Youth Academy Facts

The Youth Academy seems to be most people's favourite topic. When it was introduced a brief bit of information was released but there hasn't been much since. Here I'm going to look at this in more detail and see what I can extrapolate from what we do know.

17 Year Olds

The YA release came with 2 graphs. The one below shows distribution of skill for 17 year olds according to YA investment:

What does this graph tell us? Well for a start it's a little misleading. For 300k investment 16% of 17yo players are 4 skill, around 1.5% are 5 skill? Actually no! If you add the amount together for each investment line you see they all add up to approx 23.5% as shown in this chart below:

	Skill						Tot 17yo	Av Skill
Invest	1	2	3	4	5
0	5	14.25	4	0.25			23.5	2.0
50		4.25	13.75	5.25	0.25		23.5	3.1
100		1.75	13.25	8.25	0.25		23.5	3.3
150		1	11.25	10.75	0.5		23.5	3.5
200		0.5	9.5	13	0.5		23.5	3.6
250		0.25	7.75	14.75	0.75		23.5	3.7
300		0	6	16.5	1.5		24	3.8

So the first thing I would read from this graph is around 23.5% of youths are 17yo. Once you realise that you can see that the amount of 17yo players at these skill levels is approx 4x what the graph shows, so for a 5 star academy around 65% of 17yo players will come in at 4 skill, and around 7% at 5 skill - but that 16% of all talents are 17/4.

Distribution of youths by age

Another useful piece of information would be distribution of youths according to each possible age 16-20. That has never been made officially available but we might be able to get a good approximation from a X11 stats site that was setup a few years ago.

The following chart shows age distribution of promoted youths

Obviously this is promoted youths only so certain ages may be biased a bit but taking some rough figures I get distribution along the following lines:

Age	Percent
16	6.1%
17	28.8%
18	33.0%
19	23.3%
20	8.9%

This is based on around 18,000 promoted youths. Admittedly the data is quite old but when the YA came in the distribution of ages and SQs wasn't altered, just the skill. Not a perfect match to the official X11 data but reasonably close and I would figure less of the older players are on a decent path so less get promoted - a 20yo pretty much needs to be 6 skill or have amazing SQs to bother.

In truth I'm not sure how much the xestats data is useful. I have no doubt the data is correct but this is players that are promoted so many poorer players will be excluded, and that is probably older players.