Youth Academy Facts

The Youth Academy seems to be most people's favourite topic. When it was introduced a brief bit of information was released but there hasn't been much since. Here I'm going to look at this in more detail and see what I can extrapolate from what we do know.

17 Year Olds

The YA release came with 2 graphs. The one below shows distribution of skill for 17 year olds according to YA investment:

What does this graph tell us? Well for a start it's a little misleading. For 300k investment 16% of 17yo players are 4 skill, around 1.5% are 5 skill? Actually no! If you add the amount together for each investment line you see they all add up to approx 23.5% as shown in this chart below:

	Skill						Tot 17yo	Av Skill
Invest	1	2	3	4	5
0	5	14.25	4	0.25			23.5	2.0
50		4.25	13.75	5.25	0.25		23.5	3.1
100		1.75	13.25	8.25	0.25		23.5	3.3
150		1	11.25	10.75	0.5		23.5	3.5
200		0.5	9.5	13	0.5		23.5	3.6
250		0.25	7.75	14.75	0.75		23.5	3.7
300		0	6	16.5	1.5		24	3.8

So the first thing I would read from this graph is around 23.5% of youths are 17yo. Once you realise that you can see that the amount of 17yo players at these skill levels is approx 4x what the graph shows, so for a 5 star academy around 65% of 17yo players will come in at 4 skill, and around 7% at 5 skill - but that 16% of all talents are 17/4.

Distribution of youths by age

Another useful piece of information would be distribution of youths according to each possible age 16-20. That has never been made officially available but we might be able to get a good approximation from a X11 stats site that was setup a few years ago.

The following chart shows age distribution of promoted youths

Obviously this is promoted youths only so certain ages may be biased a bit but taking some rough figures I get distribution along the following lines:

Age	Percent
16	6.1%
17	28.8%
18	33.0%
19	23.3%
20	8.9%

This is based on around 18,000 promoted youths. Admittedly the data is quite old but when the YA came in the distribution of ages and SQs wasn't altered, just the skill. Not a perfect match to the official X11 data but reasonably close and I would figure less of the older players are on a decent path so less get promoted - a 20yo pretty much needs to be 6 skill or have amazing SQs to bother.

In truth I'm not sure how much the xestats data is useful. I have no doubt the data is correct but this is players that are promoted so many poorer players will be excluded, and that is probably older players.

The old tactics screen

Once upon a time Xpert Eleven used to have a great tactics page - and this was replaced with a prettier, more modern looking page. I guess there was an expected backlash from the older players and so the game has an option to use the old tactics page which most of the top players still do. If you are new to X11 you might not know the old tactics page exists and you are missing out.

Selecting which tactics page to use

Select the Settings option on the profile menu and you will get the page up where you can choose your tactics page.

Using the old screen

Just tick the top button to choose to use the old tactics page. The screen looks like the one below. It's a lot clearer and simpler to use and gives good visibility of your opponent and theur previous games. 

You have separate tabs to select your team, tactics and substitutions but it shouldn't take much effort to work out.

Newer CR Calc - being tested again

X11 skill calculator

Updated 29/7/14: Improved projection of DV figures for players 16-25
Predict peak skill for players <27 with 4+ CRs

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How to use

Cut and paste the player's skill data from their CR history page into the textbox.

Press "Read Data" to strip out the CR data,
If the data needs corrections then edit it in the boxes below.
Press "Calculate" to check the player's exact skill

Skill	Percentage

Player injuries

Player injuries - the curse of so many people's lives. There are certain things you can do to help the situation.

Fragile players

Fragile players have more chance of getting injured - but they don't increase the overall chance of the team to get injuries. It's more like they are a magnet for the injury. Certainly having lesser players with fragile can be an advantage because it reduces the chance of your better players to pick up an injury - hooray!

The downside to fragile players is the injuries are supposed to be longer.

Red crosses

The game engine does try to be fair on occasion and one of these situations seems to be with red cross injuries. In my experience it's rare for a team to have more than 2 red cross injuries at a given time.

In teh past I've tried to gain advantage from this by going in to key games with injuries but paying bruise believing the opponent had more chance to sustain an injury than I do.

I've even seen it suggested targetting injured players from the xfer market - a bit extreme and hard to acomplish though.

Training

I always train players to coincide with the day the injury ends. If you train a player who is injured their form will only increase to a maximum of 10 and won't increase if it is already above this.

Note that the time the player injury shows is in local time so it may show the day before it actually ends (eg in the UK ending on the 25th at 23:00 means training needs to end on the 26th.)

Retirement decoys

It's always a pain when your best players in Xpert Eleven decide to retire. Way back this used to happen at the Change Report so you just got an email saying a given player had retired - no warning. It was changed so you get informed they are retiring that season so at least you know what to do with them - but still it's a pain.

There are 2 facts that have been noticed about player retirements:

• There are a maximum of 5 players who can retire each season.
• The retiring players start from the top of your team so goalkeepers first, then defenders, midfielders, forwards

Putting these 2 pieces of information together has spawned the idea of retirement decoys. The idea is buy a lot of old players, 35+, especially keepers or defenders and if enough of these choose to retire your older players may be safe for another season or more.

I tested this out with one of my teams a while back

Obviously you want to be buying the cheapest possible players and >34 is best. I bought these players mid season and I believe none of them chose to retire when I had my CR. 

My opinion is this approach doesn't work. Players generally have a max 50% chance to retire so to keep all your players safe you need an average 10 decoys. Mine didn't retire at all - maybe you need them there from the start of the season to maximise the chance of that. Still some people do try it - perhaps you could use it to your advantage?