Life in FM

Looking around the internet forums, the FM scene has never had it so good, how can anyone say that the community is dying when we have some great Football Manager communities to meet everyone’s needs of the new Football Manager player. But anyway I noticed a thread upon one of these forums asking about co-ownership which many gamers will know is a major part of Italian football when developing young players. That got me thinking, is the system in Italy a better system to help their youngsters reach a their full potential?

So I felt a proper experiment was obviously needed to see which system works best for these young players. The experiment will start off with a group of clones, identical players that play in the same position, same attributes and same fixed CA and PA to make it all fair. I will then subject the group of players to different enviromental conditions and see which of them.

The idea really came about because I pondered, whether the co-ownership system in Italy works better than the system used in other countries, so the first group of players will join up with Serie B teams half of which will already be co-owned with the top clubs in Italy while the rest will be left to their own devices.

Next up we will be looking at the English league, were we will have a group of players joining up with Championship sides, a group of players in the Premier League but affiliated with clubs with decent training facilities in lower leagues. Then the next task is to test out training facilities vs trainers, this will only need three of our clones, one will join a club with state of the art training facilities but poor coaches, the other will be the visa versa and then a control will be somewhere in the middle. But what I am going to do with the club with the poor training facilities is give them a state of the art youth academy and see how the new players from that side progress, along with another side in Italy doing the same.

How it will be measured?

As usual with all the experiments that are done on the site I will the game out in holiday mode for a number of years and we will log the progress of each of our clones. But from that we won’t be able to see the hidden attributes from within the game so using FM Scout we will be able to track statistically the progress of our players in the game.

This is by no means a perfect test, to get a dead cert answer to what is the best system it would mean rigirious testing over many different games and many more sitatutions and countries, with so many variables time contraints that would not be possible. But I think it will be an interesting insight to how the game works and it may even help some people in their own quest to youth development. Feel free to suggest your own situations that we could throw our clones in as well.