I've always thought the youth academy was a bit hard done by reading through this forum. Sure, you don't always get a useful player, but you can sell the free one for a decent amount, about as much as selling out your stadium 6-7 times over. Not bad considering the small cost of building a youth academy.

Anyway, I'm at level 5 now. A top 5 star 18 year old costs $7-10m and I got my two free players from my level 3 junior pitch this morning.

As usual I signed the free 2 star guy, an 18 year old striker, and he is on the market now at around $800k.

Now I seem to remember getting a 4 star guy with a special who costs 21 tokens for the other player. But this time it was a 18 year old 3 star DC/R (who will easily make 4 star before the end of the season, needs 16 more skill points), which was exactly the position I would need to get a player for at the start of next season after the retirement of one player, and a 2 star guy I have had since the start of my game who is still getting 7s and 8s every game but I'm worried wont be able to cut it as a 1 star player in level 6. This youth player only cost 12 tokens - is this normal now? I couldn't see his $ value so I wasn't really sure how good he was, but anyway I've got 40 or so tokens, so I said **** it and signed him.

Turns out he is worth $4.18m and is a fast trainer (improved 22% from a normal stretching training), so he is going to be a useful squad player for me for the next few seasons. If I had spent the tokens on a bank investment, 25 tokens would have got me $7.2m ($288k/token) or 28.8m for 85 ($339k/token), Even if I sold him straight away, this guy would net me $350/token. And if I bought a decent young squad player with that bank investment money it probably would have cost me 5-6 tokens in an auction anyway...

So, did I get lucky or is this the new norm?