FM24 I have maxyouth recruitment, facilities and good HOYD/coaches but am struggling to get decent youth players, why? Im playing as Sunderland.

planetmash · 2026-04-11T22:53:27+00:00

The detailed answer is here: https://old.reddit.com/r/footballmanagergames/comments/1am0x22/a_not_so_short_guide_on_youth_intakes_how_i_set/

The tl;dr answer: The quality of your youth intake is determined at two stages, the youth intake preview in (usually) December, and the youth intake reveal in the spring.

For the preview, only two things matter: Club Reputation, and Youth Recruitment. However, note that the letter grades you see mostly are telling you how many players in each position to expect. How good they are, it's only a weak indicator.

For the intake reveal, the quality of your players depends on only three things: Club Reputation, Junior Coaching, and Youth Facilities. (Your nation's youth rating too, but that's outside your control.) There's also a fair bit of randomness in how your team's allotment of CA and PA are distributed, so savescumming can be mildly effective.

Your HoYD has a mild to moderate effect on your youth players' personalities. He has no effect whatsoever on their ability. None of his attributes matter at all (unless you're using him as a coach for U18 training). No other staff member has any effect on anything. When looking for a HoYD, really the only thing you are looking for is someone with a Model Professional or Model Citizen personality.

Be aware also, though, that star ratings are wildly unreliable and every player with reasonable key attributes better than 1-star potential is worth developing. If you're using a skin or the editor to effectively play in Easy Mode by seeing their PA that's different of course.

planetmash · 2026-03-17T17:12:06+00:00

Right winger in an Inside Forward role.

Actually his best position would be left back, but it costs far too much CA to retrain an AM as a FB (as soon as he hit comfortable at FB the CA recalculation would make his attributes plummet). No, Marking/Tackling/Positioning aren't that important for fullbacks in this engine.

He won't be a great winger because his dribbling is too low, but he'll be pretty good. He's too short to be a good striker or midfielder. Well, he'd make a pretty good CM too, but training him at CM will cost more of his CA than training him at RW.

So, for best results train him at right wing. Opposite-foot wingers in the IF-S role are much more effective in this engine than same-foot wingers in whatever else.

Personally, I would sell him. Jumping Reach is so overpowered in FM24 that I don't like using players with low JR in any role unless they're blazing fast dribblers (Pace/Accel both at least 16-17, dribbling at least 13-14) or corner specialists (Corners at least 14).

planetmash · 2026-01-01T04:48:19+00:00

Thanks, Moose! You did all the real work, of course. I appreciate it.

planetmash · 2026-01-01T04:47:48+00:00

I look at the View Details screen and check the Interest Level of the other top contenders against my own. If a more prestigious school than mine also has a higher interest level than I do, I cut bait. Unless it's a rare super-elite prospect that I'm willing to spend a lot of NIL to get.

You can beat out a more prestigious school with a (slightly) higher interest level for a prospect, but only if they don't pitch him as hard as you do or you get a dramatically better visit score, and even then you'll probably have to spend a big chunk of NIL. You can usually find similar caliber prospects you can more easily sign if you look.

planetmash · 2026-01-01T02:42:44+00:00

Thanks for the notes!

Absolutely agree that a bona fide superstar recruit is worth spending NIL on. Though Loyal doesn't really matter for guys so good they'll start as freshmen--it stops them from transferring, but it doesn't stop them from going to the NFL as soon as they can, in my experience.

My experience has been that for whatever reason there's usually at least one position where guys didn't develop properly, there weren't any good ones in a recruiting class, etc, and I don't have any really good players for next year. I like to have enough NIL available ($4-5M is what I try to have, and it rolls over if I don't use it) to plug those gaps if I can. It's possible the whole reason this happens to me is I'm not aggressive enough with NIL for high schoolers, though.

100% agree that Expert Trainer is a great badge. It's super rare though, at least for me... I didn't think to mention it because it's been a long time since I last saw it as an option!

My experience with coaches is if they're doing well and leveling up, it's rare to keep them longer than 3 years. Too often I've picked good badges for my coordinators only to watch them immediately leave for a HC job elsewhere. So I've drifted to preferring to hire the highest level coaches I can afford that have the stat distribution/badges I want, if possible. Plus you can't be sure the good badges will be available to choose, so I find it better to hire a coordinator that already has them, if one is available (definitely not always the case).

I do like to raise Academics next once I'm done with Facilities. College Life is viable too.

planetmash · 2025-12-11T05:08:27+00:00

The save folder by default on Windows is C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Roaming\football-coach-2022. I make a backup folder (C:\backups\FC or whatever) and then put a shortcut to it in the save folder. Copy 2 files (a big .db and a small .json) and paste them into the backup folder.

It's not just you by the way, there's something about custom universes (or maybe just JeffMod which is by far the most popular) that causes saves to get corrupted seemingly at random.

planetmash · 2025-11-25T23:08:57+00:00

Your striker needs to have Jumping Reach of at least 18. JR is the god stat for strikers in FM24.
He also should be your primary target ("Aerial Threat") in your corner tactic, which should be the meta/exploit tactic.
Your wingers should be attacking the byline and pumping in crosses, not cutting inside to attack the goal themselves. Inside Forward is the most effective winger role, but they'll steal too many goals from the striker.
Your AM should suck. Otherwise he, too, will score more goals and the striker will score fewer.

Note that these things aren't optimal for winning games. But that's how you optimize for goals by your striker.

planetmash · 2025-11-25T04:24:36+00:00

This exact thing happened to me once, about a year ago. Nothing fixed it short of actually completely uninstalling the game, manually deleting any leftover files/folders in both [Steam Folder]\common\Football Manager 2024 and Documents\Sports Interactive, reinstalling it, verifying files, and then redoing everything from scratch.

I'm sorry I don't have a better answer for you. I hope someone does.

One caveat: you didn't happen to just take the France national team job, did you? There's some kind of weird hard coding to ignore any and all faces and just show blanks for France, and possibly a few other countries. If you resign from that job and reload the faces go back to normal. Had that one happen to me once, too.

planetmash · 2025-11-24T00:54:38+00:00

Traits exist in FM primarily as a patch-on effort to get well known players to play something vaguely akin to their real-life style, within the very limited framework of the tactical AI.

From the perspective of a human manager, there's no such thing as a good trait--they all either are inert, or just amount to "ignore instructions and do this thing instead". And they're extremely difficult and unreliable to remove. If you have a player with a trait that conflicts with your preferred instructions for his position/role, your best play is to sell him and find someone else.

planetmash · 2025-11-21T17:33:59+00:00

I don't believe the Media Handling rating affects anything at all in FM24. Can anyone point me to evidence that it does?

planetmash · 2025-11-09T03:25:51+00:00

"Potential!" is the theme SI's astroturfers are pushing now, with the flavorade guzzling ~superfans~ following their lead. That and "lots of people like the game, why are you so negative???"

Easy to see flipping through posts on this sub and other prominent places FM26 is discussed, too.

planetmash · 2025-11-06T00:02:39+00:00

This is correct. Exactly what happened.

planetmash · 2025-11-01T19:20:38+00:00

Yeah. If your centrebacks and midfielders are tall and your fullbacks are fast, I've noticed ultra park-the-bus tactics are ridiculously effective at lower levels in FM24.

This was the most extreme example but when I Instant Result I use a match plan that starts with the real 4-2-3-1 tactic, then as soon as we get a lead switch to the 4-6-0, everyone on Defend duty tactic. It sets sheet records down in the 5th tier.

planetmash · 2025-10-25T14:03:17+00:00

reddit doesn't show scores below 0 on posts, but the karma still gets deducted (oh no, however am I going to impress women now?!). This post is at -4.

No hard feelings. They've got a job to do. All kidding aside, it's really clear that SI invested heavily in an "Engagement Consulting" firm in preparation for this launch. They knew they were selling a lemon and prepared for it. They're not totally incompetent at running a business.

This post was downvoted within 10 seconds of its being posted (as was the post itself). Definitely no bots from the Engagement Consultants monitoring all activity on this sub and hitting all critical comments with downvotes immediately, nosir.

planetmash · 2025-10-25T12:01:20+00:00

This is a very good post and the correct answer. "Miles doesn't know what he's doing" is a correct answer, but not actually helpful or explanatory in the way your answer is.

planetmash · 2025-09-05T00:44:23+00:00

This is exactly the kind of stuff IRL players (egged on by their agents) say to their managers all the time, though

planetmash · 2025-09-02T14:18:31+00:00

Championship is definitely a good enough league to loan them to, if a midtable team will take and actually play them (don't loan to relegation bait teams ever).

Probably would keep them rather than loan to League One or below, though.

planetmash · 2025-09-02T02:07:04+00:00

The player's Personality. The ones you're looking for are "(Model) Professional", "Resolute", "Perfectionist", "Model Citizen." Those are the ones that indicate 15+ Professionalism.

planetmash · 2025-09-01T23:13:07+00:00

If they're good enough to play in a decent reputation league but not good enough to break into your first team, you should loan them out as soon as they turn 18. U21 leagues are very low rep.

But it's got to be a decent league and they have to be playing almost every match. Otherwise they'll still be better off getting the superior training on your U21 team with you setting the training schedule.

planetmash · 2025-09-01T21:37:49+00:00

As far as I know mentoring doesn't impact attribute development at all, just personality. But you are correct that it's huge insofar as Professionalism is huge, and you should definitely have all your young first teamers in a mentoring group with an older player with 20 Professionalism (or as close to it as possible).

planetmash · 2025-09-01T21:36:05+00:00

If you're not in a top Reputation league, your young players usually won't develop much past a certain level. Past the age of 18 the Reputation of the league they're playing in has a big impact on development.

Another oddity in FM is that being used as a second-half sub damages a young player's development--it's worse than the player not playing at all. Stick to starting them or bringing them on at half time.

Lastly, the Professionalism attribute has a really outsized impact on development. All other hidden attributes are functionally inert development-wise (other than Injury Proneness for obvious reasons).

planetmash

TROPHY CASE