Youth Training
Youth training is slower and does NOT depend at all on the type of training set for the senior team. A player can be promoted only if he is at least 17 years old and was in your youth academy for at least one season, so you may have plenty of time to train him if he is scouted when he is 15 or 16 years old.
When you train a junior player, you can pop him more than one skill per week thanks to a primary and a secondary training choice:
- primary trainings will give a normal boost (a little less than the standard amount for seniors),
- secondary training will give gets a smaller boost.
Note that if you set an identical training for both you will not train at full potential because a little part of the training will be lost.
You also have "Individual training" which trains each player randomly to a relevant skill, though the owner has no control over which skill gets chosen; a skill that is already capped may get picked, resulting in no training for that player.
In fact, players in the youth team have a "cap" for their qualities in a certain skill. At a certain moment the player won’t improve anymore, because he has learned everything there is to learn about that skill. Because you can’t see the skill of a youth player, you will have to watch his performances and coach reports to determine whether you should stop training him on a skill or not.
Strategies
The best training strategy is most likely to wait until the most gifted players, the ones that the training focuses on, are fully grown, even if this may mean training them beyond their 17th birthday. On the other hand, you won't have good players every week, so it's worth it to wait the until (more or less) all skills are capped.
The following contents are based on the opinion of Hattrick users — which means that their veracity and accuracy have not been confirmed by any official statement, and consequently they do not necessarily reflect the game reality. Please take this into consideration!
Some Youth Academy managers, following the philosophy of "Xarnism", maintain that the maximum potential of Youth Academy training can be achieved by focusing on producing young 17 year old products with high primary skill, and one useful secondary.
Alternatively, the philosophy that most players should be kept in the Youth Academy for the longest time to maximize their multi-skill potential is known as "Zugism"". Probably it’s best to wait until the player is fully-grown, then it’s possible that he’s even older than that. But such a player has advantages:
- he can be trained on more than one skill,
- he will be better than the average youth pull from the current youth squad.
Also, there have been rumours that players that are called early, decline two to three levels in ability. Supposedly the trainer will tell you when the player is ready to be promoted. On the long term, this means that there will be less youth players, but their average level will be better.
