Pompey_Dan
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The dawning of each new Football Manager season brings with it renewed hope that this will be the year that you pluck the next world star from the back streets of Buenos Aires or the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.
Expectancy of signing tomorrow's stars today is heightened as "newgens" are introduced into the game during pre-season. Newgens are players aged between 14 and 20 who are unique to your game and are designed to give the FM world an ever expanding feel.
A few of these new players will be destined to reach the very top of the game whilst others will undoubtedly fade into lower league obscurity. Spotting the best newgens early and signing them to your team before nurturing them through those formative early years can be utterly invaluable, either by improving the long-terms prospects of your side or boosting your finances when you sell them on to a bigger club for a sizeable profit.
But you'll need to be quick if you want to add the brightest young talents to your squad as you can be sure that scouts from Europe's elite clubs won't be far behind. Of course, it helps if you know where to look!
A FEW WORDS ABOUT POTENTIAL ABILITY
So what is it that has every big club fighting for a young player's signature?
Every player in Football Manager is given two very important ratings, current ability (or CA) and potential ability (PA). Awarded a score between 1 and 200, CA governs how good the player's attributes are at any given time whereas PA determines how good the player's attributes could become with the right handling.
It is this PA rating that is all important when signing young players, the higher the score the greater the chance that the player will blossom into a real star.
To help illustrate how CA/PA translates into real life terms I have listed the ratings for some of the game's better known players as they start the game:
Lionel Messi (194/197)
Cristiano Ronaldo (190/195)
Wayne Rooney (178/184)
Gareth Bale (165/180)
Jack Wilshere (134/178)
Cristiano Ronaldo (190/195)
Wayne Rooney (178/184)
Gareth Bale (165/180)
Jack Wilshere (134/178)
CA and PA ratings are shown in the game, however, instead they are alluded to in your staff and scout reports using a rating of between 0 and 5 stars. To spot the most talented youngsters you will need to employ scouts with a high "Judging Player Potential" attribute. Placed in the right nations these scouts can be the difference between signing the new Cristiano Ronaldo or the next Chris Iwelumo!
Of course not every player is going to reach the dizzying heights predicted for them, history is littered with the sad stories of talented footballers who failed to make it to the top, but with a high PA rating there's at least a chance that the player could become one of the greats.
THE EXPERIMENT SET UP
In an effort to identify where the best new talent is likely to surface I've studied an FM game-save spanning 10 years, looking only at newgen players with a PA rating of 170 or higher.
To achieve a decent overview of the FM world I used a small database that encompassed all the continents, with the top divisions from the following nations loaded:
Argentina
Australia
Brazil
China
England
France
Germany
Holland
Italy
Mexico
Portugal
Russia
Scotland
South Africa
South Korea
Spain
Turkey
U.S.A.
THE EXPERIMENT RESULTS
What makes finding newgens with high potential all the more tricky is the small number that are generated each season... put simply, gifted footballers don't grow on trees!
Over the experiment's ten years I saw 394 newgens generated whose PA exceeded 170, that's an average of 39 each season. If the bar is raised, by narrowing the search to newgens with a PA of 180 or higher, then the average drops to just 8 per year (1.4 per year for newgens with a PA of 190+)
With the game generating such a low number of top quality youngsters each year, and with hundreds of clubs on the look-out for this talent, knowing where to send your scouts is of paramount importance.
When we take a look at the number of high potential newgens created by continent it shouldn't surprise anyone to learn that Europe, the world's biggest footballing continent, comes out on top. Less predictable, however, was Africa finishing ahead of South America.
Despite South America's poor return as a continent, Brazil consistently produced the greatest number of high potential newgens and Argentina was the third best nation. These two nations accounted for over 70% of all South American newgens, and Brazil alone generated almost 10% of the experiment total.
Of the European nations Italy were the second best nation for producing talented footballers with 30 high quality youngsters hailing from. Much as expected France, Germany and Spain all featured in the top ten, but I didn't expect to see Croatia this high in the list. The Croats actually produced more high potential newgens than more established European countries such as England, Holland and Portugal.
Across Africa the spread of newgens was quite evenly spread, with Nigeria and Tunisia appearing in the top ten and Morocco, Senegal, Cameroon, Algeria and the Ivory Coast all making the top twenty.
On average, all of the top nations produced at least one newgen with high PA every season whilst Brazil weighed in with a staggering 3.8 per season!
Furthermore, if you are considering forming a partnership with another club in the hope of signing their best young players then you might want to consider ASEC (Ivory Coast), NK Dinamo (Croatia), Enyimba (Nigeria), ES Tunis (Tunisia) or Gremio (Brazil).
Having looked at where the best newgens were being generated I turned my attention to the type of players that were being introduced. Here, there were echoes of the playground where every young kid wants to play upfront. Almost a third of all newgens created during the experiment were most naturally suited to playing as a striker, with wingers and central midfielders the second most suitable roles. At the other end of the scale, however, only 7% of newgens were most suited to playing as defensive or attacking midfielders.
There were more Brazilian youngsters suited to playing as wingers and central midfielders than any other nationality whilst Italy produced the most strikers.
So that concludes the experiment findings, some of the results were expected but others came as a complete surprise. I'll finish the article with one last statistic, over the course of the experiment there was one newgen created with the highest possible PA score of 200. Where was he he from? Slovakia!
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