Newcastle U FC Manager Rolf Bergström was asked his opinions recently on how the introduction of Youth Teams might change the way teams choose to handle developing players into the senior squad. As his comments have been well received and raised a lot of interest, we present them here and welcome any comments.

Newcastle U FC Press Office.
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Before there were Youth Teams, the choice was pretty clear, develop young players and keep them or develop and sell them. Selling early is essential if a club doesn't have the best training facilities as every single sub-optimal train effectively reduces the ultimate value of the player. If you have top training facilities, then the choice is trickier, and it's really a judgement call on how you want to play the game...for example:
1. Trading all value players swiftly to make big money for longer term success or
2. Building a team slowly so that ~4-7 months down the line you have a top team or
3. Buying (expensive) good mature (28-33y) players rather than taking the time to develop them 'in-house'
etc, etc..

The arrival into the VM leagues of Youth Teams will complicate decision making because unless VM changes the current formula for mood reduction in 23-27 year olds, it seems incompatible for the better teams to have good talents join their senior squad after graduating from the Youth Teams. This is because these players are clearly not as good as 28-31 year olds and so will miss minutes in first team games, undermining heir mood and hence compromising their training and their ultimate achievable rating. Even going the very labour-intensive route of arranging multiple friendlies, wrecking a team's chances in cup matches (by picking poorer, younger players) and intensively micro-managing first team matches to put the 23-27 year olds on when you need to for as long as you dare, it still isn't a satisfactory solution really...the game will become extremely tedious to optimise for all but the most devoted of Players. Life for most gamers (and football managers!) is just too busy to go down such a route.

I therefore suspect, unless there are significant additional measures (introduced after the Beta test programme) to protect the mood of younger players graduating from Youth Teams, that clubs opting to have Youth Teams will seek to sell graduating players as soon as they can to clubs who have chosen not to have Youth Teams (as long as those clubs are still able to bring them on for just a few minutes to protect their mood as is currently the case). If that is also to be changed so that ALL clubs (whether or not they have Youth Teams) will see their 23-27 year olds' mood drop if they don't amass enough first team minutes on the pitch, then the whole YT experiment will have failed (adding more hassle and reducing the overall ratings of players) because the only clubs who could make use of such players will be those with no ambitions to succeed and get into the top #100.

It will be incompatible to have 11-13 good 28-31 year old players in a first team (good enough to actually win things) and a bunch of 23-27 year olds ready to eventually take their place as the latter will be down ~4-8 rating points (it's hard to figure out exactly how much their ultimate ratings will be compromised as the changes have just recently been introduced) vs what they could have achieved if their mood hadn't been hijacked for 5 months (player game years) before they get good enough to replace the older players....

So I believe that it is complicated and unclear at the moment how 23-27 years olds fit into VM now. Very interesting to hear what other observers think. Maybe some clubs choose to turn into poorly-achieving teams (never winning anything) but focused instead on making money by having no 28+ players at all and instead optimising 23-27 year olds in their senior squads for the loftier teams to buy at premium prices to replace their older players when their abilities start to reduce.

Anyway, that's my opinion. I think the fate of 23-27 year olds needs a serious rethink because the way things are looking at the moment, trying to optimise these players seems a lost cause and hardly worth the huge investment in time to micro-manage them.

RB