How to Develop Wonderkids With The Burton Albion Trick

Here's how you can develop your wonderkids with a method I call The Burton Albion Trick.

Here’s how you can develop your wonderkids with one simple trick that gets overlooked by many Football Manager players.

No matter how you play FM, one thing unites us all: we all love wonderkids. Nothing turns a good save into a great save like a healthy crop of talented youngsters coming through your youth intake. The internet is full of various different guides and tips on how to develop your highly promising youngsters, but most of them miss what I think is one of the best tricks to getting the most out of your youngsters.

The conventional wisdom is that before they turn 18, your youngsters need good training facilities and good coaching. After turning 18, they need good facilities and gametime. You can work on building up your own facilities, but this can take a lot of time and money that you’d rather save for your first team transfer budget. In that case, there’s a simple way around it.

Enter Burton Albion

A lowly League One club, the Brewers don’t seem to be a hotbed for developing your youth, on the surface. But a simple look at the club’s facilities tells us more.

Burton Albion are blessed with state of the art youth facilities and state of the art training facilities. This is because they have the use of the English national team’s St George’s Park. This is an absolute gift for the club, and a dream for any Premier League side looking to get their youngsters high-level training at the best facilities in the country.

So how do we take advantage of Burton Albion’s gift to youth development?

Step One - Get your board to trust you

This might take a season or two, but you need to develop a strong relationship with your board. Play the short-term game and rack up wins, overachieving in the league and cups is the easiest way to do this.

Step Two - Ask for a feeder club

Tell the board you need a feeder club to get match experience for your youngsters. If they trust you, they’ll ask you to make a recommendation from any club in the football pyramid. On my Southampton save, it took me until around September of the second season to earn this amount of respect from the board, so while this is a bit of a time commitment, it’s far quicker than trying to upgrade your own facilities to that level.

Step Three - Reap the rewards

Send your best and most promising youngsters to Burton Albion and keep an eye on their development. You’ll be paying their wages, so this is a win-win for Burton, you can even set it so your youngsters keep playing with your u23s and u18s to ensure they’re learning your tactics and getting the benefit of your superior coaches. Once your players are of a standard to play in a League One side, they’ll get gametime for Burton at a very good standard, bolstering their development even more.

Final Thoughts

So there you have it, my number one tip for youth development. I hope you’ve found this helpful, and go on to enjoy a long and beneficial affiliation with Burton Albion.