ManagerLeague : Online football manager : Gaining Part 4: Age, Gaining & Data

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Gaining Part 4: Age, Gaining & Data (02/03/2014 04:45)

"Surrounding young players with older ones probably helps their gains - but perhaps not that much."

- Belizio

I'm going to take a diversion from working my way through the list of gaining mantras to go back to the question of how much older players help your younger ones gain (I know you're all desperate to know whether the pumpkin thing is real, don't worry, I haven't forgotten). In a previous post, I wondered whether huge gains on young players were strongly influenced by the age of their teammates, or whether it was mostly just the fact that these young players were getting in close to 200 friendlies a year. I looked at the gaining rate of my own (medium-star, surrounded by all ages) young players, calculated roughly what I could expect from them if I simply made sure they played in as many games as possible, and concluded it was high enough that it probably accounted for most of the gains from "youth farm" teams.

That was based at least partly on a gut sense of what a "good" season's gain should look like, so today I'd like to run a quick analysis with a bit more data. As a jumping-off point, here's a nice blog post from (successful Dutch league-and-cup-winning manager) Getzome with a bunch of good advice for those of you who are relatively new to the game. Read it if you haven't already! Midway through the blog though, when discussing player gaining, Getzome stresses one single rule for improving your player gains:

"The key to success lies in just one thing: *drumroll drumroll* - Old Players."

- Getzome

I think this is exaggerated. I think success lies in a very wide range of factors, just one of which is the surrounding players' ages, and that this factor has less of an effect on gaining than reading most of the guides on the blogs would have you believe. In short, I think it's more possible to balance a competitive squad with decent player gains than is widely assumed.

Now just to be clear - my aim is not to suggest that some people are "wrong" for playing the game a certain way, or to pick on any particular guide (I'm just using Getzome's as a jumping-off point because he provides some nice data we can look at, and makes the typical argument that you read in most ManagerLeague guides). Nor am I arguing that age and experience have no effect on gaining. Instead, I see most guides - and therefore a majority of players - adapting identical strategies to build up their teams or cash, and I think this is at least partly because there's a prevailing wisdom that you "have to" do things a certain way if you're going to be competitive. So the aim here is not to tell you that you can't use the 3-young-players-surrounded-by-38-year-olds strategy if you want, but to point out that maybe you don't have to, and that there are legitimate alternative strategies available.

Comparing Strategies

To directly compare the effects of different age strategies, I've looked at my own gains for this season, along with Getzome's team (Baronie) and the other nineteen sides making up the current top-20 gainers in the team rankings. That gives us a range of teams who a) are all playing plenty of friendlies and gaining well, and b) are using different strategies. Now, obviously, the total number of gains earned by a team is not that informative on its own - the sides on top will tend to be ones with large squads, younger players, and those who have played lots of friendlies already this season. So, to really see how well each strategy is working I've looked at each team (after S.111 Round 19 but before the weekend cups) and noted the age, number of league games, number of friendlies and total attributes gained for each player on those teams. From this we can get a rough estimate of the number of attributes earned per game for each player*. Here's a plot of how many attributes per match were earned by players of different ages on these teams:

Figure 1: Average number of attributes earned per match for different ages.

Data from 21 strongly gaining teams; Season 111 Rounds 1-19.

Here we can see of course that younger players tend to gain faster than older ones, as we already know. Your youngsters should be getting an attribute for roughly every five or 6 competitive games they play (or roughly every 8-10 friendlies) while your over 30s probably need to play twice as many games for each attribute. The important thing about this is that we can now subtract the appropriate rate from each player's actual attributes/game to see how well they're doing compared to what we'd expect, given their age and the number of games they've played in. Let's call this the Adjusted Gaining Rate.

Also, for each team we can figure out the average age of the lineups they actually played (not just the average squad age, but the age of the players on the field), because we know how many matches each of their player appeared in. The average lineup age should be a decent measure of the extent to which that team adopted the "lots of old players" strategy. So, we should see higher Adjusted Gaining Rates per player for older lineups (but lower actual gains, since they're playing fewer young players in friendlies). Which is what we see, albeit with quite a bit of variation:

Figure 2: Adjusted Gaining Rate for lineups of different ages.

That said, there are two teams in this dataset that look a bit different to all the others - the ones in the bottom left corner. Those sides have an average starting lineup of below 20, and have played zero players above the age of 30 this season. They also have pretty terrible gaining rates on their players. That's not to say their teams haven't racked up big gains - they're in the top-20 so far this season - but that's only because they have large squads, filled with young players, and have played most of their friendlies already, and these things are masking the fact that their gains are way below what you would expect from their players. So a pretty solid conclusion you can draw from that is that you're not going to get huge gains on individual players if you surround them with 20-year-olds.

OK, let's not do that. But how old do we really need our squad to be? Let's instead look just at the sides with at least some 31+ year-olds in their squad. Suddenly, the pattern isn't quite as conclusive:

Figure 3: Adjusted Gaining Rate for lineups of different ages (but with at least some players over 30).

That's a tiny correlation of just 0.07, way below the size you'd need to be confident there was really an effect. You hear from almost every gaining guide that you should aim for an average lineup age of 28 or more. Now, of the top gaining sides this season, only a couple are getting close to that kind of average age, and with pretty mixed results. So:

Although you definitely need at least some older players to get decent gains, there appears to be far less difference between an average age of 22 and one of 28.

Now, (Champion's-League-League-Cup-and-8!!-times-English-League-Champion) Crazy Lion has a very detailed blog post on gaining which you should read. Interestingly, in point 32 Crazy Lion suggests that:

"Spinner maintains that having one older player per line will help with gains just as much as filling your squad with older players"

- Crazy Lion

I think that leaves open the possibility that older and older squads lead to diminishing returns. It's definitely possible that 3 youngsters surrounded by 38-year-olds will gain slightly better than 5 surrounded by 31-year-olds, but I don't think it is certain. More importantly, if it's true, the size of the boost seems to be quite limited. If you enjoy pouring all your efforts into a very small handful of players each year and striving for the highest gains you can on those guys then go for it! It can't hurt to follow that strategy to its extreme. But if you're more interested in keeping your players, growing organically, and maintaining a competitive squad over a longer time, I think that's also possible. Perhaps it's more of a challenge, but that's why we play the game, right? And your team can always rise again if a strategy you try doesn't work out, so why not mix things up and try doing things a different way? Do whatever makes you enjoy the game most, and don't stress out about following a prescribed route to success!

One last thing. When we talk about gaining, we always talk about the effect on a single player - how do we maximise his gains? It's useful to remember that we're always trading off between gains on one player and those on the others, especially with a strategy that fills up most of our squad with older players. Of course it's true that +6Q on three players is better than +3Q on six players, but is it better than +5Q on six players? +5Q on ten players? That's a call you have to make based on your circumstances. So remember, the strongest effect that you see in this dataset is that maximising gain on a few players reduces your gains on everyone else:

Figure 4: Average gains per player, per match, for lineups of different ages.

To put this in perspective, here's a back of the envelope calculation. That difference in Figure 4 means somewhere around 100 extra attributes per season for a team with a few 31-year-olds and an average lineup age 22, compared to a team with average lineup age 28. The boost in adjusted gaining rate for focusing on very few youths, and surrounding them with an old lineup - i.e. the trend in Figure 3 - is worth something like 3-6 attributes per season in total. Getting a single extra attribute onto one of your 6 chosen youth players with this strategy is probably 'costing' something like 20 attributes in lost opportunity for other young players. Something to think about.

I hope this post has been interesting, and I'd love to hear what you think in the comments :-) Meanwhile, may your gains be fruitful, whatever strategy you choose!

- Belizio

*Details for those interested: Players can earn through league, cup, player cup or friendly games, plus through normal training and camps, but looking a player's page will only show you how many league and friendly games they played. So I assumed each team played in roughly 4 cup games and 16 player cup games this season, i.e. they won 50% of their knockout matches. Each player was assumed to appear in cups and player cups at the same rate as they appeared in league and friendly games respectively, so a player featuring in 75% of league games and 25% of friendlies was assumed to also have about 3 cup (75% x 4) and 4 player cup (25% x 16) appearances. I assumed every player took part in both of this season's camps, and however many trainings they had fitness available for (for this I assumed stamina of 70-79, losses of 2 fitness per match, and worked out how many trainings they needed to rest in to make the fitness match up over the season so far). I then weighted each type of match and training according to my own data over the previous 3 seasons, i.e. Camps > Matches > Friendlies > Training, with the weight of a competitive match set at 1 - which means all the numbers that follow are "attributes earned per match", but also take into account attributes earned other ways. One attribute per match is roughly equivalent to 0.75 attributes per friendly, 0.45 attributes per training, or 1.9 attributes per camp.

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Moshu wrote:
21:32 15/03 2014

This is an interesting analysis. The inconclusive results come from taking into consideration only age.

Thanks for sharing!

Belizio wrote:
00:37 16/03 2014

Thanks for the comment!

No empirical analysis can technically ever be conclusive, by definition! But the weakness of the trend in figure 3 puts a pretty firm statistical limit on the effectiveness of this "surrounded-by-oldies" strategy. The two main factors detemining gaining (besides luck, which likely determines a huge chunk) are:

1. Number of matches played, which accounts for slightly over 40% of the variance in gains in our dataset;

2. Age of the player gaining, which accounts for a further 15%, more-or-less.

Both are factored into this analysis. Of course the aim of general linear modelling is to test the effect of one or more factors by holding them constant, while allowing everything else to vary. Assuming these other factors are independent of the one we're testing, their effects should average out to zero, leaving us with the effect we're interested in - the bigger our dataset, the smaller the other effects become.

A third factor which is not available is potential, i.e. stars. Since potential should influence the gaining rate of players (though there is some disagreement over just how significant the effect is, and whether it affects rate of gain, maximum attributes, or some combination) it's possible that the potential of players is somehow correlated with gaining strategy. If that's the case, it would affect our results, whereas if the gaining strategy of a team is unrelated to the potential of their players then it would wash out like everything else. Intuitively, if there is a relationship, you might expect teams with the lots-of-older-players strategy to have higher potential players on average, since they are mainly academy/farm sides with a strong focus on developing players (so likely scout heavily to find high potential players). This fits with my non-academy team -- my players average about 3 stars, which is probably less than most academy teams who look for 4-5 stars minimum. But of course if that's the case, then it means those academy sides are getting even worse gains than they should be!

To put it into context, the weakness of the trend in Figure 3 means that the sum total of everything an academy side is doing differently to a 'regular' one - finding 5-star players, surrounding them with oldies, and everything else they do to optimise their gains - is only accounting for 0.2% of their gains. So not only is there no statistical evidence that the strategy really helps above and beyond including a handful of 31-year-olds, even if you believe it's helping - and even if you think this analysis is way off, and underrates the effect by a factor of 2 or 3 - you are still talking about:

Number of matches played per season determining ~40% of your gains;

Player age determining ~15% of your gains;

Academy strategy (very old lineup plus scouting for 4-5* players) determining less than 0.5% of your gains.

So that's really the point I'm making, that the sum effect of this type of strategy is much smaller than people assume, and that if you put any young player in 200 friendlies a year you should get lots of gains.

Anyone is free to interpret the data in any way they wish of course, and the more accurate your interpretation, the better you're likely to do as a manager :-)

MKManager79 wrote:
14:50 22/05 2014

I want to defend Getzome's statement to a degree. There are many factors that determine succes. One of the biggest factors is having high quality players. A consistent way to achieve this is by training a group of 17 year old players as hard as you can. Do this for 6 youngsters, surround them with old players and play them in as many friendlies, player cups, league matches etc. as you can. Sell them once they reach age of 22. You can repeat this to build money and credit reserves. By using few youngsters and lots of oldies your youngsters will gain a few attributes more than other youngsters of the same age each season. This will be the difference between reaching q98 by age 24 and reaching "only" q95 by age 24. This means you can sell your youngsters for the highest prices, i.e. 300M or more.

Belizio wrote:
18:05 22/05 2014

I agree that the strategy works - see paragraph 4. My issue is that it's the ONLY strategy that ever gets talked about or suggested to new players, and it has some major flaws in my eyes:

1. As far as I am concerned, using cheap, low quality players (especially goalkeepers) to improve your gains is an exploit, full stop. It's not realistic and it doesn't involve any skill or decision making. I'm actually quite surprised so many people do it - the game stops feeling like a management sim at that point for me!

2. It's too predictable (this is another issue with the game as it stands). Seventeen-year-olds virtually always gain very quickly and very consistently. What is worse is that you can even measure the potential of a player - i.e. know ahead of time how well they will gain. That's absurd! Potential shouldn't be visible, and not every player should become a superstar. Injuries should derail potential talents, some apparent stars should fizzle, and others should develop late into top players. Then the strategy might be interesting - actually scouting for talent (that 18-yo gained a lot on that terrible team without friendlies, I'll give him a shot). As it stands though, churning out a steady stream of identikit young players might 'work' but again it's unrealistic and unchallenging in my eyes.

3. You sacrifice having a competitive squad when you fill it with 40-year-olds and drop down the divisions. I know people like gaining, and there will always be some academy teams who don't care about winnning matches (aka the *actual point of the game*, surely?), but it seems weird to tell new players they should construct a squad specifically for this one purpose, instead of slowly developing a team that can move them up the divisions and get them hooked on the game. Similarly, if you're developing a team in this way, it's by definition unsustainable, since you have to go through a long boring period of building up cash and being uncompetitive for every team you 'build'. I guess that's fine, I just don't understand why it's an attractive way to play the game.

So I dislike the strategy, but it's fine if it's a niche approach that a small number of players take (with a few tweaks to make it more interesting). The problem is that it is the ONLY strategy anyone advocates. The reason for this is that people believe it's the only effective strategy - that you need to take this approach to get decent gains. This article is pushback against that to some extent. To summarise:

- Youth farm teams gained about 0.5% more on their youths than teams who didn't use the strategy. The effect of surrounding youths with 40-year-olds is less than most people think (hence the jumping off point being Getzome's statement that old players are the only key to success). The reason people think the old-lineup strategy works so well is because those youths play 200 friendlies a season. THAT's the key, NOT the surrounding ages (so long as there are at least a few 31-yos scattered through the lineup, and your lineup age is around 24 or more - playing all youths and no experience will damage your gains as we saw above).

- Youth farm teams gained far fewer attributes overall compared to teams not using the strategy. That's very important to remember: following the strategy ruins the development of the rest of your team, so it's unsustainable.

MKManager79 wrote:
21:51 22/05 2014

I like your reaction a lot. We share the opinion that just training youths in oldy squads in lower divisions does not seem exciting. Working hard on the youngsters gains for 7 seasons or more and then being able to enjoy only a few seasons in the top division and CL or SU seems not a lot of fun to me. On the other hand this strategy will work for everyone if they work hard enough even with limited insight into strategy and tactics. Then comes the question: "What is succes in ML?". Point is the definition of succes differs from one person to the next. Some players just want their favorite player from their team to excel and get lots of awards. Some players just want to be victorious over a friend also playing ML and stuck in the same division. Some players want a q96+ team where as many players as possible are self trained. I've read many blogs and most blogs only emphasize what most of us think we already know about ML and see as truth. Your blogs actually fight this "truth" where needed and I appreciate this a lot. Thanks!

Belizio wrote:
22:14 22/05 2014

Yes! Nail on the head. There's no real-world prize (OK, there's a trophy or something for Super Cup / Champions League :-P) so I think success is very simply whatever makes you enjoy the game, because the whole point of playing is to enjoy it. It's not a means to any other end. For a lot of people, winning games and tournaments is enjoyable, for (many) others it's maximising attribute gains, for others it might be producing individual players and watching them go off and have careers with top teams, others might enjoy the challenge of restricting themselves in certain ways and trying to do as well as possible within those constraints. And most managers will derive enjoyment from a combination of these. All are valid.

So while I don't personally like the standard youth farm strategy, I want to be careful not to give the impression that I don't want *anyone* adopting it. That's fine if that's your aim. I'm more concerned that it's become ubiquitous, and that every new player is essentially told to pursue that strategy (or similar). I think that can be a little off-putting: "Welcome to the game! To be successful you must follow strategy X."

SubhaManager wrote:
21:18 14/08 2014

Really you had made me fell in love with ML for the second time with an eye opening discussion with MKManager79 :)