Patience

The trick to passing the Youth Academy Challenge

Patience

The trick to success without transfers in Football Manager is simple. It’s patience.

This can be difficult if you’ve got a board that wants to sack you at the earliest possible opportunity. However, in my case, it’s not too difficult:

If you’ve got a setup like this, you’ve got the time you need to wait on your youngsters.

Now, if you wind up with really young players who look like superstars, this is a sign that your team might be pretty bad. Our top striker, for example, is only 18 years old:

As much as I’d like to think that Kim Song is a legitimate star player who might play for a big club someday, it’s probably not true. What is likely true, though, is that he looks really good in comparison with the rest of our squad.

And, well, our squad is pretty young — hence the need for patience:

Ignore the greyed out Sim Yong-Chol, who only appears because we only have two keepers on the first team squad. We only have 4 players who are older than 20. The rest of the team has potential, but it’s far too early to see what they’re going to blossom into.

If the Youth Academy Challenge has taught me anything about Football Manager, it’s taught me the importance of having patience. You need to give your young players the chance to actually blossom into something before you say yes or no to them. And sometimes the best way to do that is to force yourself into doing that.