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.

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...