Making improvements to your youth academy and training facilities

Like most things in the game, your youth academy and training facilities have a rating between 1 and 99, with 99 being the best possible facilities anywhere in the world.

As you progress through the game, you'll need to keep increasing the ratings of those facilities so that they meet the changing requirements of your club.

In real life, the standard of a club's youth and training facilities will be based on a whole host of factors, including:

  • Buildings
  • Pitches
  • Staff
  • Equipment
  • Technology
  • Nutrition

...and so on. But to keep things simple in the game, we've given your facilities a generic rating that includes all of those factors.

Otherwise you'd get bogged down in the day-to-day elements like hiring cleaners or buying new tracksuits!

So when you improve your club's facilities (for instance from a rating of 75 to 76), that doesn't mean you're knocking down the old facilities and building something brand new.

It might just mean you've hired some new staff, or bought some new equipment, or improved the standard of the training pitches.

These small, incremental changes to your facilities also means you can easily downgrade them if you get relegated, or if your finances are struggling.

People often (and understandably) get annoyed when sometimes the game automatically downgrades the rating of their facilities.

But that's a natural part of the sport - equipment will get old and need replacing; buildings need maintenance; pitches might need improving... etc.

So over time it's inevitable that your facilities ratings will go down, and you'll need to spend some money to keep them up to the previous standard.

However one misunderstanding is that people sometimes think they've "wasted money" upgrading their facilities when they get a message a few weeks later saying that the rating has gone down again.

That's not actually true - here's an example:

Imagine you upgraded your youth academy from 75 to 76. Then a month or so later you see a news story saying your academy rating has gone back down to 75.

That doesn't mean you wasted the money upgrading it to 76. Because if you hadn't done the upgrade, your academy would have been downgraded anyway, from 75 to 74.

So the money you spent means your academy is still 1 rating higher than it would have been.