tl;dr 'Youth Facilities' have no effect on newgen PA in any way. The 'club reputation' of OTHER clubs in your nation has a small effect on newgen PA. 'Corporate facilities' may also have a minor effect on newgen PA, but this could be just statistical noise.
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I did testing before in FM19 and found that youth facilities affect newgen CA but not PA.
I have done a decent amount of testing with FM24 and have found the same, and that median PA continues to be the most reliable measure of newgen quality, with peak PA having much more of a randomness factor.
What I found in my previous testing was roughly the following:
Junior coaching ~40% PA effect Nation youth rating ~25% PA effect Youth recruitment ~25% PA effect Club reputation acts as tie breaker for youth recruitment Either unique nation or division ID ~25% (or perhaps even more) PA effect (a hidden, unchangeable factor - it may be 'Nation attribute template' that is listed as an inaccessible debug option in the editor, which sounds like it would be similar to the 'Nation personality template' before it was removed in recent versions) All other factors no effect
But I wanted to test a few new theories I had this time as well.
First, the data:
Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams normal: 141.5 median, 170 peak Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams YF1: 138.1 median, 161.4 peak Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams YF20: 143.7 median, 171.4 peak Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams JC1: 143 median, 163 peak Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams ClubRep/Train/YouthImp/Corp 1: 124.3 median, 176.3 peak Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams Train/YouthImp/Corp 1: 137.25 median, 165.5 peak Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams YouthImp/Corp 1: 136 median, 171.6 peak Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams YouthImp 20/Corp 1: 135.6 median, 164.9 peak Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams ClubRep1: 130.6 median, 177 peak Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams ClubRep1/YF1: 142 median, 174 peak Man City normal (no affiliates), premier league normal, all other England teams ClubRep1/YF1/corp1: 138 median, 163.5 peak Man City normal (no affiliates), premier league ClubRep/YF1/Corp1, all other clubs normal: 138.8 median, 177.4 peak Man City normal (no affiliates), north-west local region normal, all other clubs ClubRep1/YF1: 138.4 median, 176 peak Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams ClubRep/Corp 1: 133.9 median, 167.3 peak
Margin of error I'd guesstimate at ~3-5 median PA. This isn't up to EBFM's standards, but it's 'good enough' in my opinion. I've always been of the view that if you can't replicate it reliably in a few seasons of FM, then its not significant enough of a result to include anyway.
In case you're wondering, keeping the affiliates for Man City reduces median PA by ~15-20, and I deliberately removed them because I know affiliates mess with the newgen intake results as they can replace one or more of them with one from an affiliate club. I wanted to get a pure English club result.
I noticed that Man City often gets some purely Scotland/Ireland only players, and that once their top player (194 PA) was Ireland only. This is notable because Ireland has low enough of a nation youth rating that a 194 PA Ireland player is pretty highly unlikely. It gave credence to the idea that newgens are tied to local region in some way, so I thought I'd re-examine that aspect too (I'd previously tested 'local region' and found it had zero effect on CA/PA).
Hypothesis: Youth facilities have insignificant effect at a single club, but a nations or divisions teams YF contributes cumulatively to a pool of PA that clubs then draw upon. Conclusion: False.
Hypothesis: Youth facilities don't effect median PA, but they effect peak PA or the skew. Conclusion: False.
Although YF1 always eventually produced a high peak PA, I did notice that YF1 alone had a long run of ~155-160 peak PA. This wasn't the case in other YF1 tests, and YF20 produced peak PAs all over the place from 159 to 194. Skew is difficult to definitively conclude on, but I didn't get the impression looking through the results that youth facilities effected the skew.
Hypothesis: Youth facilities contribute to a division pool only. Conclusion: False.
Hypothesis: Youth facilities contribute to a 'local region' pool only. Conclusion: False.
Hypothesis: Junior coaching/Training Facilities/Youth Importance of other clubs has an effect somehow. Conclusion: False.
Hypothesis: Club reputation of other clubs has an effect somehow. Conclusion: Tentatively, yes.
This was a somewhat surprising finding. From memory, I did find before that club rep had a ~10% CA effect, but not on PA. In this case, we can see that ClubRep1 reduced median PA by ~7.7% alone, and ~12.2% when combined with other low club attributes. I took extra samples to be sure and got the same result.
The strange thing is that ClubRep1 result is normal when combined with YF1. I think there's a clue as to what's going on in the fact that the low median PA results only happened when *all* other England teams had low club rep. But that still doesn't make sense of it.
Hypothesis: Corporate facilities of other clubs has an effect somehow. Conclusion: Unclear.
Corp 1 did produce lower median PAs consistently, but the difference of ~3-7 may not be statistically significant. Consider that the typical variance of a club each year is ~5 median PA, even after stripping away the outliers.
Hypothesis: Starting CA affects PA, say that +20 CA due to factor contributes +20 PA as well. Conclusion: False.
Thanks for this! I think I read somewhere else recently (probably Reddit) that Youth Facilities don't impact the PA of newly generated players at all. This is really good to know.
GeorgeFloydOverdosed said: In case you're wondering, keeping the affiliates for Man City reduces median PA by ~15-20, and I deliberately removed them because I know affiliates mess with the newgen intake results as they can replace one or more of them with one from an affiliate club. I wanted to get a pure English club result. Expand
Great test, man. Thoughts about the affiliate clubs thing:
There are 7 countries with a higher Youth Rating than England(136), highest being Brazil with 163. If my top English club gets an affiliate in Brazil, wouldn't that be a good thing? Seems like swapping an English newgen for a Brazilian should be an upgrade most of the time.
The question is, I guess, how the game makes the Brazilian kid: does he get generated in my youth intake with my own 20/20 JC and YR? or is he made at his own club, with their stats (probably lower than mine), and just moved to my team?
If it's the first option then its a win. If not, then its a gamble. Any ideas?
EvensenFM said: Thanks for this! I think I read somewhere else recently (probably Reddit) that Youth Facilities don't impact the PA of newly generated players at all. This is really good to know. Expand
I actually posted a comment on your youtube recently, that was it.
You do pretty good videos, enjoying watching them alongside doing things, even though I wouldn't have thought football history would be my thing.
kvasir said: Great test, man. Thoughts about the affiliate clubs thing:
There are 7 countries with a higher Youth Rating than England(136), highest being Brazil with 163. If my top English club gets an affiliate in Brazil, wouldn't that be a good thing? Seems like swapping an English newgen for a Brazilian should be an upgrade most of the time.
The question is, I guess, how the game makes the Brazilian kid: does he get generated in my youth intake with my own 20/20 JC and YR? or is he made at his own club, with their stats (probably lower than mine), and just moved to my team?
If it's the first option then its a win. If not, then its a gamble. Any ideas? Expand
Yes, you are entirely correct in your first hypothesis. I just removed the affiliates from Man City because I'm trying to work out the newgen mechanics accurately.
To the question, a few days ago I would have said to you that its just Brazil's youth rating + it must be your own facilities, because in some testing I did before on it I found that it only takes the youth rating, not any of the affiliate club attributes.
But recently I was watching EBFM's video on affiliate clubs, and his data shows that while nation youth rating is still the most important factor, affiliate club attributes do in fact influence the quality of the newgen. So now I'm not sure, but I'd say believe what EBFM says on this because it's likely I only took like 5 samples or something in my test, because intake from affiliate clubs isn't really a part of the formula for newgen mechanics that I've been testing for.
You do pretty good videos, enjoying watching them alongside doing things, even though I wouldn't have thought football history would be my thing. Expand
Aha! Yeah, it must have been you. Apologies - I have a hard time keeping track...
GeorgeFloydOverdosed said: Junior coaching ~40% PA effect Nation youth rating ~25% PA effect Youth recruitment ~25% PA effect Club reputation acts as tie breaker for youth recruitment Either unique nation or division ID ~25% (or perhaps even more) PA effect (a hidden, unchangeable factor Expand Sorry for digging up old posts, but good estimation - lately made some tests with nation rating. Having clearly best reputation, coaching 20, recruitment 20, youth rating 200 , best swiss newgen was always (~15 times) >150-<160 - not very much randomness, I would even say PA of best five boys was quite regular (btw with rating 1 dropped to >70-<75). I don't suppose this hidden factor is mysterious "football's popularity", which effects no one knows, but rather other more hidden factor.
GeorgeFloydOverdosed said: tl;dr 'Youth Facilities' have no effect on newgen PA in any way. The 'club reputation' of OTHER clubs in your nation has a small effect on newgen PA. 'Corporate facilities' may also have a minor effect on newgen PA, but this could be just statistical noise. Expand
Sorry for bringing up old topics. Has anyone tested the impact of the first team's training facility on player development?
Antal said: Sorry for bringing up old topics. Has anyone tested the impact of the first team's training facility on player development? Expand
This is an old video, but from what i understand the mechanics of the game haven't really changed. The conclusion was it does have an impact.
From anecdote though, it mostly has an impact on players with lesser personalities, i've found that if the personality is good the development is good. I could be spouting nonsense, but that's what i've noticed at least.
juliius said: This is an old video, but from what i understand the mechanics of the game haven't really changed. The conclusion was it does have an impact.
From anecdote though, it mostly has an impact on players with lesser personalities, i've found that if the personality is good the development is good. I could be spouting nonsense, but that's what i've noticed at least. Expand
tam1236 said: Sorry for digging up old posts, but good estimation - lately made some tests with nation rating. Having clearly best reputation, coaching 20, recruitment 20, youth rating 200 , best swiss newgen was always (~15 times) >150-<160 - not very much randomness, I would even say PA of best five boys was quite regular (btw with rating 1 dropped to >70-<75). I don't suppose this hidden factor is mysterious "football's popularity", which effects no one knows, but rather other more hidden factor. Expand The quote you are referring to is really a misunderstanding created by looking at a single team. If you make all the other clubs have terrible reputation then you create a situation where your club’s recruitment gets worse because lots of mediocre players now don’t want to go to those other clubs and clutter up your picks. Your team isn’t picking with perfect knowledge so having a much larger pool that want your club dilutes the quality of your choices. The only team attributes that matter for PA of your intake are your club reputation first, followed by youth recruitment second. The youth rating of the country applies to all players recruited in that country, regardless of their nationality. But the number of higher PA players each year also depends on the players that have left the database of active players since the game tries to maintain stable levels of good players in each country. (This is why there tends to be a noticeable jump in high PA recruits in the first year of a save or when you add playable leagues).
Finally affiliates can have a negative effect if they are from countries with low youth ratings but this is both rare and of limited effect. The affiliates give you additional intake players and aren’t replacing high PA players from your own country. Yes they can lower the median but that is like saying that getting 5 200 PA players and a 150 PA player is worse than getting only 5 200 PA players. The negative impact only comes if you have enough affiliates that you hit the maximum limit of the intake (around 16-20) and if lower PA recruits could push out better players from other affiliates or from your local recruited but foreign nationality players.
MeanOnSunday said: The number of higher PA players each year also depends on the players that have left the database of active players since the game tries to maintain stable levels of good players in each country. (This is why there tends to be a noticeable jump in high PA recruits in the first year of a save or when you add playable leagues). Expand Would be interesting but do you have any proof? This hypothesis doesn't perfectly fit to the situation because what bothered me, was nearly the same max PA in every probe, nearly the same number of players with high PA>=150, but always PA<160 (though youth rating was set at 200). So if it is generated in such a way as you write, newgens' PA should be also connected with retired players' PA from country X, what I doubt, because lowering youth rating to 1 I got newgens of PA~70 with highest club reputation in a country.
BTW I didnt change any clubs' reputation, but I doubt recruitment works in "your" way (When high-rep, You collect bad players from bad-reputation clubs).
MeanOnSunday said: The quote you are referring to is really a misunderstanding created by looking at a single team. If you make all the other clubs have terrible reputation then you create a situation where your club’s recruitment gets worse because lots of mediocre players now don’t want to go to those other clubs and clutter up your picks. Your team isn’t picking with perfect knowledge so having a much larger pool that want your club dilutes the quality of your choices. The only team attributes that matter for PA of your intake are your club reputation first, followed by youth recruitment second. The youth rating of the country applies to all players recruited in that country, regardless of their nationality. But the number of higher PA players each year also depends on the players that have left the database of active players since the game tries to maintain stable levels of good players in each country. (This is why there tends to be a noticeable jump in high PA recruits in the first year of a save or when you add playable leagues).
Finally affiliates can have a negative effect if they are from countries with low youth ratings but this is both rare and of limited effect. The affiliates give you additional intake players and aren’t replacing high PA players from your own country. Yes they can lower the median but that is like saying that getting 5 200 PA players and a 150 PA player is worse than getting only 5 200 PA players. The negative impact only comes if you have enough affiliates that you hit the maximum limit of the intake (around 16-20) and if lower PA recruits could push out better players from other affiliates or from your local recruited but foreign nationality players. Expand I suppose you are referring to me only using Man City, but that is for this FM24 test. In FM19, I tested every playable club, and that is what my factor % approximations are derived from (by examining the differences between the clubs).
It is not true that only club rep followed by youth recruitment matter. If you doubt my own claims, you can see EBFM finding the same results (junior coaching is the most important for newgen PA).
The affiliate player does replace one of the 16 of your intake, and high PA newgens do not squeeze out low PA newgens in the intake. Rather there is a fairly predictable median that is the peak probability of a distribution curve, and the shape of the curve (bunched up or large tails) is affected by a few factors, but essentially the peak PAs you'll see are random (i.e. Man City might get 170 PA peak one year, 190 PA peak the next). The peak PAs are only predictable in one regard, that Man City is going to produce a player somewhere in the range of ~160-200 PA every year, but Brackley Town almost never will. The best indicator of both overall quality and chance of high PA newgens is median PA.
If your theory about how recruitment works was correct, then ClubRep1/YF1 would not produce results equal to default, which it did.
EBFM found that youth facilities of affiliate clubs is inversely correlated with intake PA. He also found that club rep of affiliate affects PA, but not for self-intake. I figure this might be a clue.
We can infer that if other clubs have YF20, their release of high PA newgens to other clubs is dampened. If they have YF1, it would be unrestricted. Since YF does not affect newgen PA, the high PA newgen output of all other English clubs is not affected, it is simply that they are handing over the better players to Man City.
We see consistently that ClubRep1 of all other English clubs results in low median PA, but not if *some* other English clubs are normal (whether same division or not).
Some logical deductions:
1. It is not that there are not enough high PA players being generated, as YF1 alleviates it entirely, even when all other clubs are ClubRep1.
2. Club rep has little effect on self-intake, therefore the boost to PA that high club rep of *other* clubs provide isn't coming from their intake quality being raised, but that the standard high PA players are more likely to be poached if the team is high rep. My guess is that this is meant to represent high rep teams being more likely to be scouted, while the reality is that good youths can come from anywhere but many simply go unnoticed.
3. So the low PA of ClubRep1 actually represents a scouting failure, rather than an actual drop in available youth quality.
4. YF1 must negate the scouting failure. Perhaps it is because these players seek out the better club to join, instead of waiting to be scouted.
Another way of thinking about it is that youth facilities represent your defense against poaching, while club rep is what makes you 'visible' to poachers.
In theory, this should mean a YF1 high rep club should have slightly lower median PA intakes.
I suppose that 'youth recruitment' is what the aforementioned scouting would be. An interesting question is if there is a real hidden pool of pre-newgens, where does the new 16th player come from when one get poached, and who is the replaced player and where does he get dropped to.
We know that youth recruitment is also a pecking order rather than absolute, i.e. YR 19 is no good if every other team is YR20. But it doesn't sound right that if one team is YR 2 and everyone is YR 1, then there would be no difference between YR 2 and YR 20 for that club. Having YR 20 overcome high YF and low clubrep barriers makes more sense.
This is all difficult to test, but I have noticed the following suggestive oddity: The Jamaican Premier League starts with 8 teams with 20 youth recruitment. Turkey on the other hand has 16 1st div clubs with 6 or less YR. Without diving into this too deeply, obviously something is going on here beyond just YR 2 beats YR 1, and it seems to me that YR is being adjusted to produce desired results when club rep and expected player quality is set in stone first. Pete Sottrel (SI staff) claimed 'The Youth Recruitment rating tells us how wide the club’s catchment area is' but this has to be a bullshit story because clubs in the microstate of San Marino have mostly YR of 2, while Luxembourg have several YR 14-20, Seattle has 12, and Sugar Boys and two others in the British Virgin Islands have 18.
The most important factor in PA for newgens aka youth intake is your nations' "GAME IMPORTANCE" if it is not set to "Very Important" you will never have any good NewGens even if you played 1000 years. You have the RNG of finding 1 random Star like how some random Asian Island gets 1 star every 50 years or whatever.
I've done a load of build a nation saves and testing. It is pretty easy to test. Max out everything but set game importance to the lowest level and the NewGens will be awful even with everything else Maxxed out.
This is the actual problem with USA in FM as the game importance is set to the lowest setting while everything else is pretty on par with the Big 10 in Europe.
USA in FM cannot generate any USA players for a top 20 National Team. All of the USA National Team NewGens (once the real players retire) will all spawn over seas at other clubs. Because it uses the nations game importance of where the player is spawned at.
USA cannot even spawn MLS caliber players!!!!!!!! USA will literally spawn garbage NewGens in USA.The entire national team will be spawned at overseas club intake.
Game Importance supersedes all other youth settings and mechanics. I am not even sure if SI is aware of it lmao.
If you are playing a top league in a top country you really wont notice anything.
The most important factor in PA for newgens aka youth intake is your nations' "GAME IMPORTANCE" if it is not set to "Very Important" you will never have any good NewGens even if you played 1000 years. You have the RNG of finding 1 random Star like how some random Asian Island gets 1 star every 50 years or whatever.
I've done a load of build a nation saves and testing. It is pretty easy to test. Max out everything but set game importance to the lowest level and the NewGens will be awful even with everything else Maxxed out.
This is the actual problem with USA in FM as the game importance is set to the lowest setting while everything else is pretty on par with the Big 10 in Europe.
USA in FM cannot generate any USA players for a top 20 National Team. All of the USA National Team NewGens (once the real players retire) will all spawn over seas at other clubs. Because it uses the nations game importance of where the player is spawned at.
USA cannot even spawn MLS caliber players!!!!!!!! USA will literally spawn garbage NewGens in USA.The entire national team will be spawned at overseas club intake.
Game Importance supersedes all other youth settings and mechanics. I am not even sure if SI is aware of it lmao.
If you are playing a top league in a top country you really wont notice anything. Expand Hear me out, I believe you are largely mistaken on this.
From memory, game importance does have a modest effect on the distribution (low game importance = PA more bunched up around median), but it doesn't change the median or rule out very high PA players occurring entirely. Don't take my word for it, you can see EBFM's test results. Two problems with EBFM's data here is that he didn't look at the distribution as a whole, and he uses average instead of median. I think I've neglected to say before that this is (likely) why EBFM came to a different conclusion about youth facilities, where he found a very slight but consistent increase to PA. This is because he used the average, which isn't reliable with FM's system, and I guess it's possible something is going on here but I'd think if there is it'd probably be that the CA boost from YF is roughly added to the PA (i.e. 36 CA > 40 CA = 120 PA > 124 PA).
I would say that game importance is equivalent to a ~10% PA factor, it's not directly comparable to the other PA factors so it's hard to pin down a precise figure.
That said I haven't tested it in a long time, and it's possible your testing was qualitatively different to what I did. You said you maxed out all other factors. I guess it's possible low game importance has a more pronounced effect in such conditions. But what I do know is that with the default game settings we play with, game importance is almost a negligible factor.
Part of it could also be that because nations do in fact appear to have different (and significant) values set under the hood, it's easy to confuse that with game importance, cities, etc.
I've been doing more testing that I've been sitting on for a while now as I reflect on how to best communicate it. Basically I noticed how newgens have unique 'place of birth' that usually isn't even the club's city, so I thought this might be a clue that would allow me to deduce the hidden nation mechanics.
EBFM got as far as thinking it's probably a national pool & draft process going on. What I've found is that seemingly can't be true. From testing before, I already knew that city, local region, etc. all had zero influence on PA. But now I also know that the whole city system is essentially purely cosmetic. There is a sophisticated mechanic that assigns the place of birth, but it does not affect the newgen PA.
Why this matters:
- There isn't some more sophisticated behind the scenes stuff going on like HoYDs/U18s staff poaching from other cities in the local region or such. This doesn't mean that 'Youth Recruitment' doesn't do anything, it just means that it acts independently with its own mechanism; it doesn't interact with some underlying hidden process regarding cities and pre-newgens floating around the place and whatnot.
- There aren't 'player pools' in cities, therefore there is no player scarcity in regards to 'youth recruitment' in congested areas.
- The PA comes from the club location (nation), not the birth city location.
- 'Local region' doesn't seem to have any effect on...anything. I think it probably simply serves a 'boundary' purpose for editing, i.e. a team coordinates is in south England but is part of a northern local region so it gets counted in the north division.
Teasing out those implications takes some thought itself, but there is more (though less significant) that is difficult to explain without bamboozling someone who hasn't been looking at it for several hours as I have. For instance:
- Newgens come from the city location, not the club location, but they adopt the nationality of the club. This is confusing, and purely cosmetic, but I can illustrate its probable intended purpose with an example: Suppose an American Samoa club is added to USA competition. The club is 'based in' USA for economic travel reasons say, but the youths coming through are born in 'Pago Pago' because it's an American Samoa club.
- You cannot tell whether players are generated first at cities or at clubs, because they are the same thing - the club generates them as having come from cities.
- There is a map coordinate geometry to city/'place of birth' selection, likely a rectangle with decreasing selection probability towards the edges. But there are nuances and even exceptions.
Of course I would have to furnish all the different examples I found to prove my findings, in addition to explaining these abstractions.
Unfortunately it didn't get me any closer to uncovering the hidden nation factor, but what it has shown me is that the newgen recruitment process is probably a lot more simple than previously thought, in regards to PA, and it reinforces that unique nation ID is a key component while staff, cities, whatnot isn't.
Here's my rough mockup of what the 'place of birth' selection actually looks like.
This whole thing appears to be purely cosmetic, so don't try and work out how to get better newgens with it. There is no actual competing for newgens, or even newgen generation in these cities, going on.
There are three clubs: Ljubljana, Kamnik, and Maribor.
The rectangle is area the club can draw newgens from.
It is not that newgens are generated at each city and a few of them get picked up, it is that the club generates precisely 16 newgens. There 'place of birth' is probabilistic based on distance from club and 'inhabitants range' of the city. The circles are just to convey the idea of decreasing probability the further you go out from the club location.
Notice how Ljubljana and Maribor each draw ~4 players from their own city, but Kamnik only draws 2 and takes many more from nearby the nearby capital of Ljubljana. This is because Kamnik has low inhabitants range, and Ljubljana is high probability because of proximity + high inhabitants.
I do not think city 'attraction' affects it, I have tested it but the results are not 100% clear but clear enough to rule it out I think. From memory, 'inhabitants range' is also relative to 'inhabitants range' of other cities. That is to say, if Ljubjlana only had 10,000 people, it would still be top dog if all other cities are 1000< pop, but also it would be less commonly the place of birth than if it had 20mil people and others 1000< pop. There are some further nuances that reveal themselves when you try to break it with extremes like this, but since the mechanic is cosmetic, I won't go further into that.
Lastly there is the matter of exceptions. As you can see, sometimes there can be instances outside the rectangle. I don't know what exactly is going on here, I suspect it has something to do with youth recruitment perhaps. Maybe it's even just a randomness factor they've put in to try and better reflect reality.
The most important factor in PA for newgens aka youth intake is your nations' "GAME IMPORTANCE" if it is not set to "Very Important" you will never have any good NewGens even if you played 1000 years. You have the RNG of finding 1 random Star like how some random Asian Island gets 1 star every 50 years or whatever.
I've done a load of build a nation saves and testing. It is pretty easy to test. Max out everything but set game importance to the lowest level and the NewGens will be awful even with everything else Maxxed out.
This is the actual problem with USA in FM as the game importance is set to the lowest setting while everything else is pretty on par with the Big 10 in Europe.
USA in FM cannot generate any USA players for a top 20 National Team. All of the USA National Team NewGens (once the real players retire) will all spawn over seas at other clubs. Because it uses the nations game importance of where the player is spawned at.
USA cannot even spawn MLS caliber players!!!!!!!! USA will literally spawn garbage NewGens in USA.The entire national team will be spawned at overseas club intake.
Game Importance supersedes all other youth settings and mechanics. I am not even sure if SI is aware of it lmao.
If you are playing a top league in a top country you really wont notice anything. Expand
I’m doing an USA only MLS save the bolded is simply not true. Once you max out Junior Coaching/Youth Recuitment you get tons of regens with 130-140 PA which is a great MLS player. Over 3 seasons with maxed out everything I have like 15 players with 130 plus and a ton of mid+ 120s. Might be the easiest intake only save to win every competition besides Mexico. (I’ve got a lot of issues with how stupid they handle MLS academies when they basically work identical to Europe with no youth contracts.) I’ve got two starters already in the mid 130s from the academy pre maxing everything out.
The draft also pumps out 120-140 pa players but they are mostly too old since there is no youth league and the phantom games don’t do shit for development so their CAs are f**king terrible at 20/21
I have an academy CD getting called into the senior NT with the real players still active but the active CDs are all in the 130s except Carter Vickers.
While most of the good regens are from Europe/Mexico , I’ve seen some crazy players come out of MLS academies in other saves. Like high 150s starting for Arsenal good but it’s like once every 3-5 years and tedious to scout. (But always free.)
Though yeah if you change game importance to the highest setting the US starts pumping out WC talent left and right because the clubs have nothing to spend on besides infrastructure and the countries economic/population stats are so high. (I would argue the U.S. regen quality is realistic if only slightly punishing given the trajectory MLS academies are going. Basically all the starters that grew up in the U.S. were in MLS academies at one point.)
From memory, game importance does have a modest effect on the distribution (low game importance = PA more bunched up around median), but it doesn't change the median or rule out very high PA players occurring entirely. Don't take my word for it, you can see EBFM's test results. Two problems with EBFM's data here is that he didn't look at the distribution as a whole, and he uses average instead of median. I think I've neglected to say before that this is (likely) why EBFM came to a different conclusion about youth facilities, where he found a very slight but consistent increase to PA. This is because he used the average, which isn't reliable with FM's system, and I guess it's possible something is going on here but I'd think if there is it'd probably be that the CA boost from YF is roughly added to the PA (i.e. 36 CA > 40 CA = 120 PA > 124 PA).
I would say that game importance is equivalent to a ~10% PA factor, it's not directly comparable to the other PA factors so it's hard to pin down a precise figure.
That said I haven't tested it in a long time, and it's possible your testing was qualitatively different to what I did. You said you maxed out all other factors. I guess it's possible low game importance has a more pronounced effect in such conditions. But what I do know is that with the default game settings we play with, game importance is almost a negligible factor.
Part of it could also be that because nations do in fact appear to have different (and significant) values set under the hood, it's easy to confuse that with game importance, cities, etc.
I've been doing more testing that I've been sitting on for a while now as I reflect on how to best communicate it. Basically I noticed how newgens have unique 'place of birth' that usually isn't even the club's city, so I thought this might be a clue that would allow me to deduce the hidden nation mechanics.
EBFM got as far as thinking it's probably a national pool & draft process going on. What I've found is that seemingly can't be true. From testing before, I already knew that city, local region, etc. all had zero influence on PA. But now I also know that the whole city system is essentially purely cosmetic. There is a sophisticated mechanic that assigns the place of birth, but it does not affect the newgen PA.
Why this matters:
- There isn't some more sophisticated behind the scenes stuff going on like HoYDs/U18s staff poaching from other cities in the local region or such. This doesn't mean that 'Youth Recruitment' doesn't do anything, it just means that it acts independently with its own mechanism; it doesn't interact with some underlying hidden process regarding cities and pre-newgens floating around the place and whatnot.
- There aren't 'player pools' in cities, therefore there is no player scarcity in regards to 'youth recruitment' in congested areas.
- The PA comes from the club location (nation), not the birth city location.
- 'Local region' doesn't seem to have any effect on...anything. I think it probably simply serves a 'boundary' purpose for editing, i.e. a team coordinates is in south England but is part of a northern local region so it gets counted in the north division.
Teasing out those implications takes some thought itself, but there is more (though less significant) that is difficult to explain without bamboozling someone who hasn't been looking at it for several hours as I have. For instance:
- Newgens come from the city location, not the club location, but they adopt the nationality of the club. This is confusing, and purely cosmetic, but I can illustrate its probable intended purpose with an example: Suppose an American Samoa club is added to USA competition. The club is 'based in' USA for economic travel reasons say, but the youths coming through are born in 'Pago Pago' because it's an American Samoa club.
- You cannot tell whether players are generated first at cities or at clubs, because they are the same thing - the club generates them as having come from cities.
- There is a map coordinate geometry to city/'place of birth' selection, likely a rectangle with decreasing selection probability towards the edges. But there are nuances and even exceptions.
Of course I would have to furnish all the different examples I found to prove my findings, in addition to explaining these abstractions.
Unfortunately it didn't get me any closer to uncovering the hidden nation factor, but what it has shown me is that the newgen recruitment process is probably a lot more simple than previously thought, in regards to PA, and it reinforces that unique nation ID is a key component while staff, cities, whatnot isn't. Expand
I wish I was mistaken all of the Build a Nation players know about Game Importance superseding NewGen settings. Go watch a ton of of SecondYellowCard Build a Nation setup videos and read his discords where his followers test all of the NewGen stuff for the lowest nations.
I can tell you my last 3 build a nation saves were hungary before I knew about game importance, Andorra and Faroe Islands. Hungary even after 60 years where I gave every club billions and billions to max out their facilities could never produce a NewGen that was as good as IRL national club member. The way you give clubs billions is by buying their horrendous youth players for 10 million each as the board never turns down 10 million offers. So you are buying 30+ players per club eventually. Giving clubs 300 million each season.
bigloser said: I’m doing an USA only MLS save the bolded is simply not true. Once you max out Junior Coaching/Youth Recuitment you get tons of regens with 130-140 PA which is a great MLS player. Over 3 seasons with maxed out everything I have like 15 players with 130 plus and a ton of mid+ 120s. Might be the easiest intake only save to win every competition besides Mexico. (I’ve got a lot of issues with how stupid they handle MLS academies when they basically work identical to Europe with no youth contracts.) I’ve got two starters already in the mid 130s from the academy pre maxing everything out.
The draft also pumps out 120-140 pa players but they are mostly too old since there is no youth league and the phantom games don’t do shit for development so their CAs are f**king terrible at 20/21
I have an academy CD getting called into the senior NT with the real players still active but the active CDs are all in the 130s except Carter Vickers.
While most of the good regens are from Europe/Mexico , I’ve seen some crazy players come out of MLS academies in other saves. Like high 150s starting for Arsenal good but it’s like once every 3-5 years and tedious to scout. (But always free.)
Though yeah if you change game importance to the highest setting the US starts pumping out WC talent left and right because the clubs have nothing to spend on besides infrastructure and the countries economic/population stats are so high. (I would argue the U.S. regen quality is realistic if only slightly punishing given the trajectory MLS academies are going. Basically all the starters that grew up in the U.S. were in MLS academies at one point.) Expand
I may have exaggerated the MLS talent but only a little. And it is different if you are actually playing in MLS as it makes it Active thus the entire nation gets full newgens as opposed to a league that is just loaded but not active.
This is why people make Brazil active since you have a much higher % to spawn mass quality of NewGens every season as opposed to a just top tier loaded but not active. I load all leagues but only have 5-10 active and never USA as active. In testing since not many actually play with USA.
Quantity of newgens is different for active vs not active but loaded vs not active and not loaded.
Unless using custom leagues Africa has no leagues except South Africa. So early you can find great African irl players. So you will notice a lot of NewGens spawn in Europe who play for Africa National Clubs as Africa since no leagues only spawn NewGens when a player retires because FM wants to always keep the total player number the same in the database.
While the active league all clubs spawn full set of Newgens every season.
This is also the reason after 50-60 years England takes over as the NewGen king if you have a full England pyramid loaded. You are talking 6/7 tiers of clubs who can spawn newgens and with RNG Jesus even if the combined lower tier pop out 1 National CLub bench player a season it eventually adds up after decades.
Go create a backup save and sim 20 years in the future and see where the USA national team players spawned at. It will all be overseas. USA wont be able to create in nation NewGens for a top 20 Fifa club. That is completely unrealistic. Sure some USA players are born overseas and have dual citizenship. But in FM they will 100% be spawned overseas. The reason USA stays a top 15 Fifa Club is because they spawn in Europe. USA might spawn 2-3 players born in USA who spawned at USA clubs that get to the national team.
People have won the World Cup with Wales when doing older Pre Ryan Reynold Wrexham Road to Glory saves. As the NewGens actually follow the England settings. Since as far as FM settings go Wrexham is in England.
This also use to be the case in old FM back in the day with San Marino as they had a club somewhere down in Italy's lowest tiers with a custom database. And once you got that club to top Tier Italy and became the #1 club in the world they could spawn world class newgens enabling people to win the World Cup with San Marino National Team as all the NewGens would come from the human controlled club in Italy.
There use to a link to the guy who did the San Marino world cup on reddit or Si forum. It might be 10 years old at this point. Think he had to play over 100 years or something.
jimmysthebestcop said: I wish I was mistaken all of the Build a Nation players know about Game Importance superseding NewGen settings. Go watch a ton of of SecondYellowCard Build a Nation setup videos and read his discords where his followers test all of the NewGen stuff for the lowest nations.
I can tell you my last 3 build a nation saves were hungary before I knew about game importance, Andorra and Faroe Islands. Hungary even after 60 years where I gave every club billions and billions to max out their facilities could never produce a NewGen that was as good as IRL national club member. The way you give clubs billions is by buying their horrendous youth players for 10 million each as the board never turns down 10 million offers. So you are buying 30+ players per club eventually. Giving clubs 300 million each season. Expand Coincidentally it was a recent video by SecondYellowCard where he tested the DoF role that got me thinking that youth recruitment might work similarly. Turns out it likely doesn't, but that's what led me to investigate the 'place of birth' thing.
I haven't been able to find this discord you mention yet, but I've done some testing of game importance anyway, not only to draw a conclusion here but because it's good to retest things once every few years to see if the mechanic has changed and also I'd like further clarity/precision on the distribution effect I mentioned. I retested recently the hidden nation factor thing I assert is the case, and I can confirm it still exists.
England very important (default) Man City average (3 samples):
median 142.166 average 135.375 range 68.333-172.333
england-wide stats:
range 30-179 10th best player = 157.333 PA
England unimportant Man City average (3 samples):
median 131.666 average 132.687 range 78.666-162
england-wide stats:
range 34-170.33 10th best player = 153.666 PA
Conclusions
Game importance has no strong effect on PA. Previously I had said it bunches up the PA around the median and ends up affecting the PA to the tune of ~10%, and this is what we see. But as I tried to communicate in qualifying that 'it's not directly comparable to the other PA factors so it's hard to pin down a precise figure', it's not a simple flat 10% - in Singapore's case, the effect was 0% or even negative. In England's case, it was an 8% difference, for both Man City and (to a similar degree) the nation as a whole.
The main takeaway from game importance as I see it is that because it bunches up PA around the median, it does actually dampen your wonderkid chances just enough to make one not want to dismiss it entirely, but it's not that significant or consistently applicable as other factors such as junior coaching are. 160 PA instead of 170 PA, in some cases.
I haven't done a deep analysis of it, but just my general impression is that its not that Game Importance is shifting up or down the general quality of the newgens either, and this is somewhat indicated by the low difference in the average as well (2% difference for the Man City samples). I think it's simply bunching up the distribution closer to the median.
I hope this also serves as an illustration of why I use the median instead of the average. The median is pretty stable and therefore predictable unlike the average. While the median can be predicted with strong likelihood of being within a range of -/+ 5 PA or thereabouts with enough samples, the average will end up with an uncertainty range of ~10 PA or more even if you collect many samples.
I included height in the singapore samples as I thought it was interesting to observe; I wondered if its distribution has some correlation, or something in common, with the PA distribution.
jimmysthebestcop said: I may have exaggerated the MLS talent but only a little. And it is different if you are actually playing in MLS as it makes it Active thus the entire nation gets full newgens as opposed to a league that is just loaded but not active.
This is why people make Brazil active since you have a much higher % to spawn mass quality of NewGens every season as opposed to a just top tier loaded but not active. I load all leagues but only have 5-10 active and never USA as active. In testing since not many actually play with USA.
Quantity of newgens is different for active vs not active but loaded vs not active and not loaded.
Unless using custom leagues Africa has no leagues except South Africa. So early you can find great African irl players. So you will notice a lot of NewGens spawn in Europe who play for Africa National Clubs as Africa since no leagues only spawn NewGens when a player retires because FM wants to always keep the total player number the same in the database.
While the active league all clubs spawn full set of Newgens every season.
This is also the reason after 50-60 years England takes over as the NewGen king if you have a full England pyramid loaded. You are talking 6/7 tiers of clubs who can spawn newgens and with RNG Jesus even if the combined lower tier pop out 1 National CLub bench player a season it eventually adds up after decades.
Go create a backup save and sim 20 years in the future and see where the USA national team players spawned at. It will all be overseas. USA wont be able to create in nation NewGens for a top 20 Fifa club. That is completely unrealistic. Sure some USA players are born overseas and have dual citizenship. But in FM they will 100% be spawned overseas. The reason USA stays a top 15 Fifa Club is because they spawn in Europe. USA might spawn 2-3 players born in USA who spawned at USA clubs that get to the national team.
People have won the World Cup with Wales when doing older Pre Ryan Reynold Wrexham Road to Glory saves. As the NewGens actually follow the England settings. Since as far as FM settings go Wrexham is in England.
This also use to be the case in old FM back in the day with San Marino as they had a club somewhere down in Italy's lowest tiers with a custom database. And once you got that club to top Tier Italy and became the #1 club in the world they could spawn world class newgens enabling people to win the World Cup with San Marino National Team as all the NewGens would come from the human controlled club in Italy.
There use to a link to the guy who did the San Marino world cup on reddit or Si forum. It might be 10 years old at this point. Think he had to play over 100 years or something. Expand
Feel like you just changed the argument that having Leagues playable and that total new gens generated are huge factors. it’s why Egypt infamously has a higher Youth rating than Belgium. You can even load leagues later in a save to generate a Wonderkid boom there. So yeah no shit.
I always load MLS in all my saves and it always produces some high end regens even when I never play there. I don’t know why you are digging in so hard here. I’m 2040s in a penta save and 3-4 of the best players are regens out of MLS academies. They usually never actually play in MLS but they are generated there and leave on a free at 18. I don’t know why you wouldn’t load it, it’s one league and generates literally free players and buys your scraps.
If you don’t load a league that’s playable it’s going to be significantly shittier at generating regens than it actually is because SI balances countries with the assumption the league is loaded.
In well aware of how it works, Canadian regens at Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal use the U.S. intake. Wrexham/Swansea etc are literally listed in the English intake the not the Welsh one.
I looked at the penta save and pulled up all the regens with over 150 PA. OF the 10, all except 2 generated in MLS academies. (Only 10 woof)
The top 7-8 were all generated in the U.S. intake including a 185 PA out of the New England and 170 PA out of Charlotte. Both regulars at Arsenal. (9 years apart though.) The 2 Euro intakes were like 154 PA or lower playing at Celtic. 1 was out of England and 1 out of Germany.
I imagine the 140s is heavily Euro intakes though. Hasn’t SI said there is separate generational regen type that’s treated differently? I imagine the odds of one of those being American in a German intake is low.
GeorgeFloydOverdosed said: Coincidentally it was a recent video by SecondYellowCard where he tested the DoF role that got me thinking that youth recruitment might work similarly. Turns out it likely doesn't, but that's what led me to investigate the 'place of birth' thing.
I haven't been able to find this discord you mention yet, but I've done some testing of game importance anyway, not only to draw a conclusion here but because it's good to retest things once every few years to see if the mechanic has changed and also I'd like further clarity/precision on the distribution effect I mentioned. I retested recently the hidden nation factor thing I assert is the case, and I can confirm it still exists.
England very important (default) Man City average (3 samples):
median 142.166 average 135.375 range 68.333-172.333
england-wide stats:
range 30-179 10th best player = 157.333 PA
England unimportant Man City average (3 samples):
median 131.666 average 132.687 range 78.666-162
england-wide stats:
range 34-170.33 10th best player = 153.666 PA
Conclusions
Game importance has no strong effect on PA. Previously I had said it bunches up the PA around the median and ends up affecting the PA to the tune of ~10%, and this is what we see. But as I tried to communicate in qualifying that 'it's not directly comparable to the other PA factors so it's hard to pin down a precise figure', it's not a simple flat 10% - in Singapore's case, the effect was 0% or even negative. In England's case, it was an 8% difference, for both Man City and (to a similar degree) the nation as a whole.
The main takeaway from game importance as I see it is that because it bunches up PA around the median, it does actually dampen your wonderkid chances just enough to make one not want to dismiss it entirely, but it's not that significant or consistently applicable as other factors such as junior coaching are. 160 PA instead of 170 PA, in some cases.
I haven't done a deep analysis of it, but just my general impression is that its not that Game Importance is shifting up or down the general quality of the newgens either, and this is somewhat indicated by the low difference in the average as well (2% difference for the Man City samples). I think it's simply bunching up the distribution closer to the median.
I hope this also serves as an illustration of why I use the median instead of the average. The median is pretty stable and therefore predictable unlike the average. While the median can be predicted with strong likelihood of being within a range of -/+ 5 PA or thereabouts with enough samples, the average will end up with an uncertainty range of ~10 PA or more even if you collect many samples.
I included height in the singapore samples as I thought it was interesting to observe; I wondered if its distribution has some correlation, or something in common, with the PA distribution. Expand
Extremely interesting. I havent even bought or played the demo of Fm26 I am staying away from it as it is a flaming dumpster of poop and I cant reward SI with my money. Maybe I will jump back in fm27. Is it different in fm26? No idea.
I would be interested in your results over a 10-20 year span. At least in Fm24 and all previous versions if Game Importance wasnt set to very high in a decent Youth nation you couldnt produce NewGens even if your were #1 club in the world.
Singapore could never have good players because there youth rating is bad. Czech would be a good test as their youth rating is 90-100+ while game importance is not set to very important.
I dont think this is an issue for most players since most people play in a big nation, build a nation saves arent that popular in the community. So most people wont notice it.
I am honestly probably not explaining myself well. I just know in fm24 and prior when doing build a nation saves even if you changed youth rating to 100 the nation couldnt ever produce wonder kids even when getting league to top 5 and all the clubs in the top 50 if Game Importance wasnt set to very important.
I dont know if there is some kind of time factor and that is why you need to sim 10-20 seasons or what tbh.
jimmysthebestcop said: Extremely interesting. I havent even bought or played the demo of Fm26 I am staying away from it as it is a flaming dumpster of poop and I cant reward SI with my money. Maybe I will jump back in fm27. Is it different in fm26? No idea.
I would be interested in your results over a 10-20 year span. At least in Fm24 and all previous versions if Game Importance wasnt set to very high in a decent Youth nation you couldnt produce NewGens even if your were #1 club in the world.
Singapore could never have good players because there youth rating is bad. Czech would be a good test as their youth rating is 90-100+ while game importance is not set to very important.
I dont think this is an issue for most players since most people play in a big nation, build a nation saves arent that popular in the community. So most people wont notice it.
I am honestly probably not explaining myself well. I just know in fm24 and prior when doing build a nation saves even if you changed youth rating to 100 the nation couldnt ever produce wonder kids even when getting league to top 5 and all the clubs in the top 50 if Game Importance wasnt set to very important.
I dont know if there is some kind of time factor and that is why you need to sim 10-20 seasons or what tbh. Expand I should have mentioned that I used FM24. I guess some will say then what's the point of doing an updated test if you're not going to even use the most recent edition, but for me FM26 just has to be foregone.
I actually completely forgot to do one thing I wanted to do this time, which was to test what it looks like 5-10 years into the future.
I wanted to do USA initially, to address your claim about the MLS exactly, but found newgen intake works a bit differently and I couldn't be bothered trying to work it out. So my plan after that was to choose a nation with low game importance but high youth rating, but there aren't really any that are loadable - and singapore was one of the best options that was left. But this is also why I did Man City, because I had in mind (and generally what people play with) is clubs with top facilities in top nations, and England is no.1 for that.
As I was writing this I was doing my testing, and I was about to say that I've been wrong about game importance all these years, as 5 years in, the Man City (unimportant England) median had slipped to 117.5 PA (155 peak) which is outside of the range one would expect for the 131.166 PA averaged median I had got for the initial year. But then I did the control test (normal England), and that was 122 PA median, and 115.5 PA on the second sample.
This is bringing back what I experienced regarding game importance back when I initially tested it in FM19. No one has so far pointed out that I said game importance has no effect, yet later claim it has a minor effect, but I want to clarify this. As you can see, game importance has a minor effect that is only sometimes apparent. When I started testing it, I used average PA as a measure and so it was invisible to me and I thought it had no effect. Once I cottoned on to median PA being more accurate, I observed that questionable minor effect. In multi-year tests I thought I had borne out its effect, only to be confounded again in the same way this time. So I had to conclude whether a handful of PA difference, some of the time, constituted something real or an illusion. I concluded it was illusory, although the bunching up around the median effect is obviously real. It's a bit difficult to explain this fully if you haven't tried this kind of testing yourself, but basically it's very easy to be hoodwinked by limited samples and the inherent randomness. If I test a club and get 139, 134, 140, 137 then it's very tempting to say this club is a ~137.5 PA club. But then I would get 153 and 145 if I took 2 more samples. So this is why when I saw game importance raising PA by at most ~10% and inconsistently, I put it down to randomness.
I will continue this testing a bit, to clarify results at the 5 year and 10 year mark, as it does require at least 3 (preferably 5) samples to give any reliable indication.
I continued testing game importance at the 5 year mark and got these additional results:
England normal ('very important' ) samples:
119 120.5 113.5 106 118.5
England 'unimportant' samples:
140 143.5 140.5
2nd 'very important' samples:
105.5 111 101
At this point I stopped because there is something extra going on here that is more notable in itself. Still, I think we can pretty much wrap up the game importance thing, as ~140 PA median for Man City (or almost any club really) is about as high as it gets.
But now the matter of these highly variable medians. I have a feeling I already knew this years ago but I have forgotten about it, as I was recalling recently how I would savescum a whole year in advance to see the newgen results instead of reloading just before newgen day, in recent versions, and I couldn't remember why. Now I see it's no doubt because certain things are being set a few months earlier than intake day with the new 'Youth Preview' system.
Honestly I'm still hazy right now on it and I can't really be bothered digging deep into it, but I know this doesn't affect any data I've presented, except this multi-year attempt thing.
It's not to do with facilities, reputation, club coefficients, etc. changing - I double checked all those to make sure. What it does seem to correlate strongly with is your youth intake quality star rating. Yes, this star rating is relative to your existing squad, but it seems also nonetheless to be reflecting the differences in your median PA.
If median PA can vary for even a top club by as much as ~30% randomly, then does knowing the newgen factors even matter at this point? In a way this is a point even I don't want to admit, but it's one reason FM was losing its lustre for me even before FM26, they ruined the fun of newgens. On the other hand, the factors still work, and the year-to-year randomness doesn't mean inherent randomness - it's a dampener for sure, but still means you have a reasonably predictable and consistent system. To illustrate the difference:
Before:
Man City - 140, 143, 135, 146, 148 Arsenal - 136, 129, 138, 139, 139
Now (nation-based year-to-year randomness):
Man City - 140, 110, 115, 130, 145 Arsenal - 136, 107, 110, 119, 142
Inherent randomness (~30%):
Man City - 140, 110, 115, 130, 160 Arsenal - 158, 181, 132, 105, 116
That's if nation-based year-to-year randomness is what is actually going on here. As I said, I'm quite hazy on it right now. I'll probably try and get to the bottom of it sometime down the track. I know this all seems to put things in the wrong direction of progress, and people generally don't like that, but better to acknowledge the setbacks/problems than keep them on the down low and end up fooling myself/others about it.
It's bugging me, so I've been looking into it more. This is about the median dropping in subsequent years, not game importance anymore.
Normal Man City test
2024: 144, 3.5 star, Aston Villa 134 2025: 126, 2 star, Aston Villa 144 2026: 102, 1 star, Arsenal 113, Aston Villa 133.5 2027: 94.5, 0.5 star, Arsenal 124.5, Aston Villa 124 2028: 119.5, 3 star, Arsenal 122.5, Aston Villa 121 2029: 112, 2 star, Arsenal 103, Aston Villa 126 2030: 103.5, 2 star, Arsenal 120, Aston Villa 125 2031: 120.5, 2.5 star, Arsenal 123, Aston Villa 134
Average: 115.25, Aston Villa 130.1875
Normal Aston Villa test
2024: 136.5, 5 star, Man City 132 2025: 129, 3 star, Man City 138 2026: 90, 0.5 star, Man City 121 2027: 99.5, 3 star, Man City 140 2028: 120, 3 star, Man City 120 2029: 110.5, 3 star, Man City 122 2030: 106.5, 1.5 star, Man City 123 2031: 113.5, 2.5 star, Man City 135
Average: 113.1875, Man City 128.875
Forest Green (league 2) non-player: 70, 91.5 Forest Green player: 52 (note: was 0.5 star)
Overall this is a relief, because it seems to be the case that the median of all non-player teams doesn't decline or go all over the place in subsequent years. That median variation of -/+ ~10 is normal if you're unfamiliar.
It's only the player team that is affected. And this seems to be consistent across different division levels/club quality.
It's not about existing youth players affecting things, I tested that, and the AI's median remaining unaffected which I found out later is further proof of this.
I thought maybe what's causing it is the manager itself, specifically either the reputation or the player & youngster knowledge of the human manager. But changing those attributes didn't seem to make a difference.
I think that the median being normal in the first year might be a clue as to what's causing it.
Not sure if I wrote about it here or not. But from personal observation the first intake is very often abnormally good no matter where you start the save, could be just player's team or globally I haven't really checked. It's been like that for years. Might be something intentionally implemented by SI to get us hooked.
GeorgeFloydOverdosed said: I would savescum a whole year in advance to see the newgen results instead of reloading just before newgen day, in recent versions, and I couldn't remember why. Now I see it's no doubt because certain things are being set a few months earlier than intake day with the new 'Youth Preview' system. Expand I have the same feeling from my long-time savescummings (actually just tests - I played whole, normal season after that). The general shape of your newgens is decided during a previous intake-day. It can bye modified by youth facilities etc, by random-generator in intake-day, but not so much (and maybe this is a mysterious hidden factor - for example you don't have facilities which you do have next year). And that's why first intake is much better - it is "half-blind-generated" in a different way maybe during generating profile when starting new game? I need two weeks to be 100% certain.
tl;dr 'Youth Facilities' have no effect on newgen PA in any way. The 'club reputation' of OTHER clubs in your nation has a small effect on newgen PA. 'Corporate facilities' may also have a minor effect on newgen PA, but this could be just statistical noise.
----------------------------
I did testing before in FM19 and found that youth facilities affect newgen CA but not PA.
I have done a decent amount of testing with FM24 and have found the same, and that median PA continues to be the most reliable measure of newgen quality, with peak PA having much more of a randomness factor.
What I found in my previous testing was roughly the following:
Junior coaching ~40% PA effect
Nation youth rating ~25% PA effect
Youth recruitment ~25% PA effect
Club reputation acts as tie breaker for youth recruitment
Either unique nation or division ID ~25% (or perhaps even more) PA effect (a hidden, unchangeable factor - it may be 'Nation attribute template' that is listed as an inaccessible debug option in the editor, which sounds like it would be similar to the 'Nation personality template' before it was removed in recent versions)
All other factors no effect
But I wanted to test a few new theories I had this time as well.
First, the data:
Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams normal: 141.5 median, 170 peak
Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams YF1: 138.1 median, 161.4 peak
Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams YF20: 143.7 median, 171.4 peak
Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams JC1: 143 median, 163 peak
Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams ClubRep/Train/YouthImp/Corp 1: 124.3 median, 176.3 peak
Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams Train/YouthImp/Corp 1: 137.25 median, 165.5 peak
Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams YouthImp/Corp 1: 136 median, 171.6 peak
Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams YouthImp 20/Corp 1: 135.6 median, 164.9 peak
Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams ClubRep1: 130.6 median, 177 peak
Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams ClubRep1/YF1: 142 median, 174 peak
Man City normal (no affiliates), premier league normal, all other England teams ClubRep1/YF1/corp1: 138 median, 163.5 peak
Man City normal (no affiliates), premier league ClubRep/YF1/Corp1, all other clubs normal: 138.8 median, 177.4 peak
Man City normal (no affiliates), north-west local region normal, all other clubs ClubRep1/YF1: 138.4 median, 176 peak
Man City normal (no affiliates), all other England teams ClubRep/Corp 1: 133.9 median, 167.3 peak
Margin of error I'd guesstimate at ~3-5 median PA. This isn't up to EBFM's standards, but it's 'good enough' in my opinion. I've always been of the view that if you can't replicate it reliably in a few seasons of FM, then its not significant enough of a result to include anyway.
In case you're wondering, keeping the affiliates for Man City reduces median PA by ~15-20, and I deliberately removed them because I know affiliates mess with the newgen intake results as they can replace one or more of them with one from an affiliate club. I wanted to get a pure English club result.
I noticed that Man City often gets some purely Scotland/Ireland only players, and that once their top player (194 PA) was Ireland only. This is notable because Ireland has low enough of a nation youth rating that a 194 PA Ireland player is pretty highly unlikely. It gave credence to the idea that newgens are tied to local region in some way, so I thought I'd re-examine that aspect too (I'd previously tested 'local region' and found it had zero effect on CA/PA).
Hypothesis: Youth facilities have insignificant effect at a single club, but a nations or divisions teams YF contributes cumulatively to a pool of PA that clubs then draw upon.
Conclusion: False.
Hypothesis: Youth facilities don't effect median PA, but they effect peak PA or the skew.
Conclusion: False.
Although YF1 always eventually produced a high peak PA, I did notice that YF1 alone had a long run of ~155-160 peak PA. This wasn't the case in other YF1 tests, and YF20 produced peak PAs all over the place from 159 to 194. Skew is difficult to definitively conclude on, but I didn't get the impression looking through the results that youth facilities effected the skew.
Hypothesis: Youth facilities contribute to a division pool only.
Conclusion: False.
Hypothesis: Youth facilities contribute to a 'local region' pool only.
Conclusion: False.
Hypothesis: Junior coaching/Training Facilities/Youth Importance of other clubs has an effect somehow.
Conclusion: False.
Hypothesis: Club reputation of other clubs has an effect somehow.
Conclusion: Tentatively, yes.
This was a somewhat surprising finding. From memory, I did find before that club rep had a ~10% CA effect, but not on PA. In this case, we can see that ClubRep1 reduced median PA by ~7.7% alone, and ~12.2% when combined with other low club attributes. I took extra samples to be sure and got the same result.
The strange thing is that ClubRep1 result is normal when combined with YF1. I think there's a clue as to what's going on in the fact that the low median PA results only happened when *all* other England teams had low club rep. But that still doesn't make sense of it.
Hypothesis: Corporate facilities of other clubs has an effect somehow.
Conclusion: Unclear.
Corp 1 did produce lower median PAs consistently, but the difference of ~3-7 may not be statistically significant. Consider that the typical variance of a club each year is ~5 median PA, even after stripping away the outliers.
Hypothesis: Starting CA affects PA, say that +20 CA due to factor contributes +20 PA as well.
Conclusion: False.
Thanks for this! I think I read somewhere else recently (probably Reddit) that Youth Facilities don't impact the PA of newly generated players at all. This is really good to know.
GeorgeFloydOverdosed said: In case you're wondering, keeping the affiliates for Man City reduces median PA by ~15-20, and I deliberately removed them because I know affiliates mess with the newgen intake results as they can replace one or more of them with one from an affiliate club. I wanted to get a pure English club result.
Great test, man. Thoughts about the affiliate clubs thing:
There are 7 countries with a higher Youth Rating than England(136), highest being Brazil with 163. If my top English club gets an affiliate in Brazil, wouldn't that be a good thing? Seems like swapping an English newgen for a Brazilian should be an upgrade most of the time.
The question is, I guess, how the game makes the Brazilian kid: does he get generated in my youth intake with my own 20/20 JC and YR? or is he made at his own club, with their stats (probably lower than mine), and just moved to my team?
If it's the first option then its a win. If not, then its a gamble. Any ideas?
EvensenFM said: Thanks for this! I think I read somewhere else recently (probably Reddit) that Youth Facilities don't impact the PA of newly generated players at all. This is really good to know.
I actually posted a comment on your youtube recently, that was it.
You do pretty good videos, enjoying watching them alongside doing things, even though I wouldn't have thought football history would be my thing.
kvasir said: Great test, man. Thoughts about the affiliate clubs thing:
There are 7 countries with a higher Youth Rating than England(136), highest being Brazil with 163. If my top English club gets an affiliate in Brazil, wouldn't that be a good thing? Seems like swapping an English newgen for a Brazilian should be an upgrade most of the time.
The question is, I guess, how the game makes the Brazilian kid: does he get generated in my youth intake with my own 20/20 JC and YR? or is he made at his own club, with their stats (probably lower than mine), and just moved to my team?
If it's the first option then its a win. If not, then its a gamble. Any ideas?
Yes, you are entirely correct in your first hypothesis. I just removed the affiliates from Man City because I'm trying to work out the newgen mechanics accurately.
To the question, a few days ago I would have said to you that its just Brazil's youth rating + it must be your own facilities, because in some testing I did before on it I found that it only takes the youth rating, not any of the affiliate club attributes.
But recently I was watching EBFM's video on affiliate clubs, and his data shows that while nation youth rating is still the most important factor, affiliate club attributes do in fact influence the quality of the newgen. So now I'm not sure, but I'd say believe what EBFM says on this because it's likely I only took like 5 samples or something in my test, because intake from affiliate clubs isn't really a part of the formula for newgen mechanics that I've been testing for.
GeorgeFloydOverdosed said: I actually posted a comment on your youtube recently, that was it.
You do pretty good videos, enjoying watching them alongside doing things, even though I wouldn't have thought football history would be my thing.
Aha! Yeah, it must have been you. Apologies - I have a hard time keeping track...
GeorgeFloydOverdosed said: Junior coaching ~40% PA effect
Nation youth rating ~25% PA effect
Youth recruitment ~25% PA effect
Club reputation acts as tie breaker for youth recruitment
Either unique nation or division ID ~25% (or perhaps even more) PA effect (a hidden, unchangeable factor
Sorry for digging up old posts, but good estimation - lately made some tests with nation rating. Having clearly best reputation, coaching 20, recruitment 20, youth rating 200 , best swiss newgen was always (~15 times) >150-<160 - not very much randomness, I would even say PA of best five boys was quite regular (btw with rating 1 dropped to >70-<75). I don't suppose this hidden factor is mysterious "football's popularity", which effects no one knows, but rather other more hidden factor.
GeorgeFloydOverdosed said: tl;dr 'Youth Facilities' have no effect on newgen PA in any way. The 'club reputation' of OTHER clubs in your nation has a small effect on newgen PA. 'Corporate facilities' may also have a minor effect on newgen PA, but this could be just statistical noise.
Sorry for bringing up old topics. Has anyone tested the impact of the first team's training facility on player development?
Antal said: Sorry for bringing up old topics. Has anyone tested the impact of the first team's training facility on player development?
This is an old video, but from what i understand the mechanics of the game haven't really changed. The conclusion was it does have an impact.
From anecdote though, it mostly has an impact on players with lesser personalities, i've found that if the personality is good the development is good. I could be spouting nonsense, but that's what i've noticed at least.
juliius said:
This is an old video, but from what i understand the mechanics of the game haven't really changed. The conclusion was it does have an impact.
From anecdote though, it mostly has an impact on players with lesser personalities, i've found that if the personality is good the development is good. I could be spouting nonsense, but that's what i've noticed at least.
Thanks my friend, this is a great video.
tam1236 said: Sorry for digging up old posts, but good estimation - lately made some tests with nation rating. Having clearly best reputation, coaching 20, recruitment 20, youth rating 200 , best swiss newgen was always (~15 times) >150-<160 - not very much randomness, I would even say PA of best five boys was quite regular (btw with rating 1 dropped to >70-<75). I don't suppose this hidden factor is mysterious "football's popularity", which effects no one knows, but rather other more hidden factor.
The quote you are referring to is really a misunderstanding created by looking at a single team. If you make all the other clubs have terrible reputation then you create a situation where your club’s recruitment gets worse because lots of mediocre players now don’t want to go to those other clubs and clutter up your picks. Your team isn’t picking with perfect knowledge so having a much larger pool that want your club dilutes the quality of your choices. The only team attributes that matter for PA of your intake are your club reputation first, followed by youth recruitment second. The youth rating of the country applies to all players recruited in that country, regardless of their nationality. But the number of higher PA players each year also depends on the players that have left the database of active players since the game tries to maintain stable levels of good players in each country. (This is why there tends to be a noticeable jump in high PA recruits in the first year of a save or when you add playable leagues).
Finally affiliates can have a negative effect if they are from countries with low youth ratings but this is both rare and of limited effect. The affiliates give you additional intake players and aren’t replacing high PA players from your own country. Yes they can lower the median but that is like saying that getting 5 200 PA players and a 150 PA player is worse than getting only 5 200 PA players. The negative impact only comes if you have enough affiliates that you hit the maximum limit of the intake (around 16-20) and if lower PA recruits could push out better players from other affiliates or from your local recruited but foreign nationality players.
MeanOnSunday said: The number of higher PA players each year also depends on the players that have left the database of active players since the game tries to maintain stable levels of good players in each country. (This is why there tends to be a noticeable jump in high PA recruits in the first year of a save or when you add playable leagues).
Would be interesting but do you have any proof?
This hypothesis doesn't perfectly fit to the situation because what bothered me, was nearly the same max PA in every probe, nearly the same number of players with high PA>=150, but always PA<160 (though youth rating was set at 200). So if it is generated in such a way as you write, newgens' PA should be also connected with retired players' PA from country X, what I doubt, because lowering youth rating to 1 I got newgens of PA~70 with highest club reputation in a country.
BTW I didnt change any clubs' reputation, but I doubt recruitment works in "your" way (When high-rep, You collect bad players from bad-reputation clubs).
MeanOnSunday said: The quote you are referring to is really a misunderstanding created by looking at a single team. If you make all the other clubs have terrible reputation then you create a situation where your club’s recruitment gets worse because lots of mediocre players now don’t want to go to those other clubs and clutter up your picks. Your team isn’t picking with perfect knowledge so having a much larger pool that want your club dilutes the quality of your choices. The only team attributes that matter for PA of your intake are your club reputation first, followed by youth recruitment second. The youth rating of the country applies to all players recruited in that country, regardless of their nationality. But the number of higher PA players each year also depends on the players that have left the database of active players since the game tries to maintain stable levels of good players in each country. (This is why there tends to be a noticeable jump in high PA recruits in the first year of a save or when you add playable leagues).
Finally affiliates can have a negative effect if they are from countries with low youth ratings but this is both rare and of limited effect. The affiliates give you additional intake players and aren’t replacing high PA players from your own country. Yes they can lower the median but that is like saying that getting 5 200 PA players and a 150 PA player is worse than getting only 5 200 PA players. The negative impact only comes if you have enough affiliates that you hit the maximum limit of the intake (around 16-20) and if lower PA recruits could push out better players from other affiliates or from your local recruited but foreign nationality players.
I suppose you are referring to me only using Man City, but that is for this FM24 test. In FM19, I tested every playable club, and that is what my factor % approximations are derived from (by examining the differences between the clubs).
It is not true that only club rep followed by youth recruitment matter. If you doubt my own claims, you can see EBFM finding the same results (junior coaching is the most important for newgen PA).
The affiliate player does replace one of the 16 of your intake, and high PA newgens do not squeeze out low PA newgens in the intake. Rather there is a fairly predictable median that is the peak probability of a distribution curve, and the shape of the curve (bunched up or large tails) is affected by a few factors, but essentially the peak PAs you'll see are random (i.e. Man City might get 170 PA peak one year, 190 PA peak the next). The peak PAs are only predictable in one regard, that Man City is going to produce a player somewhere in the range of ~160-200 PA every year, but Brackley Town almost never will. The best indicator of both overall quality and chance of high PA newgens is median PA.
If your theory about how recruitment works was correct, then ClubRep1/YF1 would not produce results equal to default, which it did.
EBFM found that youth facilities of affiliate clubs is inversely correlated with intake PA. He also found that club rep of affiliate affects PA, but not for self-intake. I figure this might be a clue.
We can infer that if other clubs have YF20, their release of high PA newgens to other clubs is dampened. If they have YF1, it would be unrestricted. Since YF does not affect newgen PA, the high PA newgen output of all other English clubs is not affected, it is simply that they are handing over the better players to Man City.
We see consistently that ClubRep1 of all other English clubs results in low median PA, but not if *some* other English clubs are normal (whether same division or not).
Some logical deductions:
1. It is not that there are not enough high PA players being generated, as YF1 alleviates it entirely, even when all other clubs are ClubRep1.
2. Club rep has little effect on self-intake, therefore the boost to PA that high club rep of *other* clubs provide isn't coming from their intake quality being raised, but that the standard high PA players are more likely to be poached if the team is high rep. My guess is that this is meant to represent high rep teams being more likely to be scouted, while the reality is that good youths can come from anywhere but many simply go unnoticed.
3. So the low PA of ClubRep1 actually represents a scouting failure, rather than an actual drop in available youth quality.
4. YF1 must negate the scouting failure. Perhaps it is because these players seek out the better club to join, instead of waiting to be scouted.
Another way of thinking about it is that youth facilities represent your defense against poaching, while club rep is what makes you 'visible' to poachers.
In theory, this should mean a YF1 high rep club should have slightly lower median PA intakes.
I suppose that 'youth recruitment' is what the aforementioned scouting would be. An interesting question is if there is a real hidden pool of pre-newgens, where does the new 16th player come from when one get poached, and who is the replaced player and where does he get dropped to.
We know that youth recruitment is also a pecking order rather than absolute, i.e. YR 19 is no good if every other team is YR20. But it doesn't sound right that if one team is YR 2 and everyone is YR 1, then there would be no difference between YR 2 and YR 20 for that club. Having YR 20 overcome high YF and low clubrep barriers makes more sense.
This is all difficult to test, but I have noticed the following suggestive oddity: The Jamaican Premier League starts with 8 teams with 20 youth recruitment. Turkey on the other hand has 16 1st div clubs with 6 or less YR. Without diving into this too deeply, obviously something is going on here beyond just YR 2 beats YR 1, and it seems to me that YR is being adjusted to produce desired results when club rep and expected player quality is set in stone first. Pete Sottrel (SI staff) claimed 'The Youth Recruitment rating tells us how wide the club’s catchment area is' but this has to be a bullshit story because clubs in the microstate of San Marino have mostly YR of 2, while Luxembourg have several YR 14-20, Seattle has 12, and Sugar Boys and two others in the British Virgin Islands have 18.
So for the country level newgens......
The most important factor in PA for newgens aka youth intake is your nations' "GAME IMPORTANCE" if it is not set to "Very Important" you will never have any good NewGens even if you played 1000 years. You have the RNG of finding 1 random Star like how some random Asian Island gets 1 star every 50 years or whatever.
I've done a load of build a nation saves and testing. It is pretty easy to test. Max out everything but set game importance to the lowest level and the NewGens will be awful even with everything else Maxxed out.
This is the actual problem with USA in FM as the game importance is set to the lowest setting while everything else is pretty on par with the Big 10 in Europe.
USA in FM cannot generate any USA players for a top 20 National Team. All of the USA National Team NewGens (once the real players retire) will all spawn over seas at other clubs. Because it uses the nations game importance of where the player is spawned at.
USA cannot even spawn MLS caliber players!!!!!!!! USA will literally spawn garbage NewGens in USA.The entire national team will be spawned at overseas club intake.
Game Importance supersedes all other youth settings and mechanics. I am not even sure if SI is aware of it lmao.
If you are playing a top league in a top country you really wont notice anything.
jimmysthebestcop said: So for the country level newgens......
The most important factor in PA for newgens aka youth intake is your nations' "GAME IMPORTANCE" if it is not set to "Very Important" you will never have any good NewGens even if you played 1000 years. You have the RNG of finding 1 random Star like how some random Asian Island gets 1 star every 50 years or whatever.
I've done a load of build a nation saves and testing. It is pretty easy to test. Max out everything but set game importance to the lowest level and the NewGens will be awful even with everything else Maxxed out.
This is the actual problem with USA in FM as the game importance is set to the lowest setting while everything else is pretty on par with the Big 10 in Europe.
USA in FM cannot generate any USA players for a top 20 National Team. All of the USA National Team NewGens (once the real players retire) will all spawn over seas at other clubs. Because it uses the nations game importance of where the player is spawned at.
USA cannot even spawn MLS caliber players!!!!!!!! USA will literally spawn garbage NewGens in USA.The entire national team will be spawned at overseas club intake.
Game Importance supersedes all other youth settings and mechanics. I am not even sure if SI is aware of it lmao.
If you are playing a top league in a top country you really wont notice anything.
Hear me out, I believe you are largely mistaken on this.
From memory, game importance does have a modest effect on the distribution (low game importance = PA more bunched up around median), but it doesn't change the median or rule out very high PA players occurring entirely. Don't take my word for it, you can see EBFM's test results. Two problems with EBFM's data here is that he didn't look at the distribution as a whole, and he uses average instead of median. I think I've neglected to say before that this is (likely) why EBFM came to a different conclusion about youth facilities, where he found a very slight but consistent increase to PA. This is because he used the average, which isn't reliable with FM's system, and I guess it's possible something is going on here but I'd think if there is it'd probably be that the CA boost from YF is roughly added to the PA (i.e. 36 CA > 40 CA = 120 PA > 124 PA).
I would say that game importance is equivalent to a ~10% PA factor, it's not directly comparable to the other PA factors so it's hard to pin down a precise figure.
That said I haven't tested it in a long time, and it's possible your testing was qualitatively different to what I did. You said you maxed out all other factors. I guess it's possible low game importance has a more pronounced effect in such conditions. But what I do know is that with the default game settings we play with, game importance is almost a negligible factor.
Part of it could also be that because nations do in fact appear to have different (and significant) values set under the hood, it's easy to confuse that with game importance, cities, etc.
I've been doing more testing that I've been sitting on for a while now as I reflect on how to best communicate it. Basically I noticed how newgens have unique 'place of birth' that usually isn't even the club's city, so I thought this might be a clue that would allow me to deduce the hidden nation mechanics.
EBFM got as far as thinking it's probably a national pool & draft process going on. What I've found is that seemingly can't be true. From testing before, I already knew that city, local region, etc. all had zero influence on PA. But now I also know that the whole city system is essentially purely cosmetic. There is a sophisticated mechanic that assigns the place of birth, but it does not affect the newgen PA.
Why this matters:
- There isn't some more sophisticated behind the scenes stuff going on like HoYDs/U18s staff poaching from other cities in the local region or such. This doesn't mean that 'Youth Recruitment' doesn't do anything, it just means that it acts independently with its own mechanism; it doesn't interact with some underlying hidden process regarding cities and pre-newgens floating around the place and whatnot.
- There aren't 'player pools' in cities, therefore there is no player scarcity in regards to 'youth recruitment' in congested areas.
- The PA comes from the club location (nation), not the birth city location.
- 'Local region' doesn't seem to have any effect on...anything. I think it probably simply serves a 'boundary' purpose for editing, i.e. a team coordinates is in south England but is part of a northern local region so it gets counted in the north division.
Teasing out those implications takes some thought itself, but there is more (though less significant) that is difficult to explain without bamboozling someone who hasn't been looking at it for several hours as I have. For instance:
- Newgens come from the city location, not the club location, but they adopt the nationality of the club. This is confusing, and purely cosmetic, but I can illustrate its probable intended purpose with an example: Suppose an American Samoa club is added to USA competition. The club is 'based in' USA for economic travel reasons say, but the youths coming through are born in 'Pago Pago' because it's an American Samoa club.
- You cannot tell whether players are generated first at cities or at clubs, because they are the same thing - the club generates them as having come from cities.
- There is a map coordinate geometry to city/'place of birth' selection, likely a rectangle with decreasing selection probability towards the edges. But there are nuances and even exceptions.
Of course I would have to furnish all the different examples I found to prove my findings, in addition to explaining these abstractions.
Unfortunately it didn't get me any closer to uncovering the hidden nation factor, but what it has shown me is that the newgen recruitment process is probably a lot more simple than previously thought, in regards to PA, and it reinforces that unique nation ID is a key component while staff, cities, whatnot isn't.
Here's my rough mockup of what the 'place of birth' selection actually looks like.
This whole thing appears to be purely cosmetic, so don't try and work out how to get better newgens with it. There is no actual competing for newgens, or even newgen generation in these cities, going on.
There are three clubs: Ljubljana, Kamnik, and Maribor.
The rectangle is area the club can draw newgens from.
It is not that newgens are generated at each city and a few of them get picked up, it is that the club generates precisely 16 newgens. There 'place of birth' is probabilistic based on distance from club and 'inhabitants range' of the city. The circles are just to convey the idea of decreasing probability the further you go out from the club location.
Notice how Ljubljana and Maribor each draw ~4 players from their own city, but Kamnik only draws 2 and takes many more from nearby the nearby capital of Ljubljana. This is because Kamnik has low inhabitants range, and Ljubljana is high probability because of proximity + high inhabitants.
I do not think city 'attraction' affects it, I have tested it but the results are not 100% clear but clear enough to rule it out I think. From memory, 'inhabitants range' is also relative to 'inhabitants range' of other cities. That is to say, if Ljubjlana only had 10,000 people, it would still be top dog if all other cities are 1000< pop, but also it would be less commonly the place of birth than if it had 20mil people and others 1000< pop. There are some further nuances that reveal themselves when you try to break it with extremes like this, but since the mechanic is cosmetic, I won't go further into that.
Lastly there is the matter of exceptions. As you can see, sometimes there can be instances outside the rectangle. I don't know what exactly is going on here, I suspect it has something to do with youth recruitment perhaps. Maybe it's even just a randomness factor they've put in to try and better reflect reality.
jimmysthebestcop said: So for the country level newgens......
The most important factor in PA for newgens aka youth intake is your nations' "GAME IMPORTANCE" if it is not set to "Very Important" you will never have any good NewGens even if you played 1000 years. You have the RNG of finding 1 random Star like how some random Asian Island gets 1 star every 50 years or whatever.
I've done a load of build a nation saves and testing. It is pretty easy to test. Max out everything but set game importance to the lowest level and the NewGens will be awful even with everything else Maxxed out.
This is the actual problem with USA in FM as the game importance is set to the lowest setting while everything else is pretty on par with the Big 10 in Europe.
USA in FM cannot generate any USA players for a top 20 National Team. All of the USA National Team NewGens (once the real players retire) will all spawn over seas at other clubs. Because it uses the nations game importance of where the player is spawned at.
USA cannot even spawn MLS caliber players!!!!!!!! USA will literally spawn garbage NewGens in USA.The entire national team will be spawned at overseas club intake.
Game Importance supersedes all other youth settings and mechanics. I am not even sure if SI is aware of it lmao.
If you are playing a top league in a top country you really wont notice anything.
I’m doing an USA only MLS save the bolded is simply not true. Once you max out Junior Coaching/Youth Recuitment you get tons of regens with 130-140 PA which is a great MLS player. Over 3 seasons with maxed out everything I have like 15 players with 130 plus and a ton of mid+ 120s. Might be the easiest intake only save to win every competition besides Mexico. (I’ve got a lot of issues with how stupid they handle MLS academies when they basically work identical to Europe with no youth contracts.) I’ve got two starters already in the mid 130s from the academy pre maxing everything out.
The draft also pumps out 120-140 pa players but they are mostly too old since there is no youth league and the phantom games don’t do shit for development so their CAs are f**king terrible at 20/21
I have an academy CD getting called into the senior NT with the real players still active but the active CDs are all in the 130s except Carter Vickers.
While most of the good regens are from Europe/Mexico , I’ve seen some crazy players come out of MLS academies in other saves. Like high 150s starting for Arsenal good but it’s like once every 3-5 years and tedious to scout. (But always free.)
Though yeah if you change game importance to the highest setting the US starts pumping out WC talent left and right because the clubs have nothing to spend on besides infrastructure and the countries economic/population stats are so high. (I would argue the U.S. regen quality is realistic if only slightly punishing given the trajectory MLS academies are going. Basically all the starters that grew up in the U.S. were in MLS academies at one point.)
GeorgeFloydOverdosed said: Hear me out, I believe you are largely mistaken on this.
From memory, game importance does have a modest effect on the distribution (low game importance = PA more bunched up around median), but it doesn't change the median or rule out very high PA players occurring entirely. Don't take my word for it, you can see EBFM's test results. Two problems with EBFM's data here is that he didn't look at the distribution as a whole, and he uses average instead of median. I think I've neglected to say before that this is (likely) why EBFM came to a different conclusion about youth facilities, where he found a very slight but consistent increase to PA. This is because he used the average, which isn't reliable with FM's system, and I guess it's possible something is going on here but I'd think if there is it'd probably be that the CA boost from YF is roughly added to the PA (i.e. 36 CA > 40 CA = 120 PA > 124 PA).
I would say that game importance is equivalent to a ~10% PA factor, it's not directly comparable to the other PA factors so it's hard to pin down a precise figure.
That said I haven't tested it in a long time, and it's possible your testing was qualitatively different to what I did. You said you maxed out all other factors. I guess it's possible low game importance has a more pronounced effect in such conditions. But what I do know is that with the default game settings we play with, game importance is almost a negligible factor.
Part of it could also be that because nations do in fact appear to have different (and significant) values set under the hood, it's easy to confuse that with game importance, cities, etc.
I've been doing more testing that I've been sitting on for a while now as I reflect on how to best communicate it. Basically I noticed how newgens have unique 'place of birth' that usually isn't even the club's city, so I thought this might be a clue that would allow me to deduce the hidden nation mechanics.
EBFM got as far as thinking it's probably a national pool & draft process going on. What I've found is that seemingly can't be true. From testing before, I already knew that city, local region, etc. all had zero influence on PA. But now I also know that the whole city system is essentially purely cosmetic. There is a sophisticated mechanic that assigns the place of birth, but it does not affect the newgen PA.
Why this matters:
- There isn't some more sophisticated behind the scenes stuff going on like HoYDs/U18s staff poaching from other cities in the local region or such. This doesn't mean that 'Youth Recruitment' doesn't do anything, it just means that it acts independently with its own mechanism; it doesn't interact with some underlying hidden process regarding cities and pre-newgens floating around the place and whatnot.
- There aren't 'player pools' in cities, therefore there is no player scarcity in regards to 'youth recruitment' in congested areas.
- The PA comes from the club location (nation), not the birth city location.
- 'Local region' doesn't seem to have any effect on...anything. I think it probably simply serves a 'boundary' purpose for editing, i.e. a team coordinates is in south England but is part of a northern local region so it gets counted in the north division.
Teasing out those implications takes some thought itself, but there is more (though less significant) that is difficult to explain without bamboozling someone who hasn't been looking at it for several hours as I have. For instance:
- Newgens come from the city location, not the club location, but they adopt the nationality of the club. This is confusing, and purely cosmetic, but I can illustrate its probable intended purpose with an example: Suppose an American Samoa club is added to USA competition. The club is 'based in' USA for economic travel reasons say, but the youths coming through are born in 'Pago Pago' because it's an American Samoa club.
- You cannot tell whether players are generated first at cities or at clubs, because they are the same thing - the club generates them as having come from cities.
- There is a map coordinate geometry to city/'place of birth' selection, likely a rectangle with decreasing selection probability towards the edges. But there are nuances and even exceptions.
Of course I would have to furnish all the different examples I found to prove my findings, in addition to explaining these abstractions.
Unfortunately it didn't get me any closer to uncovering the hidden nation factor, but what it has shown me is that the newgen recruitment process is probably a lot more simple than previously thought, in regards to PA, and it reinforces that unique nation ID is a key component while staff, cities, whatnot isn't.
I wish I was mistaken all of the Build a Nation players know about Game Importance superseding NewGen settings. Go watch a ton of of SecondYellowCard Build a Nation setup videos and read his discords where his followers test all of the NewGen stuff for the lowest nations.
I can tell you my last 3 build a nation saves were hungary before I knew about game importance, Andorra and Faroe Islands. Hungary even after 60 years where I gave every club billions and billions to max out their facilities could never produce a NewGen that was as good as IRL national club member. The way you give clubs billions is by buying their horrendous youth players for 10 million each as the board never turns down 10 million offers. So you are buying 30+ players per club eventually. Giving clubs 300 million each season.
bigloser said: I’m doing an USA only MLS save the bolded is simply not true. Once you max out Junior Coaching/Youth Recuitment you get tons of regens with 130-140 PA which is a great MLS player. Over 3 seasons with maxed out everything I have like 15 players with 130 plus and a ton of mid+ 120s. Might be the easiest intake only save to win every competition besides Mexico. (I’ve got a lot of issues with how stupid they handle MLS academies when they basically work identical to Europe with no youth contracts.) I’ve got two starters already in the mid 130s from the academy pre maxing everything out.
The draft also pumps out 120-140 pa players but they are mostly too old since there is no youth league and the phantom games don’t do shit for development so their CAs are f**king terrible at 20/21
I have an academy CD getting called into the senior NT with the real players still active but the active CDs are all in the 130s except Carter Vickers.
While most of the good regens are from Europe/Mexico , I’ve seen some crazy players come out of MLS academies in other saves. Like high 150s starting for Arsenal good but it’s like once every 3-5 years and tedious to scout. (But always free.)
Though yeah if you change game importance to the highest setting the US starts pumping out WC talent left and right because the clubs have nothing to spend on besides infrastructure and the countries economic/population stats are so high. (I would argue the U.S. regen quality is realistic if only slightly punishing given the trajectory MLS academies are going. Basically all the starters that grew up in the U.S. were in MLS academies at one point.)
I may have exaggerated the MLS talent but only a little. And it is different if you are actually playing in MLS as it makes it Active thus the entire nation gets full newgens as opposed to a league that is just loaded but not active.
This is why people make Brazil active since you have a much higher % to spawn mass quality of NewGens every season as opposed to a just top tier loaded but not active. I load all leagues but only have 5-10 active and never USA as active. In testing since not many actually play with USA.
Quantity of newgens is different for active vs not active but loaded vs not active and not loaded.
Unless using custom leagues Africa has no leagues except South Africa. So early you can find great African irl players. So you will notice a lot of NewGens spawn in Europe who play for Africa National Clubs as Africa since no leagues only spawn NewGens when a player retires because FM wants to always keep the total player number the same in the database.
While the active league all clubs spawn full set of Newgens every season.
This is also the reason after 50-60 years England takes over as the NewGen king if you have a full England pyramid loaded. You are talking 6/7 tiers of clubs who can spawn newgens and with RNG Jesus even if the combined lower tier pop out 1 National CLub bench player a season it eventually adds up after decades.
Go create a backup save and sim 20 years in the future and see where the USA national team players spawned at. It will all be overseas. USA wont be able to create in nation NewGens for a top 20 Fifa club. That is completely unrealistic. Sure some USA players are born overseas and have dual citizenship. But in FM they will 100% be spawned overseas. The reason USA stays a top 15 Fifa Club is because they spawn in Europe. USA might spawn 2-3 players born in USA who spawned at USA clubs that get to the national team.
People have won the World Cup with Wales when doing older Pre Ryan Reynold Wrexham Road to Glory saves. As the NewGens actually follow the England settings. Since as far as FM settings go Wrexham is in England.
This also use to be the case in old FM back in the day with San Marino as they had a club somewhere down in Italy's lowest tiers with a custom database. And once you got that club to top Tier Italy and became the #1 club in the world they could spawn world class newgens enabling people to win the World Cup with San Marino National Team as all the NewGens would come from the human controlled club in Italy.
There use to a link to the guy who did the San Marino world cup on reddit or Si forum. It might be 10 years old at this point. Think he had to play over 100 years or something.
jimmysthebestcop said: I wish I was mistaken all of the Build a Nation players know about Game Importance superseding NewGen settings. Go watch a ton of of SecondYellowCard Build a Nation setup videos and read his discords where his followers test all of the NewGen stuff for the lowest nations.
I can tell you my last 3 build a nation saves were hungary before I knew about game importance, Andorra and Faroe Islands. Hungary even after 60 years where I gave every club billions and billions to max out their facilities could never produce a NewGen that was as good as IRL national club member. The way you give clubs billions is by buying their horrendous youth players for 10 million each as the board never turns down 10 million offers. So you are buying 30+ players per club eventually. Giving clubs 300 million each season.
Coincidentally it was a recent video by SecondYellowCard where he tested the DoF role that got me thinking that youth recruitment might work similarly. Turns out it likely doesn't, but that's what led me to investigate the 'place of birth' thing.
I haven't been able to find this discord you mention yet, but I've done some testing of game importance anyway, not only to draw a conclusion here but because it's good to retest things once every few years to see if the mechanic has changed and also I'd like further clarity/precision on the distribution effect I mentioned. I retested recently the hidden nation factor thing I assert is the case, and I can confirm it still exists.
'Game Importance' Test results
Singapore unimportant (default) LC sailors:
Sample 1
75,68,57,51,49,49,48,42,42,39,37,36,32,31,31,20
median 42
average 44.1875
range 20-75
height 1.59-1.90, 1.73 median
singapore-wide stats:
range 17-80
10 best player = 73 PA
Sample 2
74,73,71,68,60,54,53,52,51,41,37,35,34,34,30,21
median 51.5
average 49.25
range 21-74
height 1.63-1.87, 1.715 median
singapore-wide stats:
range 15-86
10th best player = 74 PA
Sample 3
89,67,64,64,62,61,59,50,50,48,46,39,34,32,29,20
median 50
average 50.875
range 20-89
height 1.63-1.92, 1.725 median
singapore-wide stats:
range 13-89
10th best player = 69 PA
Singapore very important LC sailors:
Sample 1
59,53,50,48,47,46,45,44,43,39,38,36,32,31,21,21
median 43.5
average 40.8125
range 21-59
singapore-wide stats:
range 12-80
10th best player = 74 PA
Sample 2
78,70,66,66,61,60,60,53,48,46,41,39,38,37,20,17
median 51.5
average 50
range 17-78
height 1.64-1.92, 1.725 median
singapore-wide stats:
range 10-80
10th best player = 70 PA
Sample 3
53,52,48,48,48,47,44,44,44,44,43,31,31,22,20,20
median 44
average 39.9375
range 20-53
height 1.63-1.93, 1.785 median
singapore-wide stats:
range 8-115
10th best player = 71 PA
Singapore unimportant (default) LC sailors average (3 samples):
median 47.833
average 48.104
range 20.333-79.333
singapore-wide stats:
range 15-85
10th best player = 72 PA
Singapore very important LC sailors average (3 samples):
median 46.333
average 43.583
range 19.333-63.333
singapore-wide stats:
range 10-91.666
10th best player = 71.666 PA
England very important (default) Man City:
Sample 1
167,162,160,152,146,144,143,142,137,136,133,128,117,94,83,83
median 139.5
average 139.1875
range 83-167
england-wide stats:
range 30-179
10th best player = 157 PA
Sample 2
172,167,157,155,148,147,146,142,141,134,115,98,97,96,77,64
median 141.5
average 134.75
range 64-172
england-wide stats:
range 30-178
10th best player = 157 PA
Sample 3
178,167,165,160,157,155,148,147,144,142,141,104,89,85,75,58
median 145.5
average 132.1875
range 58-178
england-wide stats:
range 30-180
10th best player = 158 PA
England unimportant Man City:
Sample 1
167,157,149,148,146,145,140,137,117,111,104,98,97,90,85,81
median 127
average 135.75
range 81-167
england-wide stats:
range 34-175
10th best player = 154 PA
Sample 2
160,157,148,148,148,138,136,133,123,122,101,101,92,88,87,75
median 128
average 122.3125
range 75-160
england-wide stats:
range 34-168
10th best player = 154 PA
Sample 3
159,156,153,151,150,150,141,140,140,140,138,116,110,95,93,80
median 140
average 132
range 80-159
england-wide stats:
range 34-168
10th best player = 153 PA
England very important (default) Man City average (3 samples):
median 142.166
average 135.375
range 68.333-172.333
england-wide stats:
range 30-179
10th best player = 157.333 PA
England unimportant Man City average (3 samples):
median 131.666
average 132.687
range 78.666-162
england-wide stats:
range 34-170.33
10th best player = 153.666 PA
Conclusions
Game importance has no strong effect on PA. Previously I had said it bunches up the PA around the median and ends up affecting the PA to the tune of ~10%, and this is what we see. But as I tried to communicate in qualifying that 'it's not directly comparable to the other PA factors so it's hard to pin down a precise figure', it's not a simple flat 10% - in Singapore's case, the effect was 0% or even negative. In England's case, it was an 8% difference, for both Man City and (to a similar degree) the nation as a whole.
The main takeaway from game importance as I see it is that because it bunches up PA around the median, it does actually dampen your wonderkid chances just enough to make one not want to dismiss it entirely, but it's not that significant or consistently applicable as other factors such as junior coaching are. 160 PA instead of 170 PA, in some cases.
I haven't done a deep analysis of it, but just my general impression is that its not that Game Importance is shifting up or down the general quality of the newgens either, and this is somewhat indicated by the low difference in the average as well (2% difference for the Man City samples). I think it's simply bunching up the distribution closer to the median.
I hope this also serves as an illustration of why I use the median instead of the average. The median is pretty stable and therefore predictable unlike the average. While the median can be predicted with strong likelihood of being within a range of -/+ 5 PA or thereabouts with enough samples, the average will end up with an uncertainty range of ~10 PA or more even if you collect many samples.
I included height in the singapore samples as I thought it was interesting to observe; I wondered if its distribution has some correlation, or something in common, with the PA distribution.
jimmysthebestcop said: I may have exaggerated the MLS talent but only a little. And it is different if you are actually playing in MLS as it makes it Active thus the entire nation gets full newgens as opposed to a league that is just loaded but not active.
This is why people make Brazil active since you have a much higher % to spawn mass quality of NewGens every season as opposed to a just top tier loaded but not active. I load all leagues but only have 5-10 active and never USA as active. In testing since not many actually play with USA.
Quantity of newgens is different for active vs not active but loaded vs not active and not loaded.
Unless using custom leagues Africa has no leagues except South Africa. So early you can find great African irl players. So you will notice a lot of NewGens spawn in Europe who play for Africa National Clubs as Africa since no leagues only spawn NewGens when a player retires because FM wants to always keep the total player number the same in the database.
While the active league all clubs spawn full set of Newgens every season.
This is also the reason after 50-60 years England takes over as the NewGen king if you have a full England pyramid loaded. You are talking 6/7 tiers of clubs who can spawn newgens and with RNG Jesus even if the combined lower tier pop out 1 National CLub bench player a season it eventually adds up after decades.
Go create a backup save and sim 20 years in the future and see where the USA national team players spawned at. It will all be overseas. USA wont be able to create in nation NewGens for a top 20 Fifa club. That is completely unrealistic. Sure some USA players are born overseas and have dual citizenship. But in FM they will 100% be spawned overseas. The reason USA stays a top 15 Fifa Club is because they spawn in Europe. USA might spawn 2-3 players born in USA who spawned at USA clubs that get to the national team.
People have won the World Cup with Wales when doing older Pre Ryan Reynold Wrexham Road to Glory saves. As the NewGens actually follow the England settings. Since as far as FM settings go Wrexham is in England.
This also use to be the case in old FM back in the day with San Marino as they had a club somewhere down in Italy's lowest tiers with a custom database. And once you got that club to top Tier Italy and became the #1 club in the world they could spawn world class newgens enabling people to win the World Cup with San Marino National Team as all the NewGens would come from the human controlled club in Italy.
There use to a link to the guy who did the San Marino world cup on reddit or Si forum. It might be 10 years old at this point. Think he had to play over 100 years or something.
Feel like you just changed the argument that having Leagues playable and that total new gens generated are huge factors. it’s why Egypt infamously has a higher Youth rating than Belgium. You can even load leagues later in a save to generate a Wonderkid boom there. So yeah no shit.
I always load MLS in all my saves and it always produces some high end regens even when I never play there. I don’t know why you are digging in so hard here. I’m 2040s in a penta save and 3-4 of the best players are regens out of MLS academies. They usually never actually play in MLS but they are generated there and leave on a free at 18. I don’t know why you wouldn’t load it, it’s one league and generates literally free players and buys your scraps.
If you don’t load a league that’s playable it’s going to be significantly shittier at generating regens than it actually is because SI balances countries with the assumption the league is loaded.
In well aware of how it works, Canadian regens at Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal use the U.S. intake. Wrexham/Swansea etc are literally listed in the English intake the not the Welsh one.
I looked at the penta save and pulled up all the regens with over 150 PA. OF the 10, all except 2 generated in MLS academies. (Only 10 woof)
The top 7-8 were all generated in the U.S. intake including a 185 PA out of the New England and 170 PA out of Charlotte. Both regulars at Arsenal. (9 years apart though.) The 2 Euro intakes were like 154 PA or lower playing at Celtic. 1 was out of England and 1 out of Germany.
I imagine the 140s is heavily Euro intakes though. Hasn’t SI said there is separate generational regen type that’s treated differently? I imagine the odds of one of those being American in a German intake is low.
GeorgeFloydOverdosed said: Coincidentally it was a recent video by SecondYellowCard where he tested the DoF role that got me thinking that youth recruitment might work similarly. Turns out it likely doesn't, but that's what led me to investigate the 'place of birth' thing.
I haven't been able to find this discord you mention yet, but I've done some testing of game importance anyway, not only to draw a conclusion here but because it's good to retest things once every few years to see if the mechanic has changed and also I'd like further clarity/precision on the distribution effect I mentioned. I retested recently the hidden nation factor thing I assert is the case, and I can confirm it still exists.
'Game Importance' Test results
Singapore unimportant (default) LC sailors:
Sample 1
75,68,57,51,49,49,48,42,42,39,37,36,32,31,31,20
median 42
average 44.1875
range 20-75
height 1.59-1.90, 1.73 median
singapore-wide stats:
range 17-80
10 best player = 73 PA
Sample 2
74,73,71,68,60,54,53,52,51,41,37,35,34,34,30,21
median 51.5
average 49.25
range 21-74
height 1.63-1.87, 1.715 median
singapore-wide stats:
range 15-86
10th best player = 74 PA
Sample 3
89,67,64,64,62,61,59,50,50,48,46,39,34,32,29,20
median 50
average 50.875
range 20-89
height 1.63-1.92, 1.725 median
singapore-wide stats:
range 13-89
10th best player = 69 PA
Singapore very important LC sailors:
Sample 1
59,53,50,48,47,46,45,44,43,39,38,36,32,31,21,21
median 43.5
average 40.8125
range 21-59
singapore-wide stats:
range 12-80
10th best player = 74 PA
Sample 2
78,70,66,66,61,60,60,53,48,46,41,39,38,37,20,17
median 51.5
average 50
range 17-78
height 1.64-1.92, 1.725 median
singapore-wide stats:
range 10-80
10th best player = 70 PA
Sample 3
53,52,48,48,48,47,44,44,44,44,43,31,31,22,20,20
median 44
average 39.9375
range 20-53
height 1.63-1.93, 1.785 median
singapore-wide stats:
range 8-115
10th best player = 71 PA
Singapore unimportant (default) LC sailors average (3 samples):
median 47.833
average 48.104
range 20.333-79.333
singapore-wide stats:
range 15-85
10th best player = 72 PA
Singapore very important LC sailors average (3 samples):
median 46.333
average 43.583
range 19.333-63.333
singapore-wide stats:
range 10-91.666
10th best player = 71.666 PA
England very important (default) Man City:
Sample 1
167,162,160,152,146,144,143,142,137,136,133,128,117,94,83,83
median 139.5
average 139.1875
range 83-167
england-wide stats:
range 30-179
10th best player = 157 PA
Sample 2
172,167,157,155,148,147,146,142,141,134,115,98,97,96,77,64
median 141.5
average 134.75
range 64-172
england-wide stats:
range 30-178
10th best player = 157 PA
Sample 3
178,167,165,160,157,155,148,147,144,142,141,104,89,85,75,58
median 145.5
average 132.1875
range 58-178
england-wide stats:
range 30-180
10th best player = 158 PA
England unimportant Man City:
Sample 1
167,157,149,148,146,145,140,137,117,111,104,98,97,90,85,81
median 127
average 135.75
range 81-167
england-wide stats:
range 34-175
10th best player = 154 PA
Sample 2
160,157,148,148,148,138,136,133,123,122,101,101,92,88,87,75
median 128
average 122.3125
range 75-160
england-wide stats:
range 34-168
10th best player = 154 PA
Sample 3
159,156,153,151,150,150,141,140,140,140,138,116,110,95,93,80
median 140
average 132
range 80-159
england-wide stats:
range 34-168
10th best player = 153 PA
England very important (default) Man City average (3 samples):
median 142.166
average 135.375
range 68.333-172.333
england-wide stats:
range 30-179
10th best player = 157.333 PA
England unimportant Man City average (3 samples):
median 131.666
average 132.687
range 78.666-162
england-wide stats:
range 34-170.33
10th best player = 153.666 PA
Conclusions
Game importance has no strong effect on PA. Previously I had said it bunches up the PA around the median and ends up affecting the PA to the tune of ~10%, and this is what we see. But as I tried to communicate in qualifying that 'it's not directly comparable to the other PA factors so it's hard to pin down a precise figure', it's not a simple flat 10% - in Singapore's case, the effect was 0% or even negative. In England's case, it was an 8% difference, for both Man City and (to a similar degree) the nation as a whole.
The main takeaway from game importance as I see it is that because it bunches up PA around the median, it does actually dampen your wonderkid chances just enough to make one not want to dismiss it entirely, but it's not that significant or consistently applicable as other factors such as junior coaching are. 160 PA instead of 170 PA, in some cases.
I haven't done a deep analysis of it, but just my general impression is that its not that Game Importance is shifting up or down the general quality of the newgens either, and this is somewhat indicated by the low difference in the average as well (2% difference for the Man City samples). I think it's simply bunching up the distribution closer to the median.
I hope this also serves as an illustration of why I use the median instead of the average. The median is pretty stable and therefore predictable unlike the average. While the median can be predicted with strong likelihood of being within a range of -/+ 5 PA or thereabouts with enough samples, the average will end up with an uncertainty range of ~10 PA or more even if you collect many samples.
I included height in the singapore samples as I thought it was interesting to observe; I wondered if its distribution has some correlation, or something in common, with the PA distribution.
Extremely interesting. I havent even bought or played the demo of Fm26 I am staying away from it as it is a flaming dumpster of poop and I cant reward SI with my money. Maybe I will jump back in fm27. Is it different in fm26? No idea.
I would be interested in your results over a 10-20 year span. At least in Fm24 and all previous versions if Game Importance wasnt set to very high in a decent Youth nation you couldnt produce NewGens even if your were #1 club in the world.
Singapore could never have good players because there youth rating is bad. Czech would be a good test as their youth rating is 90-100+ while game importance is not set to very important.
sortitoutsi even has always listed game importance for finding newgens in their charts.
https://sortitoutsi.net/football-manager-2026-youth-ratings
I dont think this is an issue for most players since most people play in a big nation, build a nation saves arent that popular in the community. So most people wont notice it.
I am honestly probably not explaining myself well. I just know in fm24 and prior when doing build a nation saves even if you changed youth rating to 100 the nation couldnt ever produce wonder kids even when getting league to top 5 and all the clubs in the top 50 if Game Importance wasnt set to very important.
I dont know if there is some kind of time factor and that is why you need to sim 10-20 seasons or what tbh.
jimmysthebestcop said: Extremely interesting. I havent even bought or played the demo of Fm26 I am staying away from it as it is a flaming dumpster of poop and I cant reward SI with my money. Maybe I will jump back in fm27. Is it different in fm26? No idea.
I would be interested in your results over a 10-20 year span. At least in Fm24 and all previous versions if Game Importance wasnt set to very high in a decent Youth nation you couldnt produce NewGens even if your were #1 club in the world.
Singapore could never have good players because there youth rating is bad. Czech would be a good test as their youth rating is 90-100+ while game importance is not set to very important.
sortitoutsi even has always listed game importance for finding newgens in their charts.
https://sortitoutsi.net/football-manager-2026-youth-ratings
I dont think this is an issue for most players since most people play in a big nation, build a nation saves arent that popular in the community. So most people wont notice it.
I am honestly probably not explaining myself well. I just know in fm24 and prior when doing build a nation saves even if you changed youth rating to 100 the nation couldnt ever produce wonder kids even when getting league to top 5 and all the clubs in the top 50 if Game Importance wasnt set to very important.
I dont know if there is some kind of time factor and that is why you need to sim 10-20 seasons or what tbh.
I should have mentioned that I used FM24. I guess some will say then what's the point of doing an updated test if you're not going to even use the most recent edition, but for me FM26 just has to be foregone.
I actually completely forgot to do one thing I wanted to do this time, which was to test what it looks like 5-10 years into the future.
I wanted to do USA initially, to address your claim about the MLS exactly, but found newgen intake works a bit differently and I couldn't be bothered trying to work it out. So my plan after that was to choose a nation with low game importance but high youth rating, but there aren't really any that are loadable - and singapore was one of the best options that was left. But this is also why I did Man City, because I had in mind (and generally what people play with) is clubs with top facilities in top nations, and England is no.1 for that.
As I was writing this I was doing my testing, and I was about to say that I've been wrong about game importance all these years, as 5 years in, the Man City (unimportant England) median had slipped to 117.5 PA (155 peak) which is outside of the range one would expect for the 131.166 PA averaged median I had got for the initial year. But then I did the control test (normal England), and that was 122 PA median, and 115.5 PA on the second sample.
This is bringing back what I experienced regarding game importance back when I initially tested it in FM19. No one has so far pointed out that I said game importance has no effect, yet later claim it has a minor effect, but I want to clarify this. As you can see, game importance has a minor effect that is only sometimes apparent. When I started testing it, I used average PA as a measure and so it was invisible to me and I thought it had no effect. Once I cottoned on to median PA being more accurate, I observed that questionable minor effect. In multi-year tests I thought I had borne out its effect, only to be confounded again in the same way this time. So I had to conclude whether a handful of PA difference, some of the time, constituted something real or an illusion. I concluded it was illusory, although the bunching up around the median effect is obviously real. It's a bit difficult to explain this fully if you haven't tried this kind of testing yourself, but basically it's very easy to be hoodwinked by limited samples and the inherent randomness. If I test a club and get 139, 134, 140, 137 then it's very tempting to say this club is a ~137.5 PA club. But then I would get 153 and 145 if I took 2 more samples. So this is why when I saw game importance raising PA by at most ~10% and inconsistently, I put it down to randomness.
I will continue this testing a bit, to clarify results at the 5 year and 10 year mark, as it does require at least 3 (preferably 5) samples to give any reliable indication.
I continued testing game importance at the 5 year mark and got these additional results:
England normal ('very important' ) samples:
119
120.5
113.5
106
118.5
England 'unimportant' samples:
140
143.5
140.5
2nd 'very important' samples:
105.5
111
101
At this point I stopped because there is something extra going on here that is more notable in itself. Still, I think we can pretty much wrap up the game importance thing, as ~140 PA median for Man City (or almost any club really) is about as high as it gets.
But now the matter of these highly variable medians. I have a feeling I already knew this years ago but I have forgotten about it, as I was recalling recently how I would savescum a whole year in advance to see the newgen results instead of reloading just before newgen day, in recent versions, and I couldn't remember why. Now I see it's no doubt because certain things are being set a few months earlier than intake day with the new 'Youth Preview' system.
Honestly I'm still hazy right now on it and I can't really be bothered digging deep into it, but I know this doesn't affect any data I've presented, except this multi-year attempt thing.
It's not to do with facilities, reputation, club coefficients, etc. changing - I double checked all those to make sure. What it does seem to correlate strongly with is your youth intake quality star rating. Yes, this star rating is relative to your existing squad, but it seems also nonetheless to be reflecting the differences in your median PA.
If median PA can vary for even a top club by as much as ~30% randomly, then does knowing the newgen factors even matter at this point? In a way this is a point even I don't want to admit, but it's one reason FM was losing its lustre for me even before FM26, they ruined the fun of newgens. On the other hand, the factors still work, and the year-to-year randomness doesn't mean inherent randomness - it's a dampener for sure, but still means you have a reasonably predictable and consistent system. To illustrate the difference:
Before:
Man City - 140, 143, 135, 146, 148
Arsenal - 136, 129, 138, 139, 139
Now (nation-based year-to-year randomness):
Man City - 140, 110, 115, 130, 145
Arsenal - 136, 107, 110, 119, 142
Inherent randomness (~30%):
Man City - 140, 110, 115, 130, 160
Arsenal - 158, 181, 132, 105, 116
That's if nation-based year-to-year randomness is what is actually going on here. As I said, I'm quite hazy on it right now. I'll probably try and get to the bottom of it sometime down the track. I know this all seems to put things in the wrong direction of progress, and people generally don't like that, but better to acknowledge the setbacks/problems than keep them on the down low and end up fooling myself/others about it.
Absolutel legend man
It's bugging me, so I've been looking into it more. This is about the median dropping in subsequent years, not game importance anymore.
Normal Man City test
2024: 144, 3.5 star, Aston Villa 134
2025: 126, 2 star, Aston Villa 144
2026: 102, 1 star, Arsenal 113, Aston Villa 133.5
2027: 94.5, 0.5 star, Arsenal 124.5, Aston Villa 124
2028: 119.5, 3 star, Arsenal 122.5, Aston Villa 121
2029: 112, 2 star, Arsenal 103, Aston Villa 126
2030: 103.5, 2 star, Arsenal 120, Aston Villa 125
2031: 120.5, 2.5 star, Arsenal 123, Aston Villa 134
Average: 115.25, Aston Villa 130.1875
Normal Aston Villa test
2024: 136.5, 5 star, Man City 132
2025: 129, 3 star, Man City 138
2026: 90, 0.5 star, Man City 121
2027: 99.5, 3 star, Man City 140
2028: 120, 3 star, Man City 120
2029: 110.5, 3 star, Man City 122
2030: 106.5, 1.5 star, Man City 123
2031: 113.5, 2.5 star, Man City 135
Average: 113.1875, Man City 128.875
Forest Green (league 2) non-player: 70, 91.5
Forest Green player: 52 (note: was 0.5 star)
Exeter (league 2) non-player: 107, 108
Exeter player: 80, 79
Overall this is a relief, because it seems to be the case that the median of all non-player teams doesn't decline or go all over the place in subsequent years. That median variation of -/+ ~10 is normal if you're unfamiliar.
It's only the player team that is affected. And this seems to be consistent across different division levels/club quality.
It's not about existing youth players affecting things, I tested that, and the AI's median remaining unaffected which I found out later is further proof of this.
I thought maybe what's causing it is the manager itself, specifically either the reputation or the player & youngster knowledge of the human manager. But changing those attributes didn't seem to make a difference.
I think that the median being normal in the first year might be a clue as to what's causing it.
Not sure if I wrote about it here or not. But from personal observation the first intake is very often abnormally good no matter where you start the save, could be just player's team or globally I haven't really checked. It's been like that for years. Might be something intentionally implemented by SI to get us hooked.
GeorgeFloydOverdosed said: I would savescum a whole year in advance to see the newgen results instead of reloading just before newgen day, in recent versions, and I couldn't remember why. Now I see it's no doubt because certain things are being set a few months earlier than intake day with the new 'Youth Preview' system.
I have the same feeling from my long-time savescummings (actually just tests - I played whole, normal season after that). The general shape of your newgens is decided during a previous intake-day. It can bye modified by youth facilities etc, by random-generator in intake-day, but not so much (and maybe this is a mysterious hidden factor - for example you don't have facilities which you do have next year).
And that's why first intake is much better - it is "half-blind-generated" in a different way maybe during generating profile when starting new game? I need two weeks to be 100% certain.