Asunto: Training Philosophy / Efficiency Chart

I just worked something up that has been in my head for a long while, but I thought some in the community could benefit from it.

The following is a list of training efficiencies and projections for youth development. The baseline for this is that you are starting with 17 year olds. Yes, I know 16 year olds are a thing. There's also 17 year olds picked up late in the season. Starting with week 1 of age 17 seemed the best compromise to factor these two in.

This baseline involves 8 full seasons of training: 17 to 25. This is important to note.

Why these data points?
Because Sokker Assiente loses predictive accuracy starting in age 26. As an example, I've discovered that predictive training at age 26 is around 15-16% higher than the data suggests. Age 27 lis around 22-23% higher.

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There are 1287 training points in a season (using unearthly training, you get 99 points gain per 100). 8 seasons this amounts to 10,296 points of training.


85% training (friendly only) = 1094 training. You miss 193 training points a season (the equivalent of 2 extra trainings!), or 16 training sessions over the 8 seasons .

90% training (10 minutes league) = 1158 training. You miss 128 training points, or 10-11 training sessions over the 8 seasons.

92.8% training (15 minutes league) = 1194 training. You miss 93 training points (essentially, a training session) a season.

95% training (20 minutes league) = 1223 training. You miss 64 training points, or about 5 training sessions over the 8 seasons.

96.6% training (25 minutes league) = 1243 training. You miss 44 training points, or about 3.5 training sessions over the 8 seasons.

After this, the difference in training is miniscule. I would not advise anyone to do more than this just for the sake of training.

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The only additional thing to consider is this:

Since younger trainees train more efficiently, it matters more to them to get good training early on. As many I'm sure have noted, this is directly a tradeoff between potentially winning a league and not.
You just need to look at most of my league team scores (59-63 range), versus arcade matches (where I consistently score in the upper 60s now), to see how much this matters.

Where talent matters is how many possible skills you would lose over a lifetime of training by, say, using only 85% training the entire time vs 95%.

edit: Here is a link to the training calculator I used: https://geston.smallhost.pl/sokker/training.html

I hope this will be helpful to someone.
(editado)

Good post. It's also worth considering injury risk. Sure you can gait 3.5 more weeks of training but is it worth the injury risk? Will you lose at least 3.5 weeks additional of training due to playing more matches seeking 100% efficiency?

Also how much do field conditions contribute to injury risk?

Field conditions make a real contribution to risk in injuries. It's why I am scared to death of the first rounds of the cup because not only are their fields trash, but their players are trash as well, which leads to lower quality tackles.

In general though, it is my opinion that it is pretty pointless to go past 25 minutes in a league game. Every minute you go beyond this gives you not even a tenth of a percent added training. Typically I would do do 25 minutes - and set sub condition to 22 minutes, but lately I've dropped it to 20. I now set my orders for the start of the game at 18', because as you know, you need a stoppage for it to happen. One game against Blue last season I didn't get a stoppage until around minute 34. That was stressful AF.
If it actually happens at 18-19 minutes, it's still 94%.

Of course, if your trainees are 21-23 it's less risky, but right now I've got a whole litter of new kids training now.

And yes, I know I'm weird that I play my kids first. Very soccer unconventional. However, playing kids at the end of games seems just as self defeating. What happens if you're losing?
In actual soccer, substitutions are made for similar quality players. That makes sense.

same here, both last season and this season catching injuries at low quality pitches. I hope we get more users in US

I'm not really sure if you should treat the non-integer remainder discretely or as a hidden factor, but in case it's the first you should target:

90 in the friendly+22 minutes in the league for 96%
90 in the friendly+36 minutes in the league for 97%

for the more skilled players:
90 in the friendly+61 minutes in the league for 98%

The effect Islander didn't mention is the RELATIVE difficulty of the training of particular skills (say, the difference between the difficulty of pace and technique training) varying with age.

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Field conditions and injury. In my first few seasons I had a squad of 22 playing 1.5 games per week and I've seen an average of 1 injury per season, never had 2 players sidelined at a time, despite playing 70% on the cheapest pitches.

THEN I got promoted, upgraded my pitch to angelic to match what the other teams had, reduced the squad to 14 and... got injured 8 times during the first half of the season alone - THEN players returning from injury would get injured again, which suggests there might be specific susceptibility conditions. In turn, there were players featuring throughout and not missing a minute from any of the games, so it wasn't about match loads that much.

One circumstance the rules mention is having players tire out, but I guess low technical ability or in the skills being used may be a factor as well. There might even be a direct effect of squad size (reflecting the training load and wear on individuals that exceeds the effect of how much playing time they contribute - 16 or 17 active players feels much safer to me than the numbers immediately lower), or costs of adjusting to new venues or rivals.

The effect Islander didn't mention is the RELATIVE difficulty of the training of particular skills (say, the difference between the difficulty of pace and technique training) varying with age.

I honestly believed this for a very long time, and it makes sense at first glance. However, it just isn't true.
The difference between training pace early in a player's career and late is very little difference in the final product (say, training through age 27).

As far as your comments about 96/97/98 it's already mentioned, and mathematically it is (logically speaking) foolish to play your kids much longer than 25 minutes in league. Certainly not 61 minutes for 98. Risk of worse results and trainee injury isn't worth it (the math is above)

Hmm . According to SA pace ar high levels has way more points than other skills. Unless SA or weights are not accurate

For it to be stupid you would need game exposure to be the only factor - and for the effect to be linear or convex. But this is an assumption, and unfortunately, for what I know, it doesn't account for what is actually happening well enough. For starters, even the rules alert us to the effect depleting stamina has on susceptibility to injuries - so this is already a departure from the simple model. And really: who could have prevented the designers from making teams have injury quotas to fill? I'm not saying that they have, but you have to consider and maybe test that too.

Like I told you, I had players who featured all the time and never got a bruise. And those who were out spell after another, sometimes back to back. We're talking of several seasons and 7 injury spells to 0.

Most of all, I had injury sprees when I reduced my manpower. This could be because of that alone, or because some temporary increases in susceptibility, say weather-related, that just coincided. Whatever it was, to me, this effect was far, far more significant than simple game exposure.

Standoff tactics? Players in this game can get injured controlling or deflecting the ball, or breaking into a dash, or slipping on perfectly good grass (and that's fair), so I view this as blaming the contact aspects too much and expecting an unrealistic return.

To err on the side of caution further, you could also think of avoiding tiring out the less-stamina-endowed players by subbing them out early, but this isn't very practical either as you have 15 substitutions per week, so at least 5 times someone still would have to pull off an entire match.

Most of all, I had injury sprees when I reduced my manpower

Probably anecdotal, but I've noticed this too.
This actually happened to you Tad this past season.

Also, yes, pace is slower to train than anything else, but one of the core tenants of my first build here in 2023 was to get pace first and get pm/passing last. It didn't work out as I expected, for a few reasons, and I never had anything better than a passable midfield. It (along with lack of money) was a problem. If you trained passing and PM first, and pace last, assuming the same player - based on what spreadsheets I've had made available to me the difference is almost nothing. Like 2% at most.

I wouldn't have believed if I didn't see it with my own eyes.

hmm the season (or two seasons) before that I ran squad of similar size and didn't have many injuries.