Is This Cheating?

Messing around with Hallam

Is This Cheating?

I’ve always wanted to give the Youth Academy Challenge a try.

If you’re not aware, and if you don’t have the time to read the introduction over on the Sports Interactive forums, let me explain.

The idea here is to become the best team in Europe (or the world) without hiring any players. You need to become the very best using only the strength of your own youth setup.

The rules are something like this:

• No buying players allowed.

• No loaning in players allowed - in other words, no transfers.

• You’re not allowed to hire scouts or spend money on any scouting package.

• You must start with a team that was unplayable at the beginning of the game (this ensures that your facilities and set up are poor).

• If you are relegated to an unplayable league, you have to start over.

Now, the challenge is set up to ensure that you’re using a really weak team. This is part of where the sense of challenge comes from. However, it also ensures that you’ll spend a lot of time grinding.

I wanted to save myself the grind with Hallam. Therefore, I made a few edits to beef the team up a bit:

• I gave us a large budget with a sugar daddy owner (now referred to as a “rich benefactor”).

• I gave us the best possible youth setup, with a Head of Youth Development with perfect statistics on a 30 year contract.

• I used one of the strongest downloaded tactics I could find.

The result was interesting. Despite the fact that we had one of the lowest reputations in the entire world (I was using the World Super League addon), we wound up tearing through the first few rungs of the ladder, winning successive promotions right from the start.

I wanted to stop the grind, sure — but I might have made things too easy.

What do you think?