FIFA 23: How To Develop Your Youth Academy (2024)

You can play the Career Mode in FIFA 23 in many ways. You can take on a small team with money issues and lead them to the first division, or take your favorite team and prepare them to give a European Tour by playing in the Champions League.

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There are plenty of ways to be successful in a Career Mode; you can buy young players with exciting potential or create a full team out of free agents, but the best and most profitable way to create a good team in a Career Mode is by developing your Youth Academy. It'll give you all that you need on a team if you know how to work on it.

How To Recruit Players With A Scouting Network

The first step toward glory through the Youth Academy is having a good scouting Network. These scouts will have the responsibility of finding the best players for your team. They have two important features you must pay close attention to, Experience and Judgment stats and the type of players they can scout.

Experience and Judgment

These two stats are important as they'll determine how good the players the scout can find will be and how many players he'll scout for your team.

• Experience will determine how many players the scout will bring to you on his report. If the Experience stat is low, the list of players will be low.
• Judgment determines how good will the players the scout brings be. High Judgment brings better players.

A scout with high Experience, but low Judgment will bring a lot of bad players, while a scout with low Experience, but great Judgment will only bring a handful players but they will be excellent.

Your aim is to sign the scouts with the best stats without seriously compromising your budget.

Types Of Players

Here's when things get interesting, as you can determine the type of players you can ask a scout to bring to your team. There are a lot of options, and here's an explanation of all of them:

• Technically Gifted - These players are known to be great dribblers with great ball control. They are also great long-distance shooters and can score goals through free kicks with ease. This type of player can play on the CM, RM, LM, RW, LW, CAM, or ST.

• Winger - The players of this type will be very fast. They can play at RW, LW, RWB, LWB and ST and are known for being fast and good with the ball on their feet. These players are also known for being short!
• Physically Strong - The players of this type will be very bulky; they'll have good Aggression and Stamina and, most of the time, they'll be tall, which is great, as most of these players can play at CM, RB and LB, RWB and LWB, CDM, and ST. If you want a flagpole in the opposite area, you must scout a physically strong striker.
• Playmaker - The Playmakers can be at almost any place on the field, and they are good at passing, long passing, crossing, free kick accuracy, and any other technical stat. From here, you can farm a good CB with a great ball pass to play from the back, a great Busquets-like CM to create opportunities for the STs, or a CF with good skill to send balls to the ST.
• Goalkeeper - This one is straightforward; if you ask a scout to bring Goalkeepers, he'll bring goalies to your team.
• Attacker - These players are known to have a slow start, as they can be great technical players, but we have lacking physical stats, which means you'll see them tired pretty soon into the matches. With good development, you can make them great playmakers who are also physically strong, like a combination of Technically Gifted and Physically Strong types. These lads need a lot of development, but the reward is great.
• Defensive Minded - These players are great defenders; they are bulky, tall, and strong lads ready to protect the team. These players can be CB, RB or LB, RWB or LWB, or CDM.

How To Choose Players With Good Overall and Potential

After carefully choosing the types of players you'll want for your team, the scout reports start coming to your desk. It's time to know which players will be good and which players won't make it into the Youth Academy.

In fact, it's really easy to choose; the only thing you need to do is to be aware of their market price. If the player has a low price (ranging from $100.000 to $250.000), you'll find low-potential low overall players who aren't good enough for a big team and will take a long time to be decent for a small team. It's not recommended to invest in these players.

Now, if the players' price starts ranging from $400,000 to $700,000, you might be having a decent squad player that can be good in the future. It's more of a luck thing, so invest in them at your own risk.

Lastly, if the player's price ranges from $900,000 upwards, you might have a great player. If the price is high, the player has more chances to be already good to be part of the squad and might only need a loan move to develop for a bit to be ready to go.

Finding The Best Development Plan For Your Players

After bringing in the best players from the scout report, it's time to develop them, so they can be good and ready to hit the ground running. If you got a player with a high overall (60 upwards) who has more than 16 years, include him in the first team and send him on a loan. There will be a lot of teams wanting to get him, and rest assured he'll come back as a great player ready to be the best on your team. But if you picked a low overall high-potential player, you might want to set up a Development Plan for him.

The first thing you might want to know is the best position for a player. The quickest way to know this is by heading to Sofifa's Player Calculator, where you'll have to write the specific stats of your player, and it'll tell you which is the best position for him. It's important to change your player's position to the one the calculator says, so he'll strive there and will also have great development.

Now let's talk about the Development Plans. In the Development Plan screen, you'll see that the players have four essential skills that will determine their quality; these are Skill Moves, Weak Foot, Attacking Work Rate, and Defensive Work Rate. Ideally, you want to develop the one your player is the best in, but in certain cases, you might want a player that has the potential to have a role you need to cover. If that's the case, you must see your team's strategy and see what you need, then you must act accordingly.

Let's say you have a great Winger, and you want him to be back and forth in the field, trying to act as a Box-to-box player. If that's the case, you might want to develop his Defensive Work Rate. If you want that same Winger to get in between the opposite's defensive lines, then you might want to develop his Attacking Work Rate. If you want the Winger to do fast and good-quality ball driving, you might want to develop his Skill Moves, and if you want a Right-footed Winger to play at the right, you might want to develop his Weak Foot. Apply this way of thinking to all your players, and you'll succeed.

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