Many people seem to have found that after they offer certain contracts to youth players the player’s status is permanently stuck to ‘contract accepted’. Trying something new, I kept the default wages the same but increased the length of the contract by 1 year. However, there is a very simple way around this. When this happened to me I went about increasing the wage offers by £1,000, £2,000, even £3,000, and all of them were rejected by the player. Often youth players don’t even accept the default wages that you offer them. So it is advisable to leave the wages amount more or less as it is. Secondly, if the player does accept the contract this can trigger the contract glitch (more on that later). For a start, if you take the Chief Exec’s advice this can lead to the player rejecting the contract and saying the wages aren’t high enough. Here is my first piece of advice – totally ignore what the Chief Executive says. Interestingly, the weekly wage the Chief Executive suggests is often much lower than the default amount already entered into the ‘Salary (per week)’ area – for example, on my screen right now is a youth player whose suggested wage (by the Chief Exec) is £1,000 a week, but the default amount is £6,000 a week. There is also a section where your Chief Executive suggests what you should offer the player. Here you can set the weekly wage for the player, the length of the contract and the bonus per goal scored or clean sheet kept by the player. This is where you set out the terms of a contract with the player. If you press A (or X on the Playstation) you can go into the ‘offer contract’ screen. This means that the player is old enough to be offered a contract and join your first team. If a player is 16 or over they will have a green tick under the heading ‘eligible’.
When you go into the Youth Squad screen you will see that the ages of all your youth players are listed.
If you get no offers then reload and try again (although see point 3, especially the bit about a player’s age). Secondly, if you intend to send young players out on loan, create a backup save at the start of the transfer window. That way you avoid wasting what could be valuable time. If the contracts are declined quit, reload the backup save and try again with an improved contract offer. *NOTE* I would recommend creating a backup save before you offer any contracts to youth players.
I’ll start by laying out what sort of contract to offer your youth players and how to avoid some common glitches, before moving on to how to actually develop the players. But what about developing these prospects into world-beating players? Well, this guide should help you along that process. So far the guides on this blog have covered finding great youth talent.