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youth players
When can players in the youth academy be promoted to 1 team?

Youth Academy

Next in the Squad section we come to the Youth Academy. It's been noted already that you cannot run a Youth Academy until you have staffed it with Youth Coaches. Academy Home gives you a detailed view of these.

Once your staffing is in place, you can offer youths a place - but how do you find them in the first place?

The answer, of course, is that you send out your Scouts. When you do this, you are able to make a wide variety of choices about the type of player they look for. You can also specify the age range in the search criteria: 11-12; 13-14 and 15-17 (this is listed as 15-18 for technical reasons, but you won't be employing any 18-year-old youths). The Youth Academy can hold a maximum of twelve players.

This is where you need to be good at forward planning. It can take several seasons until a youth is ready to be offered promotion to your Squad, and he can't be offered such a place until he has passed his 16th birthday and also been in his current contract in your academy for at least 21 days. Given that youths can enter your Academy from age 11, then you need to be thinking up to five seasons ahead about your future squad needs. Indeed, youths might spend as many as seven years in the Academy, as you can keep them there until their 18th birthday. At the age of 18, if you have not already offered them a place in your Squad, the Board will do so on the club's behalf. Remember you can only have a maximum of twelve youths in your academy at any given time

As in real life, youths will not always accept a senior contract. Having played in an academy for a long time and infrequent promotion attempts at the club can greatly enhance a given youth's promotion chances. Every youth has a chance to promote, though patient managers are likely to have a much higher success rate than those who try to rush players into the first team. The manager needs to judge the progress of their youths and assess if they are ready for promotion, though players grow at different rates and at different times. Promoting a player before they have fully developed in the academy will limit a player's senior potential but can still be attempted if required. Some players may be ready to promote earlier while the potential ability of other players would be stunted if they are promoted before they turn 18.

You can keep an eye on how your youths are progressing by checking the next subheading: Youth Players. Canny managers will keep a record of their youths' progress across time - it's worth noting that youth rating improvements can occur on any day in the week.

One small thing to add - you can't promote a youth if you have renewed their contract in the last 21 days. That has caused me some issues before

One other thing - to be precise, each youth has one specific day of the week on which they may improve. This could be any day of the week.