Promoting a Player
If you’re reading this page, I have to assume you’ve assessed a player in your youth academy and decided you’d like to offer him a professional contract. If you haven’t reached that stage yet, please go back and read the previous sections to get yourself up to speed. Otherwise, continue reading.
Professional Contract Wages
Considering your academy players will have been only earning a weekly wage of £425, you’d assume they’d want a sizeable increase in their salary. Lucky for you (especially if you’re struggling financially), they’ll only ask for £550 a week. This means scouting and promoting youth players can be a fantastic cost effective way of growing a lower league club. I think I worked out last year that you could in theory fill a squad with these players and have a wage bill smaller than £30k. However, it’s not very realistic in the upper tiers of football. I highly doubt Manchester City are paying their academy graduates £550 per week.
Professional Contract Length
In my experience, I find that youth players will ask for or agree to contracts between one and three years in length. We all know that longer term contracts is a great way to drive up value and deter potential suitors (or increase their bid), but it can be risky. You only get one chance at negotiating this contract, get it wrong and the player will walk. This is especially true if you’re acting on the ‘Player Wants Out’ message.
My advice here is just keep them happy and agree to their demands if you don’t want to risk losing them. If they only want a one year contract, just do it. They’ll be too young to agree a pre-contract agreement in January and it’s unlikely their wage demands will skyrocket anyway.
In the past I have occasionally seen players that reject your offer no matter what length you choose. I have to assume this is a bug, not entirely sure if this has been fixed for FIFA 19. If this happens, you can always save and reload if you want, it might fix it.
Squad Role
This should be the obvious choice but I would always tell a youth player that they’re a ‘Future 1st Team Player’. Bear in mind this is assuming you’re managing for example a Premier League club. If you’re at a smaller club and the player is much closer to the standard of your squad, offer them a greater squad role. This would also apply to a larger club if you find an exceptionally highly rated player.
Potential
Strangely, potential can actually become more vague after offering a player a professional contract. Instead of seeing a min-max range, you’ll have to look for a statement on their bio.
- Has Potential to be Special – can reach 91+ overall
- An Exciting Prospect – can reach 86-90 overall
- Showing Great Potential – can reach 80-85 overall
With older players, the absence of these statements tends to mean their potential is below 80. However, for youth players they don’t tend to appear until their overall reaches 60. This can be frustrating if you’ve promoted players below this level. My advice here is check the training menu for the high growth symbol.
These statements also tend to disappear once they’re rated 80 overall or above. I’ve assumed this is because they’ve ‘fulfilled’ their potential. I don’t mean that they’ve maxed out, just that the game stops considering them as high growth players.
Don’t get too hung up on this, it’s called potential not destiny. Player growth can stall due to lack of game time or training, poor form or long term injuries. Potential can also be exceeded, if you manage your players correctly. Part of what dictates this is called a ‘potential modifier’. Every player is assigned a random modifier up to 10. As an example, a player with a potential of 82 but a potential modifier of 5 could still reach 87 one day. check out our full guide on understanding potential for more information.
Training
I covered training briefly in the previous segment but will revisit it here. For now, what I will say is that its really up to you. In my experience, it is definitely possible to ‘over train’ players, stunting their physical and mental attributes – as seen here. My advice would be to avoid it altogether, or train them infrequently, just enough to get them to a point where they are playable or to smooth out their rough edges.
The only situation I can think of where I’d actively over train youth players is if I had no intention of playing them. If you’re only developing youth players to sell for massive profit, then train away.
TL;DR
- Offering a professional contract to a youth player is very cheap at £550 a week.
- Demands for contract length seems to vary, I usually offer between 1-3 years but give them what they want.
- Their squad role should be ‘future 1st team player’ unless you have a poor squad or they have an unusually high overall rating.
- Player potential can now be checked via a player’s bio, but they could still fall short or exceed that number.
- Training youth players is a quick way to boost their stats but you’ll pay for it in the long term.