Youth Academy Musings

Following on from the previous article giving a series of facts about the youth academy I'd like to present a load of speculation. Some of this may be correct - I expect a lot of it is, but some of it will be wrong. You have to choose what to believe and if you use it as the basis for any decisions.

Skill adjustment by age

We  do know that older players come into the game at higher skill levels. The vast majority of 16yo player are 2-4 skill. At 20 that range is 4-6 skill. It's not unreasonable to guess that players gain .5 bar per year after 16 but always bound between 2-6 skill. From a coding point of view it's simple too.

Looking at the 17yo graph I did originally wonder that it would be nice to have a similar graph for other ages - but does it really matter? In the original YA information was also the following graph:

This shows the distribution by skill according to various investment levels. Even for a 300k academy there are only about 4% of players that are 6 skill, and these will mostly be 19/20yo. If you look at 5 skills it's a decent proportion but 20/5 - worthless, 19/5 - rarely worth much, 18/5s are usually worth similar or less than 17/4s. Essentially if a player isn't 16/17 then they have limited value.

Musings

Looking at the skill distribution for 17yo players it looks very much like a parabolic/bell curve BUT as the data is rounded to integers and the range only covers 4 meaningful points then the curve is very much distorted.

The way the datapoints settle is a bit bizarre. Averaging them it shows each increment in the YA increases average skill levels of players by 0.1 or 0.2 bars but it's not a straight add. If you look at the values for 150k investment for example there are around 11% of players at 4 skill. 4 skill covers the values from 3.5 to 4.5 and assuming roughly equal numbers of players at each skill level you would expect that a 0.1 bar increase across the board (upgrading to 200k academy) would convert 1/11 of these players to 5 skill but that doesn't happen.

What does happen at all levels of the academy is 3s become 4s, but very little in the way of 4s becoming 5s. Higher levels of the YA seemingly just get rid of the dross but don't offer a lot in the way of primo players.

Conclusion

Looking at it as a whole you have to conclude the YA is about 17/4s for the most part - and here's the bottom line of the matter: Player age/skill is rarely what is going to make a player valuable. It's about what SQs a player comes with. A vanilla 17/4 has a an estimated value of under 500k - add 2-3 SQs, and/or hard trainer and he can be approaching 10m. What the purpose of the YA seems to be is to ensure that when a youth with nice SQs does come along he is a 17/4 and worth good money rather than being a 17/3.

In summary I think the YA is a bit of a swizz. The idea that was pitched was that you get more "super" players, and the data doesn't seem to support it. What you seem to get is less dross, more average players, and the big wins are likely to be on the 17/4s with good SQs rather than 16/4 path players. Great if you want the YA to fuel a team, but not good if you are hoping for those superstars to support other team building approaches.