The team I am playing today in Youth Twenty/20 has a roster of 23 players made up entirely of youth recruits, with 90% of them being very good to excellent...meanwhile we scrape around on our arses trying to get a single good recruit a season. What the **** is going on? I have emailed admin to clarify what happens with the youth recruits as it has been something that has been annoying me for a while. When a team can get 100% of its members via youth recruits and not have to spend any money on players, that's a fairly ****ing significant advantage you would think.
As a comparison, 10 of our players (out of 20) are youth recruits. 3 of them are there because I started to realise I was unlikely to get anything better, so while they may be ready to play for the team when they are about 20, I am not going to get much out of them before then. There's still a chance 1 or 2 of them will never be good enough unless we are totally desperate.
I thought maybe there was some mechanism in place to help the lower-ranked teams by giving them access to more youth recruits, but this bloke's team is ranked 10th in the country, so he's not exactly a slouch. He's going to flog me today, because I have played all of my younger players, and I don't have 16 year olds rated between 30k & 35k like he does.
My affiliate team has a similar hit rate - 10 players are recruits, but I have only had 1 in the past 3 and a bit seasons rated over 24k, which is where I'd want them to be for Youth 1.1. So out of the 10, maybe 5 have been good.
This is a pretty short sample size - my 2 teams, but in comparison, 23 out of 23 recruits seems like a hell of an outlier.
