Starting a team from scratch

While most managers will get their enjoyment from winning trophies (and don't get me wrong, that is pretty sweet), part of my enjoyment comes from taking a hopeless team and building them up from nothing to being competitive. I managed it with Huge Pythons in the Master League and I'm hoping to do the same in the Xpert Ladies. Most of my teams are usually in a stage of development as opposed to competing directly for silverware.

My latest project, in the League of D, had enough about them to get promoted to the top division, but the sheer lack of assets means that we're in for a drubbing. I've got five youths training up this season, but I've come up with my approach for the next two or three seasons.

The key to this project will be profitability, although I will be aiming to actually win some games in the lower tier while I'm at it. I'm starting to move away from forwards as a source of income since:

• more and more people are realising how useless they are; and
• those people are now training up young forwards themselves, driving down profit margins.

The plan will be to make as much money as possible from young defenders and midfielders, using rotation of formations and decent mentors. I'm aiming to have a veteran GK, 2 defenders, 2 midfielders and a striker. That doesn't necessarily leave many spaces in the line-up for giving young'uns game time, but the approach will be to use two subs at 45 minutes each game, and rotating between 4-5-1 at home and 5-4-1 away. The section with 5 in can give two players a full game and two a half game, which should be enough to get all the prospects to a point where DV > AF, so I only need to worry about training the life out of them. Eight training sessions should be just about covered by the team's weekly income, so as long as I've enough cash to bring in my building blocks, I should be laughing.

As it stands, there are three weeks left in the current season, so I'm looking to build up as much cash between now and the start of next season (hopefully doubling a couple of the youths I currently have) and we'll see how it goes.

Selling players as underevaluations

In the past, the most common way people have raised cash has been to bring in youths, get them to double jump (e.g. a 17/4 to an 18/6) and then sell them on. However, something that is becoming increasingly common is the deliberate sale of players that will increase skill on transfer. I've seen more adverts in the forums of late for players that are being listed as underevaluations, and it makes sense to sell players in this way as you can get the skill increase without an increase in age.

My first thoughts are this approach would work better in the official leagues - you can sell players quite late into a long season (thus maximising the skill increase a player will get), you can pick a target league to sell to and it's easier for managers to verify the players you are selling. However, I will be trying this approach in a private league, with the aim of training a player and then selling them as a double underevaluation.

My Red Army side has two young strikers that are both very high in their skill band - Makalov is on 6.4 skill and Anosov is on 5.4. Obtaining a double at the end of the season for both is a viable target, although I believe I can maximise their selling potential due to the nature of the league. The division has nine teams with one match a week, so it's 16 games over 18 weeks. There are also two cups so there's plenty of room to garner extra match experience, especially as I made the final of one and am confident that I can progress quite far in the other, two-legged affair. If I keep the two players' forms up, I believe I can get the players to their target DVs - Makalov would need to be on about 18 DV if I sell at the very last moment to gain 1.1 skill, while Anosov will need a high 18 / low 19 by my reckoning, as he needs the extra 0.1 skill due to even rounding.

It will be the first time I've purposely sold underevaluations and I think it will be useful to gain some experience of listing and attempting to advertise deliberate underevals as well as providing me data for the mini-CR.