Player Progression..

I’m not going to say I think I’ve cracked player progression, because that would jinx my youth team. What I will say is that after 6 seasons I finally have a good understanding of the mechanisms thanks to recent posts by the development team. There have been a couple of recent article on The Fiery Baptist (which were themselves partly gleamed from forum posts by the developers) that talk through player development nicely. If you want to go read all the ins and outs, then look for the link on the right hand side of my blog. To summarise:

-Attributes are displayed as 1-20, but are actually stored and used in the range 1-10,000. This means your players may well be improving, just not enough to go over one of the boundaries in order to trigger a change on the attributes page.

-CA points are relative to position – a striker uses up a lot of CA points to improve finishing, a midfielder less, and a defender virtually nothing.


-Playing in multiple positions costs CA points. On top of this, each position has different weightings – if your defender can also play striker, it’s going to cost him points to learn finishing.

-Physical improvements cost the most CA points.


-Being two-footed is a huge bonus, but also costs CA points.

-The level of football a player isn’t the real driver – the average rating they are achieving is. A player achieving 7.5 in youth is going to progress better than a similar player achieving 6.5 in senior. However, if a player can play well ‘above his level’ then this will cause a bigger improvement.

Having taken all of this (and more) on board I’ve changed a few things about how I play my youth. I’ve stopped playing my kids as substitutes towards the end of matches and started ensuring that most of them are getting decent enough ratings by playing at least half of a match. I’m also giving the kids who are good enough games in senior friendly competitions. This works two ways – those who are good enough get good ratings and let me know they can be relied on. Those who don’t go back to the youth leagues or out on loan for some more experience. Actually taking care with what I’ve been doing with my youth has resulted in 4 coaching reports in 2 days – 4 more than I’ve got in the previous month. I’ve managed to find a couple of people who are keen to take my players into their first teams on loan, and Julien Kipre is already reaping the benefits with a reputation increase combined with a few shiny new stat points. Others such as Serato, Canela and Longobardi are progressing quickly and in the right areas, while even some of my kids are starting to go green, so to speak.

Talking of kids, I have a mixed record when it comes to purchasing very young kids – Marlon James is looking like he’ll be a dud, while the only player to really come through has been Matthieu Marc – I think I’ve found a gem in 16 year old Australian midfielder Coffey. For his age, he has great attributes including explosive pace and great finishing, as well as being two-footed. So far he has 4 goals and 3 assist in 9 games, but 7 of those were from the bench for my U21 side. I’m hoping he may be the first true wonderkid to come through my academy – only time will tell.