We’ve all come across situations like this one. You spot a talented player worth a few million, you approach his club with an offer, and they fire back with a ludicrous demand fifty times his actual value. I’m sure that rings a bell with most of us. The transfer market is going crazy, in real life as well as in Football Manager. As a result, training and developing your youths become increasingly essential, especially when money is tight. While absolute talent (potential ability) is, at least in a Football Manager environment, not a factor we influence by training, all other elements are trainable.

Real-life football is not an exact science; footballers are not IKEA cabinets, with a certain amount of required parts necessary to get the job done. Football Manager is more simplistic in its approach. Footballers are broken down to interlocking pieces, and training directly influences almost all of these pieces.

The abilities of a player consist of his Current Ability (CA) and his Potential Ability (PA). Since you are visiting Strikerless, I presume you are familiar with the terms current ability and potential ability. On the off-chance that you are not; the current ability for any player in the game is set on a scale of 1 to 200, with one being extremely shit at football and 200 being a footballing genius. Similarly, the potential ability is set up on a scale of 1 to 200. The PA cannot improve through training; the CA improves by training the various attributes.

The personality / hidden attributes are precisely that; hidden. All the hidden attributes make up a player’s personality description, which is found in various places in the game. You cannot improve these attributes through training, but you can influence them through mentoring. I highly recommend reading this article by Cleon on mentoring if you want to know more.

PPM’s or Player Preferred Moves are traits a player uses during matches. Some are instilled through mentoring; others can be taught by coaches during training sessions, using the coaching staff at your disposal.

The various attributes of an average player profile are, as you are all aware, divided into three categories. These three categories are very much self-explanatory; the technical category covers the technical attributes and so forth. These categories include half of the total factors that make up a players DNA, and these categories directly influence by training and first-team football.

Half the building blocks that make up the DNA of a player in the Football Manager universe are made up of elements you can directly influence with your choice of a training regimen. That makes choosing a good training regime all the more crucial.

The regimen I use these days is one I picked up in Rashidi/Bust The Net’s Discord channel. One of the members in there described his regimen as such:

So, this is what I have done; each training module pulled for session one and session two has all outfield players training their specific roles. I added on the additional resistance training as I’d id like to add some strength, balance and work rate as they are core attributes to how I like my teams to be set up.

This idea was originally posted by Callamity

The idea sounded intriguing enough to merit a trial run. Sadly, the fixture congestion in the Brazilian Serie A is so bad that we play two to three games a week. My training schedules for the first team are comprised of either travelling to games or recovering from games. I decided to give the regimen a go with the U20-squad for the past season-and-a-half.

The regimes I use are geared towards one or two games a week. Like Callimity described, I cleared the schedule entirely, before restocking it with exercises that focussed solely on improving role-related attributes. My schedules look like this.

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Using the calendar function of the U20-squad, I have to manually set the training schedule from week to week, seeing as the youth manager seems incapable of selecting the proper schedules. By seeing how many games are scheduled for a week, I can alter the schedule to match the circumstances.

Most of the exercises used focus either on the individual players’ roles or on generic, not role-specific mental attributes. All of these exercises are part of the match preparation section. Realistically, I feel that match preparation shouldn’t have such a major impact on the individual roles but hey ho, they do and this is the backbone of this training regime.

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The free space is in the regimen is there to try and balance out the extra individual training every player is undergoing. Each player is also set on an individual training regimen for the position I intend to have them play on double intensity.

I am well aware of the injury risk. The medical centre keeps pointing this out to me. However, having used this specific for a season-and-a-half, I can safely say that we have not suffered an excessive number of injuries during that time. During the first season, we suffered 57 injuries in 12 months time, an average of around 5 injuries a month.

As we look deeper at the sort of injuries sustained, we can see not a whole lot of major injuries. We can see a lot of training injuries compared to actual match injuries but I can’t really tell if that is a coincidence or normal. Either way, it looks valid when you consider the results.

Looking at a few case studies, we can see that most players have progressed quite well. Viana and Papel have developed spectacularly especially.

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The development of Papel and Viana especially underlines the importance of first-team football for youngsters. Their progression since being introduced to first-team football is spectacular. Sadly, they are not (yet) good enough to claim a solid spot in the first team but they will not be loaned away.

I intend to play them during the international breaks, when I have a fair few games to play, while most of my first-teamers are away on international duty for their respective countries (mostly Brazil but there are a few Argentines and various African nationals in the squad).

With this new training regimen, excellent facilities and the best coaching staff I can find and money can buy, I am quite confident that we can turn our academy into a proper moneymaker. Even if these players are not quite good enough for first-team duty, they can still be sold to other clubs.