Debate: Youths - Buy or Breed?

What approach do you take when bringing the new blood into your senior squad, do you promote trainees from your academy or buy them from the transfer market?

A well invested youth academy can be very beneficial to your club, even a half-invested youth academy can be beneficial, perhaps even more so what with reduced costs to run increasing the potential for profit. A common strategy that a lot of manager's will be using is to keep a lvl 3 scout on the payroll with no other facilities/staff. This allows for a good hoard of stars at the lowest possible cost, many managers believe that youth academy training is pretty worthless and scouting players with a large number of stars is the way to go. Obviously this hasn't been proven and there are just as many managers that are running maxed out youth academies regularly producing decent prospective trainees.

The youth academy system is often times looked upon as a bit of a lottery there are so many examples of 20 star scouted youths being promoted with far superior CSR/Skills than some players promoted with up to 100 stars and more. Whether this is a product of upgraded youth facilities vs youth facilities that have no investment at all I'm not sure. Then there are always the success stories such as Leónidas Barrutia scouted with a whopping 360 stars for an impressive 67k CSR on promotion from his academy!

With the idea of the youth system being a bit of a lottery a manager couldn't be blamed for placing no faith/investment into it at all and simply saving their money to buy in trainees. Equally this strategy has its pitfalls if your planning on training a potential U20 world cup superstar. The competition on the transfer market can get intense with a lot of the bigger clubs flexing their financial muscles in bidding wars that can reach excessive amounts of money!

So what's your opinion regarding the best way to obtain youth trainees? Come and share it with us over on the BR England Offsite in our poll, give us some insight into your experience with the youth academy/transfer market. Hopefully some of you can gain some useful knowledge concerning the matter or perhaps impart onto us some of your own wisdom!

Truthfully, I'm an advocate of both, as the situation requires. I've just finished fleshing out a XV of 17-21 year olds who are all showing a lot of promise. I managed to get several of those from my academy, but the better ones among them I got from the TM, and had to pay silly money for. By and large I've promoted backs and forwards, but only really bought forwards (that said, my two star-wingers were purchased a little while ago).

My only trouble is not having enough sessions to train all these maestros, what with 20/week dedicated to 2 players... My advice is, if you're training for yourself, limit the amount of U20/NTs you shoot for.

I believe that sport should be about the people from one locale finding their best local lads (or lassies) and forming a team from them.

Aside from it being a bit of a nancy-boys game the main thing that puts me off football (soccer) is all the rubbish with the transfer market and teams buying there way to the top.

I can't see what can be done about it, mind, and am more than willing for people to pay me to take my rejects off my hands.

But the Putney Pirates are a local team of local lads and we will never buy a player.

This is obviously a moral stance and not much to do with success.

I buy mine on the transfer market, but when I start foregoing training U20s to improve my team I may develop my YA to see if I can get some homegrown talent.

Always bring through my academy! Gives you a nice fuzzy feeling!

Definitely Mazzeha, I personally love bringing a player entirely through my own club not always the most successful method however lol

I have just seen the Putney Pirates training in the high street - they were going from the Coat and Badge to the Spotted Horse

In seriousness if you can train your own players then great but do not be averse to buying them in if the academy isn't producing the players you want.

I used to have the policy of recruiting a 10 star player each week but am now trying to get an U20 so have hoarded my stars. If/when one of my youths becomes an U20 player (one of whom I bought in) to what I used to do - and sell them on

Yeah good point, no point making the team suffer if you can get good buys (for cheap though...) Plus you can always sell your own academy players. Some times you get some good offers ^^

both of these strategies used alongside eachother provide the top results i believe , i have not trained an academy player since about season 3 but i have never had great players to train unless i bought them

I am just starting off trying to promote through my YA, I have been burned in the past with it but am hopeful this time around!

I have therefore bought most of my squad through the TM with some bargains and some not-so-bargains. For a team like mine - just promoted from Div V - I really want to have some younger guys to improve but need to buy some more of the established (old and knackered with high CSR) players just to stay competetive.
If/when I get to be a more established team I think I'll just stick with my YA guys.

Zec - you also make a great point about not having enough slots!

lordbasilf wrote:I have just seen the Putney Pirates training in the high street - they were going from the Coat and Badge to the Spotted Horse

lol

shhh you're giving away our top secret training schedule.

Just like to say that I think Harmsy's Thursday articles have been amazing and a breath of fresh air in my repetitive weeks