The Youth Market - Someone has to be unhappy

This weekend I'll begin a series on features I would like to see implemented in future FML updates. But one thing that definitely won't be making the list is changes to the Youth Academy system. Given the uproar on the official forums here and here you might ask why not?

Well because I believe the current system is about as good as you can get. Yes, there are minor alterations I'd make if i was starting from scratch, but now that academies are in I think the development team's time could be better spent elsewhere. As for major changes, I simply don't think they'll work.

You see, the truth is that the youth system can never make everyone happy. Most of the 1000 managers in a game would like to have youth teams at U17, U19 and U21 with 18 good quality prospects in each (defined as say 3* plus PA). That means they need 9 new 3* grads a year. But the database simply can't sustain this. The database size is 50000, which given a roughly even spread of players over the ages of 16 - 34 means that in each year group there should be about 2500-3000 players. So each season 2500-3000 new youths should be created, and of these I can't believe that more than 2000 will be 3*+ PA. So on average each of the 1000 teams can only have 2 new 3* PA youths per season.

Let's just pause to compare those numbers directly:
The average team would like 9 x 3* PA new youths a season.
The average team can have 2 x 3* PA new youths a season.

You don't need to know a lot about economics to know that demand at 450% of supply is a recipe for prices going through the roof. Before academies this was expressed through massively high youth wages, and so the community demanded academies. Now the supply-demand imbalance is expressed through the building of loads of academies, and people are again unhappy. But with this supply/demand inequilibrium there's simply no way to make everyone happy. Someone has to be unhappy. The question is who should be unhappy:

- under a pure market system (like before) those who can't afford it are unhappy. This on the whole means new players, and so makes them more likely to leave. Not good.
- under some sort of youth draft system (as Jakswan has eloquently argued for) the top teams (who get the last picks) are unhappy. I think this is better than a market system, but if you're SI do you really want to piss off some of your best and most dedicated players? Not if you can help it I would have thought.
- under a pure luck system (a few random PA youths crop up in your squad at the start of each season) a random selection of people are unhappy. Plus everyone who (like me) likes more strategy in their game is disappointed. And indeed anyone who wants to have a youth team without the hassle of having to negotiate to buy 16 players off other managers isn't going to be too thrilled either.

Which leaves us with the option of a hybrid system - perhaps combining some sort of market force of how much money you invest with some element of luck, whilst allowing new managers to bring some promising youths in to the gameworld through their starting squad?...

Oh wait, that's what we've already got...