There’s nothing Football Manager players love more than unearthing a wonderkid with the potential to become one of the greatest players on the planet without having to pay nine-figure transfer fees to sign them. To that end, working on your club’s youth academy system is an important part of building a successful farm system that can provide many key players at the lower level and which can produce world talents even when your club reaches the big time.
These are the best academies in the world in Football Manager 26, whether you’re looking to take over at a club with an elite academy or just wondering where to plunder from with your own scouting.
What Makes A Good Academy In Football Manager 26
Like all considerations in Football Manager, ranking the top academies requires more than simply checking one key attribute and choosing the highest option. There are several key factors at a club that determine the quality of both youth recruitment and development, all of which are required to build a truly elite talent factory. These are the critical club abilities to keep in mind when assessing academy strength:
- Youth Recruitment: The first chance your club’s ratings will have on the development of youth in your academy is through the Youth Recruitment rating, which is responsible for determining the raw talent levels entering into your youth system. Stronger youth recruitment makes for stronger prospects at creation.
- Youth Facilities: Once created, your youth players spend time in the youth ranks of your club, still operating at a level below where you can access them and check their abilities yourself. Your Youth Facilities represent the accommodations players have during this phase, meaning stronger facilities will help get the most out of your recruitment.
- Junior Coaching: This represents the training and mentorship players receive while in your academy and works along with your Youth Recruitment and Youth Facilities to set the overall level of talent on offer when your new recruitment batches drop.
- Training Facilities: The main training facilities are responsible for the development of all the teams you have access to, including reserves and youth sides, once the players in them are active and findable in the database. This means that making your overall facilities stronger is still essential to get the most out of your academy, even those developing in the lower sides.
The Best Academies In Football Manager 26
The best academies are those that carry strong ratings in each of the key considerations for a successful youth academy. While some of these attributes are hidden and can only be inferred in-game, FM players excel at breaking down and sharing the full database of information, so with the help of FM Scout’s academy rating assessments, we’ve highlighted the clubs doing it all right to generate the most consistently strong youth products in the world:
- Barcelona: La Masia is a world-famous academy, and with good reason. While Barcelona has spent recent years repeatedly spiraling into more and more levels of convoluted lever-pulling to keep their new signings La Liga eligible, they’ve been bolstered by having so many young starlets to plug in. Unsurprisingly, it’s nearly perfect in-game, too, with 20 ratings across the big four categories except for Team Facilities, which sits at a still-impeccable 19.
- Manchester City: It’s another massive club near the top of the list hear as the Cityzens also possess an elite talent pipeline. While the club’s reputation since moving into the big time with deep pockets has been on the high cost of first team acquisitions, that doesn’t mean it’s been the only focus. All the big clubs know that strong academies are more valuable than ever in a time with financial fair play restrictions, and City has built out its own accordingly. Like Barcelona, they are nearly perfect, with the lone difference being their single 19-rating is for Junior Coaching instead.
- Chelsea: Speaking of big spenders who still believe in a strong youth system, Chelsea has gained infamy of late for buying roughly all the players on earth, but it’s not a system entirely devoted to just finding the biggest names. Instead, Chelsea also invests heavily in its youth and reserve squads, signing lots of young talent with high potential. This allows them to use the players who make the grade while profiting off the sales of those who don’t, to then fund larger moves. Their facilities are all perfect, while Junior Coaching of 19 and Youth Recruitment of 18 ensure those facilities are full of potential stars getting good instruction.
- Ajax: Stepping back from the elite of the elite clubs, we find a Dutch side that has fallen off from its Europe-challenging days but remains one of the most well-respected clubs outside of the big five leagues in large part due to its world-class youth system. Many of the top players around the world’s largest side have spent time in Ajax’s academy developing into world-beating talents. Like Chelsea, they receive 20s for both facility ratings, with a strong 19 Youth Recruitment and 18 Junior Coaching to help ensure the prospects have strong abilities when they hit the database proper.
- FC Liefering: While big clubs have more resources at their disposal, they’re not the only ones building out their youth, with some smaller clubs running a model based around developing young players to both field for cheap and sell for profit. Despite currently being in the second tier of a non-power nation in Austria, FC Liefering has one of the strongest academies in Football Manager 26 due to serving as a feeder club for RB Salzburg in the top flight. They hold 19 ratings across the board for coaching and facilities, remarkably strong for a club of their stature, while still bringing in 18-rated initial Youth Recruitments, and are an excellent place to look for young gems.
