Subject: USA U-18 Team

As a top team at the moment i can't afford to play my youth players. And it does pain me to not give them play time. That's how i got Clinton to be awesome. I sacrificed my league standings for a few seasons to pay him as a 15 years old. So this brings me back to a promise that the developers made before season 1 even started: The loan system. I would love to loan out my youth players to teams that would play them. I wouldn't even mind covering their salaries. But i would recall them for training camps and would prefer to loan out to teams with high training facilities and quality coaching staff. Thoughts?

Another great idea! I think something like this was actually discussed in another forum a little while ago. In another sports manager game I have played, there is a loan system, and it works great (though there is always the risk that a good player ends up on a team that decides not to play the player, chooses to quit the game without adding the player to the starting roster, or even that a rival might take your players on the loan to make sure they don't gain experience). I think it was discussed in this thread: ppm.powerplaymanager.com/... (of course, there was quite a bit of other stuff going on in that thread as well).

You can have built in protection for that. If the team trading the player doesn't play him enough games you can choose to take him back without penalty.

Well .. I wasn't suggesting top/rich teams to buy "just" for the sake of buying.
But if a prospect in USA is almost as good as an international, why not keeping the money local?
Our problem is that there are few of those players that come out in USA, we just cant afford to lose them.

I can speak for myself ... I pulled 2 5* players in soccer that had very good starting OR. well .. probably 100 less than what top teams start, but their quality were amazing. Dont need to say that neither made to USA. One is still in my team and is one of my best player. If I could have sold him at 15yo, Id have made tons of money and USA would have an amazing forward!


Barker .. he came from the dead High Hitterz team. Did not help anyone.

Robertson .. Did not help a USA team. Grand Rapids sold him for 76M at age 15 while GoldFish gave 267M to a foreign manager (dead team now). Im sure Grand Rapids would have appreciated 200M+ for him


Means ... Did not help a USA team neither. Red Headed sold it for 44M. GoldFish purchased him from foreign team for 100M. Red Headed would love an extra 60M for him.

Max Jack .. Did not help. East Side gave him away for 180k. International team earned 30M from that steal. East Side would have loved 30M instead of 180k

Reif ... YEAH, an USA made money!!!!! but it wasnt from a USA team help. He sold him for 158M. Psychos bought him from international team for 194M


Now lets analyze those teams....

Boilemaster bough a player of age 21 (im sure ready to play) for 320M. that same player was sold for 43M at age 15.
Montana Miners: either not rich or cheap - only buy players of around 30M
GoldFish: Bough a 20yo player for 73M. same player was sold for 29M at age 15. Also bought a 18yo player for 92M. and a 18yo player for 95M. The original owner got 120M for him selling at 15yo.


What do i see ....
USA D1 teams will only buy ready players at around 18yo.
Some teams are making a living by buying cheap 15yo and reseling then in 3 seasons.
With one exception, USA poor teams are not profiting from it.

since our D1 teams wont buy 15yo at "ready" market and poor teams cant train them, they are stuck on
1. selling them for free/cheap
2. keep them and waste a NT caliber player.

My internet connection died out for a while before I got around to this post. Sorry in advance for an excessively long post.

While teams like the Psychos produce up to 5 national team caliber players per season on a regular basis, teams with slightly weaker facilities still produce a fair amount of players cumulatively. Angel Berry is extremely likely to make the U18 team in 1 or 2 seasons. It's just that you might average more national team caliber players per season with better facilities. For instance, Motte and Bounana on my team would easily have contended for the third or fourth lines if they had been from the United States, however, in Latvia and France respectively, the U18 national team managers don't even want to hear about players like them because they have enough 18 year old players with much more than around 800 OR at the beginning of the season. Latvia and France have much better overall infrastructure to give them this depth (though the United States can catch up to some of the smaller countries in time).

Otherwise, it's a good point with respect to experience. It is one of the reason why a player pulled by a then division III team is the starting center on this season's U18 national team.

With that said, there are usually only enough players good enough to be considered for the senior national team to fill 2 lines, sometimes only 1. A 50-100 OR lower OR can be overcome by experience and good facilities, but a player's OR and experience at 18, at least for the best players, is usually indicative of good qualities/facilities/staff (as long as they haven't fallen to 4/6 CL, as in the possibly unfortunate case of Dupuis). A third line caliber player, even with a lot of experience (unless there is a ton of depth at his position in front of him), probably won't be considered for the senior national team. Experience is important, but there needs to be more elite players, by improving the overall infrastructure, who are then also in a position to gain a ton of experience, for it to matter. Even so, if there are more teams like the Salt Lake Karma with good facilities but who also give their players experience (by the way, I used level 14 to emphasize the dropoff, but level 13 is actually still very productive) the United States would benefit.

Though players like Milton definitely get a bonus, I don't really want to speculate on who might potentially gain a lot of experience. If a player only has 15 or less experience by the time they are 18, then I wouldn't count on them to gain a ton of experience in the future. On the other hand, players with 30+ experience, or who are clearly regularly playing league games, will get bonus consideration. There usually are very few national team caliber players with substantial experience.

Finally, for the point about seeing players from a few teams making the team every year from another post, I don't really pay attention to what teams get to have players on the team - I primarily focus on whether the players are promising. In all the time I've been with the U18 team, I've never used a player from my own team, and I usually add at least a few players pulled by division III teams, and a handful from division II teams. In the past, other national team managers (most likely especially in countries like Slovakia and the Czech Republic) haven't even bothered to scout teams below division I or II. Even so, I would rather add 2-5 players from the Pscyhos every season than add more players that otherwise wouldn't have made the team from teams that wouldn't have been represented, unless perhaps the alternatives are interchangeable with the players from teams like the Psychos who are also in turn fringe players on that season's U18 team.

Agreed in general.

Gerhardt Krueger, a universal side defender on my soccer team, probably would have been on the national team if I had sold him as a 15 year old, though he has become the best player on my team for many seasons and might still peak at 1600 or so OR despite languishing for many seasons on my team before I had decent facilities.

I was mostly focusing on the nationality of the team receiving the player, and the fact that teams from the United States made sure that good United Stats prospects ended up on teams with good facilities, but your point about spreading money directly to the lower division United States teams that produced the players is another good one.

In any case, it's good to see some activity in this forum.

By the way, my HR department will finally reach level 14 tomorrow, which means that I can scout ~20 more players per season! There's also something about sponsors, but I'm more excited about the scouting. Unfortunately, the two head scouts for the U18 national team are going to retire by around the end of this season, so I will need to start interviewing for their successors (though I do have one intern that should be able to take over in two seasons).

biggest issue of players making (or not) senior team is not the 50-100 difference but the fact rich teams have Training and Regen at level 15 while poor teams dont. at age 21, there would be 6 seasons of a player being trained at max speed versus player at near max, but not near enough.

that why i say the rich should buy the players. It would provide money for "poor" to finish facilities

My General sponsor: 95M/season
Media + tickets: 95M/season
Expenses: 120M
Profit: 70M

I will need 180M to get Regen to level 14.
Another 300M to get both TF and Regen to level 15.

not to mention 240M to get SA to level 15.

so .. 2.5 seasons to get regen to level 14
4.5 seasons to get both TF and Regen to level 15

another 2.5 sseaons to get SA to level 15.

and that without investing on player purchase or Arena construction.
so .. 9.5 seasons to finish the facilities. that is 3 real world years.

chance is ... team will go dead much before it happens.

Now ...if someone give me 300M (well Boilemakers paid 320M) for a 15yo instead of waiting him to become 21 to buy Id have enough to get TF and Regen to level 14

Get another 100M for another top prospect and i can get SA to level 14.

so all of the sudden USA has another team that can produce players instead of a team that will go defunct before it can produce NT players ...

All of the factors add up and contribute to the overall development.

The OR requirements for teams with top facilities are actually adjusted lower than for teams with middling facilities. I pretty much cover all of the players on teams like the Psychos and only a handful of players per team once I get into division II and lower. Once I get to teams with facilities at level 10 or lower or so, I only look in the transfer histories. Even the best players trained at level 10 or lower will not amount to much.

For the rest, this is all a good point, but in an open market, there needs to be some sort of incentive applied to achieve this desired result. I'm not sure what can be done to make this happen, beyond perhaps helping to make the information of the players that a team like the Boilermakers could have been bidding on more accessible to those teams.

I wasn't trying to say that only the sports academies matter, but there needs to be more good sports academies to increase the probability of producing elite players, assuming that all of those players can find teams with good facilities and also gain experience. To have the most elite team possible, improving the cumulative quality of the sports academies in the United States is the first step, though the other two parts have equal or greater overall importance.

The price offered for promising 15 year olds from newer teams (that could be upgraded to a higher tier player by moving to a team with better facilities) is a feature of the way the PPM market prices those players. Although a bunch of teams from the United States could agree to make offers for these players from newer teams that incorporates the future added value, it is likely that PPM would overturn these transactions.

I think that would work.

I would be willing to buy youth players from USA teams. I have in the past. However, on a personal level, I'm just not as active on the market as some other teams are. I have bought only 3 players worth keeping in the past 3 seasons (none this season yet). So that's my issue, not scouting the market for such talent.

If we can get some kind of advertising for national young players I'm all for it. But at the same time, the teams selling these players should make the deadline more USA-friendly. A few times I've lost USA talent due to the fact that the bidding ended while I was at work. Actually, I can't even remember a USA player with a deadline around 9 pm or something. heck, I wouldn't even mind USA teams messaging me about players to ask me if I'd be interested before they put up the player. If the player is not good enough I'd tell them so they save the effort.

And one more thing, us top-20 teams ought to commit to playing a 4th line of players U-18 and a 3rd line of players U-22. I actually may do that as soon as next year if I have 5 worthy U-18 players. Screw the league title, Psychos has that in the bag each year.

Thoughts?

Speaking as someone who has to sell top-level talent when they pull it currently, selling at 9 pm doesn't get as many bidders and tends to drive down the sale price. I'd love to see my players go to another US team to develop if I can't keep them, and it's cool that Robertson and Reif made it back to this side of the pond, but I'm going to try to sell them at a time where they can net me the most. However now that I know you're interested, I would definitely contact you if I pull any I need to sell. Fortunately, the window is closing on me selling my top talent. Oh wait, I have that center... PM coming your way.

Well, there's a draft soon... I would expect a few PMs.