kid is natural in AMC and you want to use him as a CM, then retrain him in that position until he becomes ‘natural’ in the new role. Just be aware that doing this will take away from their general training level as the workload is spread out across ‘match preparation’, ‘training’, ‘individual training’, and ‘position’. You could even train a player in certain moves but I don’t do this unless my assistant recommends it.

The most important tool — game time!

If you don’t offer a player game time, he will never reach his potential and this must be done early. I recommend offering players from the ages of 17-19 around 15 games or more per season, then as they reach the age of 20 they should be playing double that amount. However, it isn’t just a case of slapping the kid into some random game against Manchester United, you need to pick your matches carefully. A player that gets game time but plays badly will progress far less than one that gets game time and plays well.

If you are a top flight club in England and have European qualification there should be plenty of easy matches to risk these youngsters. The League Cup, FA Cup and in the group stages of Europe can provide some good game time with the chance of a decent performance. Also look to those easy league matches and maybe mix 2-3 youngsters in with more experienced stars as opposed to fielding a squad of 17 year old’s and risk defeat alongside a worthless experience.

So what happens to those players that just can’t make it in your first team, well you need to loan them out. But not to any old team, try and get a club with good training facilities and never ever loan someone out unless the club are providing first team football. My rule of thumb is that once a players reaches 18 years old and isn’t guaranteed 15 matches in your team, he must be loaned out or will risk spending the season gaining next to no experience and every season counts.

Quick overview

OK, this is a lot of information to take in, so let me bullet point the steps you should be taking in the order they should be done.

• Get the right backroom staff and hand pick coaches to train in specific categories.
• Upgrade your facilities at every available opportunity.
• Give each coach one category to train in and make it their best, you want every category (ie shooting, attacking, defending, aerobic etc) to be around 3.5* minimum.
• Download my training schedules and assign each player to their relevant schedule based on their position.
• Look through your top talent to see if they need individual training to improve their game in weak areas.
• Offer 17-19 year old’s a minimum of 15 games per season but upwards of 15 would be better. Then increase this past 20 when they are 20 years old. Be sure to select the matches carefully to guarantee they get the most out of their experience.
• Loan out any player that won’t play and especially players of 18 or older that will fail to make 10 appearances. Don’t loan them out anywhere though, be sure to pick a club with good facilities that will offer first team football.

You didn’t think I was leaving the guide there did you?? So far you have learnt some incredibly simple tips and I’m sure most of you already use some of them. Well now its time to see the results. Go to the next page and see how I developed some of my youth at Newcastle.

Go to the next page and see how I developed some of my youth at Newcastle.

This section gave me a real headache, how to demonstrate the results of using all the tips on page 1, I decided to select two players from my Newcastle side and explain what I did with them year by year and how they progressed. Hopefully this will help with understanding the importance of using every tip on page 1 as opposed to picking two or three and forgetting the rest.

Yaya Sanogo‘s development

Probably my most successful signing ever on FM and this wasn’t just down to the forwards PA and CA. I had to do a lot of work on this kid and nurtured him into a legend at Saint James Park. Lets look at Sanogo‘s development year by year.

2012/13 — Signed at the age of 20 for £14 million. Sanogo had great physical attributes and looked like a deadly finisher. I brought him in and stuck the Frenchman into my ‘striker’ schedule, I was worried about his dribbling which at the time was just 11. Therefore I set his individual training to ‘dribbling’ in the hope he would improve that area specifically. Due to him joining in January, I could only offer 10 games and while the Frenchman did OK scoring an average of a goal every three games, he didn’t look dangerous. Below is what Sanogo looked like after joining Newcastle in 2012.

2013/14 — I was starting to see some results from Sanogo‘s individual training, but not just in the specific area of dribbling. As a result of improving in this area he started getting easier chances in front of goal and converted many more shots, meaning his finishing went up alongside other attributes. Sanogo converted 27 goals from 24 starts and this season was a real turning point.

2014-2020 — After Sanogo‘s first two seasons he had improved dramatically and in his third started ghosting past defenders and looked unstoppable. He was now 22 and playing a minimum of 30 games per season, also scoring more than a goal per game. We never looked back from here and Sanogo had secured a place in starting XI alongside the hearts of the Toon Army. Below is how Sanogo looked just before leaving the club. His dribbling attributes had jumped from 10 to 15 and I think training him in this area was what made Sanogo so dangerous. I offloaded him to Inter for £56 million in 2020.

The sacrifices I made for Sanogo — Obviously Sanogo didn’t just walk into Saint James Park as our new number nine, I already had three quality strikers. To aid Sanogo‘s development I sold Araujo and decided to move the Frenchman up the pecking order one place. This allowed me to offer more game time and in the end I also sacrificed Paloschi.

Marcelo Santos’ development

The best regen I have ever developed on Football Manager is Marcelo Santos. The Spanish striker looked like he had superstar potential from day one, but there were a few concerns and I also knew game time could make him a world class player as opposed to just great. Lets see what measures I took to develop this kid.

2014/15 — Signed from Argentinos of Argentina, Santos joined for £2.3 million which was his release clause. At the age of 17, Marcelo looked great but not quite ready for first team football. His mental attributes left much to be desired and this could only improve on the pitch. I was also concerned by his pace and acceleration, so trained him individually on ‘quickness’. I gave Santos around 18 games in his first season and he scored an average of goal in every three games. Not great but I needed him on the pitch to develop his mental attributes.

2015 to 2018 — Still training Santos in the usual schedule with individual training set to ‘quickness’ he was improving fast. For the next few seasons I offered Santos more than 15 games a year but he didn’t do so well. It wasn’t until 2018 that his quickness really improved and his mental attributes shot up alongside the better performances. It was at this time I decided to take him off individual training to focus on his all round game. The screenshot below shows Santos after scoring 30 plus goals in 2018/19.

2018 to 2021 — Santos never looked back from that moment and kept improving as he got more and more game time. Every season he looks deadlier and the screenshot below shows him in 2021, probably the best player in the world I reckon…certainly the most expensive anyway. I have noticed that all my players make improvements as a result of game time…but it isn’t until they play consistently that they start to look world class. Santos played more than 15 games a season from the age of 17 to 22, then he stepped it up to more than 30 after turning 23 and that was when he became the best around.

Sacrifices made for Santos — When Santos first joined I had to rotate him with Sanogo as the backup striker to Paloschi. Maybe Sanogo could have grown faster with more game time, but this all ended with the sale of my then best player Paloschi in 2016. This opened the door for me to use Santos more and was the only reason for selling my best striker. I actually signed a young striker called Fernando with the potential to be similar to Santos. But after three seasons aged 21 I had to sell him. With Sanogo and Santos to nurture further, I couldn’t carry the other youngster and was forced to choose between them. My biggest sacrifice of all came when more youth was been raised and needed game time along with new signing Adams, I had to choose between Sanogo and Santos for who to sell and the legend Sanogo left Saint James Park so Santos could claim his place as our best striker and number 9.

Conclusion

What I have tried to demonstrate on page 2 is that it wasn’t all roses and happy times at Saint James Park, I made some big calls and had to let my best players go in order to raise my youth. If you have three great strikers and one young prospect but only one place up for grabs in your team, what would you do? If the answer is sell one or two of your quality strikers and give the prospect more chance to play then well done, if your answer was leave the prospect in the reserves then you’ll never raise prospects into superstars. You have to make big sacrifices and take risks, but it does pay off. I want to leave you with one last thought, only try raising the players that can be World Class. If you try and raise every single player to be the best they can be it won’t work as not everyone can get game time. You need to single out which players can be the best around and concentrate on them, also try and realise when you’ve made a mistake. If a young prospect isn’t improving at all then it may be time to let go and move on.

Well that’s about it for today, well done to anyone who read the full post and thanks for dropping by. I welcome any questions and comments as always and please vote for who I’ll manage next :)

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