The state of Football Manager 26 has been debated since launch. I often like to refer to the game series as “spreadsheets but fun”, but it’s also a game that’s driven by the community as much as it is by the developers. We’ve covered enough FM26 mods that back that statement well. Recently, we uncovered a post from the community that raises a very important question: how effective is your Head of Youth Development?
We’ll be breaking down Reddit user Real-Computer4320’s findings, explaining what the data means, and translating it all into practical advice for your save. We’ll also add our own perspective on which types of players should care most about HOYD optimization, and how effective the role really is.
What Does A Head Of Youth Development Actually Do?
In Football Manager 26, the Head of Youth Development (HOYD) is responsible for shaping your club’s youth intake. Well, at least on paper. The role is designed to influence a newgen’s personality, preferred play style, and overall mentality. Despite the common misconception, it doesn’t directly affect raw technical ability.
The common idea has always been to hire a HOYD with elite personality traits, such as Model Citizen, Professional, and Driven. Your youth intakes will reflect those personality traits, in theory. If only if it were that simple. Football Manager isn’t necessarily clear on how much influence the role actually has, and whether it shifts outcomes or just slightly nudges RNG.
This uncertainty is exactly what the Reddit experiment aims to answer. And before we get into it, it’s quite the experiment: it involves 800 newgens, solid data analysis, and multiple teams. You have to appreciate the dedication here.
The Community’s Findings
Creator of this experiment, Real-Computer4320, started with a custom test league with five identical teams. Every club has perfect facilities, identical conditions, and is placed in Anguilla. This nation was the main choice purely because of its lack of existing players, making newgens easy to isolate. The youth rating was maxed out at 100.
Moving forward, the test involves strict timing control. Multiple save points were used before and after Youth Preview and Youth Intake, repeatedly reloading the same intake. This enables observation of what parts of a newgen are fixed, and what changes later on. This approach allows the separation of early-seeded attributes from those finalized much later in the generation process. The findings were fascinating.
Major aspects of multiple newgens — including technical attributes, physical attributes, CA, and PA — are seeded very early. Reloading just before the intake did not change these values. However, personality-related attributes like Professionalism, Ambition, Pressure, Loyalty, and Sportsmanship reroll extremely late. This happened even one day before the intake. Determination is the only visible mental attribute that consistently changed.
Professionalism inheritance was a major part of the test here. Each HOYD has identical attributes, an expert in Professionalism, which varies. The creator tracked minimums, maximums, medians, and frequency thresholds across hundreds of intakes. Not to take away from the creator, but here are our insights based on the results:
- Raising HOYD Professionalism consistently shifts the distribution upward.
- The biggest jump occurred between a mediocre HOYD (Prof rating 10) and a good one (Prof rating 15), with an average swing of over 4 attribute points.
- Higher level HOYDs still helped, but with diminishing returns.
Like all great scientific discoveries (Yes, I’m calling it that), there was an unexpected twist: not one player spawned with Professionalism above 18. The creator estimates that this is because there’s a hard generation cap at 18, or the chance of it exceeding 18 is minuscule.
More interestingly, an HOYD with less than 16 Prof never produces a player with above 15 Prof. Similarly, HOYDs with a Prof rating of 17 and 18 produced players with a max Prof rating of 16 and 17, respectively. Beyond that, even using an HOYD with 20 Professionalism, the max rating for the newgen was 18. This ceiling behavior only occurs for professionalism.
The Takeaway
First, massive credit where it’s due: this is a monstrous amount of work and dedication. As one commenter put said: “This dude made graphs and spreadsheets about a game that is graphs and spreadsheets.” It’s exactly the kind of helpful insight that you wish the game would itself explain to you.
So, yes, a Head of Youth Development matters, but not in the way you expect. A strong one can’t magically produce flawless wonderkids. But they will meaningfully improve your odds, especially when moving from a poor or “average” HOYD to a good one. That mid-tier jump is where the real value lies, with diminishing returns once you start chasing perfection.
For those managing a top club with elite facilities and cherry-picked youth prospects, it’s not worth losing sleep over the “perfect” HOYD. But for long-term saves, lower-league builds, and youth-focused challenges, investing in a solid HOYD pays off in terms of hidden personality attributes for your players.
