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 until (more or less) all skills are capped.
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.
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!
Over time, a handful of opposing factions have arisen on how to make the most of the mechanics of scouting and training. The "Zugism" and "Zapasism" school of thought assumes that most Youth Academy trainees should be kept in the Youth Academy for the longest time to maximize their multi-skill potential. Alternatively, some Youth Academy managers, following the dictates of "Xarnism" and "Berthlism", maintain that the maximum potential can be achieved by focusing on producing an elite of 17-year-olds star players with high primary skills and just one useful secondary.
The choice is not so obvious: while a "collectivized" trainers will leave players behind in terms of primary skill early on, an "elitist" trainer will never be able to catch a multi-skilled player in the long term and, by the time he reaches a high primary level he will be trained at a very inefficient pace. Nevertheless, managers within the game focus mainly on primary skill levels for matters of national teams and transfer market.
When an elite is needed
Elite players should continue to receive their primary skill training at the senior level. YA focuses on maximizing a player's primary skill level by the time he is 17 years and 0 day. By doing so, players are always pulled near 17.0 age developing as stars with high primary (preferably excellent) and one useful secondary.
Xarnist
The Xarnist approach maintains that Youth Academy managers attempt to produce a very few highly specialized 17 year old promotees.Xarnist disciples believe this is in the best interests of the parent club and the national U-20 program. The dogma implies that the most effective way to achieve a promotable player at the age of 17.00 is to accept 15 year old prospects almost exclusively when offered by the scouts. This doctrine of Youth Academy development derives from the forum's proselytism of American manager Xarn5, after his obsession with YA product Sydney Hunt.
While focusing on training one individual, Xarnists hope that other prospects will come along, but they does not continue to train a skill for other players once the identified star hits a ceiling in that skill. In this way it is possible to have a group of supporting trainees, albeit of minor importance, alongside the one to whom the entire training is dedicated. It is also imperative that the player reaches the caps even in a relevant secondary skill before the promotion.
Berthlism
The Berthlism doctrine of YA development says that, training the player with highest potential, a manager should always aim to create a real "star" (i.e. an "international" player). The basis of the Berthlism dogma was laid during a discussion on the forum by Berthli.
Berthlism says one should:
- find the proper primary training by scouting a player with highest potential - a "star";
- find the proper secondary training by deciding which secondary training fits to the primary training of the "star".
The effect is to have a smaller number of highly developed promotable players therefore with a greater chance of being selected by the national team.
When a collective is needed
The approach focuses on maximizing a player's overall training by taking full advantage of the inherent training efficiency that the Youth Academy provides, above all the fact of receiving secondary training that is not available within the Senior squad; but also focused faster training (and that was especially effective at the time when players could not train as fast as in YA even with an excellent coach and with the maximum of assistant coaches).
Additionally, junior players thrive best in a fully dedicated training facility despite the disadvantage that players have both total training ceilings and individual skill caps. All YA limitations and caps no longer bother managers who train a lot of skills at a low level instead of one at high levels. Indeed, a given trainee will become a multi-skilled senior player if a manager trains him in all skills without particular urgency to the primary and keeps the player within the YA as long as he is suitable for training; and then he can train the primary within the senior team.
Zugism
The Zugism approach supports the development of a core of well-rounded players with multiple high skills - solid, or if possible excellent. They can be promoted not earlier than their 18th birthday, but it’s probably best to wait until the player is fully-grown, then it’s possible that he’s even older than that. The founder (Mighty) zug, owner and manager of the team American Verdant Strike, pitched the idea on forum following the obsessive development curation of his own players.
To became a fervent Zugist you must accept that once promoted to senior team the player will continue to grow and therefore will have the opportunity to recover quickly even if starting with a lower primary (lower skill levels train faster). Therefore it is best to train the player's secondaries and create a well-rounded base for him while still in YA. The cultists also believe that a promotable player don't have to be a 15 years old prospects at all costs, since what really matters are the average high secondary skills.
In summary, this approach has advantages:
- players can be trained on more than one skill, and only then the primary is trained;
- players will be better than the average youth pull from the current youth squad as the secondary skills are well developed.
The Hattrick market is not entirely efficient, and manager preferences dominate the market value of players. As a vestige of the old training system, the economic value of a player for sale on the transfer market will be optimized by following a Xarnist approach. However, the value of a player within the game engine, over the course of the player's life, will be optimized by following a Zuggist strategy.
Zapasism
The effect sought by "Zapasismo" is to implement at most the largest number of promotable players, but leaving only small hopes of growing a big star. It was promoted by Zapasiewicz during a diatribe on forum that targeted Berthli.
The followers should concentrate on training a large group of players going through the following distinctive steps:
- select a group of players that has the highest potential when trained with the proper primary training;
- find the proper secondary training by selecting a different group of players with average potential and train them.
With this approch, the secondary training does NOT need to adapt to primary training at all costs.
Conclusions
The proof that could definitively settle the question of which is the preferred development of the player could have been the results obtained by the two major contending managers, Zug and Xarn, in their Youth Academy. Unfortunately, Zug did not continue with Hattrick, taking a sabbatical at that time.
However, Zug's players (Ernest Schummacher in particular, who as he once put it, "would be the greatest US Winger ever developed") had better secondary skill upon promotion than Xarn's famous U-20 and NT mainstay Sydney Hunt. With a near lifetime of training, Sydney Hunt eventually became a star indeed. Nevertheless, it was just a matter of time and of extended training of a still low primary skill that would have allowed Schummacher to eventually become the better player with both an equivalent primary, and superior secondaries.
It can still be said that both methods have their own value and that the managers choice depends only on goals they want to achieve with YA.
Xarn for dough, Zug to grow. (Mightyzug motto)
