Golden generations in U20: "makes competition worse and more based on luck"

Golden generations have been a cause of fierce disagreement between people engaged in the national teams of Hattrick. Many argue that the experience advantage of golden generations are unfair or harmful particularly for the U20 national teams competition. In this interview, I asked goomikko (8865918) what is wrong with golden generations and how the problem could be resolved.

What are golden generations

GG or golden generation refers to an age group of players which have been given experience at the cost of players of other age groups. The definition varies, but mostly it means that one U20 generation does not compete at all and 17-18 years old players are fielded from the beginning of a campaign to give them maximum experience to boost their performance in later competitions.
Now and then player's experience is boosted even in the adult national teams. Sometimes the term is used even if the previous qualification was finished early and players were switched to younger ones.

GGs exist particularly in the U20 national teams. How do they impact the game?

There are two impacts.
Firstly the impact is on the qualification, where the GG competes. The team is stronger as usually, this generation is trained better. In addition, players have loads of experience, which gives a boost to performance and turns games to the benefit of the GG team at the end of matches due to the event triggered by team inexperience.

The other impact is on the qualification, where experience is being gathered. Playing with U20 teams is its own reality.
I don´t even think the game works that well in this field. For instance, the role of self-confidence is highlighted, because defenses can be boosted easily in relation to attacks. Secondly, the match program also has a major impact. The teams with age groups gathering experience, and therefore conceding big losses, further strengthen the impact of the match program and gives self-confidence to teams for free in different moments. That means that teams competing with each other face very different circumstances instead of a level playing field. The difference between the expected points in a campaign can be many points.
In U20 the role of luck is bigger than elsewhere, due to the self-confidence effect. And the teams that have given up (not just golden generations but also the once that give up and switch to young players during the course of the campaign) increase the element of pure luck in the game.

In addition, GGs are always a reason for disappointment for the managers, that have trained promising players in the generation that is suddenly skipped.

Do GGs improve the possibilities of small countries or do you think they are unfair? Why?

I think the impact of golden generations is exaggerated. Often the golden generations are trained better and the difference is therefore bigger. Experience does give a benefit, but small countries do still have a good shot to get to the World Cup even without it. And many small countries gather experience only for the qualifications and not to aim for the medals. I think the stage where the golden generations are given experience has an impact on the competition: it becomes more boring, worse and more based on luck.

How could Hattrick resolve the problem of GGs? Should it be done?

HT could easily restrict the ages of players who are eligible for the national team. And you wouldn´t even have to restrict the selection of players directly. The restriction could rather be based on which players are given experience from national team games.

The adult team could easily be given a lower limit of at least 21 years of age. There the hoarding of experience is not as big a problem. I should say that it would not be a problem to alter the lower age limit to 24 or 25 years either.

In the youth national teams setting a limit is slightly more difficult. An easy lower bound would be 19 years. Players younger than that would not gain experience, but then at the end of qualification some teams would still switch to overaged players of the next generation.
My own proposal would be a fixed date for when the player turns 21. I would argue that a good date for this would be such, that players who can play seven or more games in the next qualification cannot gain experience in the previous campaign. One could announce this on the page of the U20 teams, with a statement saying that players who are today under xx years and xxx days do not gain experience from the games played.

I do believe that these restrictions would increase the number of teams playing until the end of qualification and aiming for a good final position.
This would benefit the competition in general. For sure, it would slightly weaken possibilities of smaller countries. I don´t know if there should be some extra tournament for the countries that end up on positions 3 and 4. This has also been suggested.

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