Academies - Worth it after all?

In amongst all the academies fuss, I think I have found some evidence that academies may be worth it after all.

I've done some calculations based on the situation in Voller. I looked at the top 50 countries in the FIFA/Coca Cola world rankings and for each saw how many players there were in the database, and how many of these had acquisition fees of over 100k. I then looked at the number of academies in each country and their star ratings and worked out whether that country was over or under saturated. Using this I was able to work out how much it would cost in terms of academy running fees per "normal" PA player produced (i.e. not 1-1.5* filler players produced to make up the numbers) and how much for a player who would eventually grow to develop a 100k+ AQ fee in today's money. And the results were very interesting.

Firstly, in the case of "normal" PA players. In the ideal completely unsaturated country, it would cost you an average of £25,200 in running costs to produce each one of these players. That's because if you have a 1* academy you get 1 such player every 7 days (4 a season), paying £3600 a day, whereas if you have a 4.5* academy you get 1 such player every 2 days (14 a season), and you're paying £12600 per day. Either way the cost per player is the same (it's just the time that varies).

No country from the FIFA top 50 gave you this ideal outcome, however the top few came close.
Best Country: £27,182
2nd: £31,675
3rd: £35,161
4th: £40,166
5th: £45,850
Now the MV for a standard PA youth at age 16-17 is currently around 100k. So by that measure, you're on to a winner if you have a YA in one of these countries. You are producing players for less than half the cost that you can sell them on for (this doesn't include the fixed costs of building your academy of course, but we can't take that in to account here because the cost involved depends on how big the academy is. Consequently I prefer to look at academy building cost as really being about time - how quickly you want players - not as purely a financial investment).

Next, let's look at the case of those quality youths who will go on to have an AQ fee in excess of 100k. (I reckon this is roughly a 4* rep in old money). Obviously the vast majority of even normal PA players do not fall in to this category, so the figures involved are much higher. Here are the top 5 in terms of cheapest average amount of running costs per high quality player produced:
Best Country: £987,696
2nd: £1,134,831
3rd: £1,154,273
4th: £1,193,756
5th: £1,382,022
So how does this compare? Well, very few players come through to 100k+ AF's in their first season or two, and those who do are generally the serious wonderkids so it wouldn't be fair to look at those. Instead let's consider what happens if you take these players through their youth career up to 21/22. The average 21/22 y/o 100k+ AF player currently has a MV of around £1.1m. So it looks like you're just about breaking even here IF (and it's a big if!) you can keep their wages down during their youth career. In the case of the best placed country I think you'd need to keep wages to about £800/day throughout their youth career to break even. Difficult but not impossible.

Of course, all these are averages, and at the end of the day the system is still a lottery - you might do better than this and you might do worse - as I have! In addition, I have only listed the best countries above - the worst nations on my scale cost £249k per normal PA player and £18.7m per high quality player respectively! But to my mind the figures do indicate that the academy market is actually much closer to equilibrium than many might think.