We Built A Wonderkid Finding Tool for FM

I found another genius who was able to make something amazing for the Football Manager community and now that we have it working, it’s time for you all to have it too! This will help you put together the database for your save and understand exactly where the wonderkids are coming from each time. It is, in a rare turn of events, basically perfect and clears up so much in Football Manager I do hope you enjoy it.

There is also a tool to break down every personality type so you can visually see, in multiple ways, what each personality and media handling style means on Football Manager. This tool should just make you more comfortable on FM. Honestly, it will change the way I put together databases on Football Manager for the rest of my life.

Much Love,
FM Senpai

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Zealand Playing:

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Podcasts:

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Zealand Stuff:

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Editor Gadjet Stuff:

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Check out the Animator Tomleggosaurus on:

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Thanks for watching and scrolling!

#FootballManager #Gaming #Hashtags

[adrianomarincic]

The disrespect on Croaita in FM is legit crazy I mean 2 semifinals in a row and only 0.3 Wonderkids, less than Thailand, Mozambique, Bulgaria and Tanzania 😭😭😭

[lyphgdm]

I should clarify a couple of things I maybe didn't explain properly:

1. The numbers shown are averages for the first intake. They are usually lower in later years but the distribution doesn't change, i.e. the ranking stays the same at the high end. The lower end will come down to chance from intake to intake, there aren't many countries that produce great players every single year.

2. Filtering the map/tables on potential is filtering the players, not the average for the country. So if you set it to 150, you're only seeing data for players of 150+ potential, not the countries that produced 150+ potential on average.

It's cool to see something I made in a video, I wasn't expecting my own prayer 😄

[Ignasir_]

The person that made this is clearly insane. Also I love it and are going to use it all the time.

[rosshancock]

Surprised to not see Croatia, Uruguay or Peru in the top 30! Feels like I always have a player from at least one/two of them in my squads

[Sasquatch]

This is the kind of info good enough to make a grown man cry. God bless the man that provided us with this.

[tomleggosaurus]

Probably one of the coolest tools I've seen. Thanks Steven!

Fun fact, on the regions screen the US state of Georgia is coloured in as South Eastern Europe, and the country Georgia has been left blank 😄

[indiekiddo]

Amazing work here! So if I care most about 1) the largest number of quality regens and 2) quick game processing speed, it looks like Database Setup 3 (1 playable league, top players added) gives you the most bang for your buck, as it has significantly shorter processing time than more playable leagues or all players added but about the same number of 150+ and 180+ regens. Might tick a few more boxes in the advanced db setup to get that number closer to 150k, but very glad to know you don't need to load a whole bunch of playable leagues and really slow your game down to make sure you get good regens!

[pwalmsley]

Scandinavia has been a goldmine on my save. My two strikers: a Dane and a Norwegian. Both 20 years old and already EPL quality.

[GIBBO]

I’ve already got a wonderkid finding tool…scout South America 🤣

[Mombot_z]

Great job analytical genius Steven! 👏🏻 👏🏻 👏🏻. Also, Congratulations Zealand on 250k subs! 🎉👏🏻🎉👏🏻

[e_eyster]

Glad South Africa popped up here. They are an amazing country in my saves where you are in that "team trying to be able to make UCL knockout proper" phase, especially when you are in a nation with a little less global pulling power for elite wonderkids. Every year I just send most of my scouts there to check out all the regens.

[Kimera]

Zealand and Steven are a blessing to our community

[confusafs]

That's a really cool tool, great job from everyone involved. To dive a little bit deeper into that subject, from the perspective of someone who has been testing and playing around with this for years, youth ratings are a bit misleading. Or at least the way we, as the FM community, interpreted it throughout the years is misleading (and the way SI sold "dynamic" youth ratings as a big deal played into that).

Every season, when the game does the youth intakes, it runs an algorithm to generate the newgens. This doesn't seem to be done separately by country; it seems to be done at a global level. First thing this algorithm needs to do is figure out how many players need to appear in each country. That is because the game wants to maintain the number of players everywhere similar to how it was in the beginning of the save. So if you had 10k players in England and 2 in Bhutan, it will try to keep it around 10k in England and 2 in Bhutan forever (give or take a couple). Because of that, countries that get more players always have a better shot at drawing better players, just from sheer quantity. This is why England is number 1 in that list, and Scotland is so high.

Also notice that the game will attempt to keep the average and distribution of potential abilities in the world similar to the beginning of the save. If we have 30 players with PA 180+ in the first season, the game will try to stay around that quantity forever. If we play with global youth ratings in the editor (set all countries to 1 or to 200), we can see that it is possible to statistically change the level of football in the world, but not by a massive degree. This means that every season FM will look at the players who retired and have an idea of how many players at each PA range it needs to create to keep the average balanced. So instead of randomizing a PA based on the country's youth rating for each newgen, what the game seems to do is generate some sort of list of PAs that need to be created, and then distribute them to the countries through some sort of draw, which takes into account youth ratings.

All of that gets us to the following question: if you have a country with 200 youth rating that gets 1 newgen every year; and a country with 1 youth rating that gets 200 newgens every year; which one has the most chances of drawing the newgen with 185 PA that the game must create? We don't know the exact math for that, but since youth ratings tend to be quite close between most countries, those with higher player counts tend to have a huge advantage.

This also explains why playable leagues generate better players much more often - due to sheer quantity (although there is one more factor on that, which relates to how different the youth intake algorithm is for playable and non-playable leagues, but this comment is already unbelievably huge, so I won't get into details - I did comment about it in Tom FM's "I gave EVERY country in FM23 the MAXIMUM Youth Rating" video, though, in case anyone is interested :) ).

One more thing to take into account is that there are other factors affecting this distribution of newgens, which might impact it even more than youth ratings. Youth facilities is one of them. When FM distributes players, it also needs to take into account how many players each team in the world is going to get, and how good they are supposed to be. That makes matters even more confusing, because the teams with better facilities are supposed to generate the best players, but there are some limitations to which countries they can come from. Teams in England might get newgens from pretty much everywhere, but that is rare. Most of them are still English, and then from the rest of UK and Ireland. Since the game is forced to generate a lot of English newgens, and is forced to generate a lot of strong newgens in England, it ends up generating a lot of strong English players, as a consequence of both. In the opposite way, if you go and make a country like Bhutan, which has no connections with any large footballing nation in the FM database, a 200 youth rating, the game won't easily be able to make these players appear in England, France, Germany or Spain, where the best youth facilities tend to be. So it makes it even harder for Bhutan to get the great players it was supposed to, at least according to our interpretation of youth ratings.

Finally, there are some indications/suggestions that Nation Importance and even sheer Reputation are other attributes that might be part of this algorithm, and maybe even have a stronger impact than youth ratings, but I haven't seen or done any strong tests on these.

[RealSmul]

My boys in the Faroe Islands in top 55, let's gooo!

[aakarmamtora]

That out of context fred and mctominay joke damn. Funny since both have come good at different times this season especially fred.

[alexanderlowe]

Easy, 200 youth rating database. Then there's a wonderkid in every corner that you turn. No escape.

[iamthebiscotti]

Can anyone explain how Scotland only had a 1.0 on the graphic but was rated higher?

[ST-qhtd]

as a moroccan I love the fact that my country made the list! (25% of every wonderkid from belgium, netherlands, spain and france is probably a moroccan)

[danielsmith]

In FM22 I found Serbia to be a real hot bed for wonderkids. In my current save on FM23, I have noticed that Mexico are producing an abundance of talented youngsters.

[jakobgrndal]

Who was the last IRL "Wonderkid" that South Africa produced? Benni McCarthy some 25'ish years ago -