Guys, what about this, from Al's Ultimate Guide?

Because you wrote, that salary is not important, and here's the opposite info:

4.2 Fast trainers

A poster, living legend, guru -- in short a man of many names -- called Nikolgiorgos has created a great guide for how to find fast trainers:
http://forum.topeleven.com/tutorials...-chris-18.html

As an introduction, the idea is to find an 18 y/o kid that is new in the game that has a very high ration between value/wage. In other, you want to find a player with high value and low salary. If the kid is a 5 star, he will be very expensive but he will also reach a great status really fast (7 stars is doable) besides gaining a lot of value. If the player starts at 3-4 stars, he will also become better and gain a lot of value fast, but it will naturally take a longer time to get this player to 6-7 stars.

These are some math examples that illustrate how I have understood Nikolgiorgos' guide applied on the first level conditions (IE where the target ratio is >200):

-FAST TRAINER 1. 5 stars. Value=2.5m. Wage=10k. Ratio=2.5m/10k=250. This player should be a very fast trainer that you should be able to push to 7 stars your first season. Remember that all these numbers should be based on the data a player has when he is created. If someone have picked up a kid like this and trained and played him hard for a while, the math will be off. Hence, look for players that seems to come from computer generated teams and that has not played any games.
This is what I started to implement this season, and really, checking the value/salary ratio helps me a lot....