Subject: Optimal sell-time

I'm sure this has been discussed before, certainly internationally, but i'm keen to hear what everyone thinks is the best time to sell any player to maximise revenue.

Should you wait until he has popped recently in as many skills as possible at any particular age? Or should you just get a good first team training talent pop and advertise like hell at 18/19yo?

Phil i guess has a good grounding on this (i understand if you don't want to share all your "secrets").

I am of the opinion it is around 23 (some training years left but generally past it), but think it may be lower?

To have a team that can compete - buy young players who aren't a rip-off, combine with juniors from your school, train for as long as you can, and then sell at ~27 or so and keep drip feeding in new players.
To get cash - you can get most profit selling at younger ages, with proof of talent when they player is still an attractive trainee to someone else (i.e. even if it's one bought at 16 and sold at 17), but if you don't keep them until they're older you have a weaker squad.
I'd only wait for pops on particularly young players, if that's what you're waiting for before selling, once they're older you might as well list them towards the start of the season when you'll get more for them as they are than you would later in the season with a pop more. Depends exactly what levels were talking about, but I think it applies to most.

20-22 is a good time sell out - particularly if you have talent proof and he hasn't any glaring weaknesses and looks good for serious onward training in someone's first team.

I found these guys could make a good contribution in my 1st team in the season or so before moving them on, although it wouldn't work now, and that brought the faster 1st team training in and 'improved' their talent.

@redjim: didn't you use to rotate round skills to make sure the player had just popped in everything before selling? Good policy if you have a long term midfielder training scheme anyway
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@redjim: didn't you use to rotate round skills to make sure the player had just popped in everything before selling?

Yeah, and I'm still training midfielders and doing it like that. Thing is, I'm selling them so old, that it doesn't really make much odds to the final price as they're all pretty much brilliant/magical/unearthly/divine on pace/technique/passing/playmaking when I come to sell and another pop here or there doesn't really make much odds. I do it anyway though, and the profit I make on them balances out my ongoing loss on 'non-trainee' transfers. The latter is slowly crippling my team, despite efforts to keep records of the sale prices of all ages of the sorts of players I bid for - the slide in the market has meant that I've made a loss faster than others - I'm on the cusp of sacking it all in and dropping down the leagues to train a load of 17y/o players up instead.

You clearly just want to copy me!

You have shown the way, tbh.
I really thought I could play the market and break even, but I haven't been able to d it - and that has been time consuming.
Also, I'm getting bored, so if I do that I could just leave my team to tick over for a while.