Cost of Youth Academy versus Auctions compared
The cost of developing players in the youth academy is far higher than acquiring the same quality players on the auction market.
Like many managers I felt the old youth academy could be improved and was looking forward to Nordeus improving upon it. Instead what we have had forced upon us is another medium to part us with our tokens. But what really are these costs and how do they compare against our other options like the Auction market and training.
For sake of the comparison I have converted all cost of Greens, Blues, Reds into Tokens. At the best rate 46T will give you 50B, 50G or 50R. Therefore we can multiply whatever the amount of B/G/Rs asked for by .92 (46T/50bgr) to give us the real cost in Tokens.
As an example training with the Local Trainer cost 15Tokens and 25Greens. At first this does not look horrible 15T isn’t so much. However, after conversion we see that 15T plus 25G (25*.92=23) equals 38Tokens.
(I did not bother to convert to $ or € as I have seen widely different purchase rates - on average you can take 10T to 1currency unit as a swag).
The question remains is 38T for the Local trainer a good deal or not.
The below table compares the costs of improving a current in the Youth Academy player (MC, 63.4%) versus an 18yo MC (64%) I just got from the Youth Academy.
| Trainer Type |
Costs shown |
Costs converted to Tokens |
Quality Improvement |
Tokens/Q% increase |
| Local Trainer |
15T + 25G |
38T |
13.5% |
2.8T/Q% |
| Senior Coach |
40T + 30G |
67.6T |
19.5% |
3.46T/Q% |
| Head Coach |
65T + 45G |
106.4T |
32.1% |
3.3T/Q% |
| 18year old MC |
N/A |
29.4T |
10% |
2.9T/Q% |
What you see is that on average it is a little more expensive to improve the player in the YA than flat out training. This is somewhat expected as the higher the player Q% the more costly it is to train. I increased my player from 64% to 74% for 29.4T (actually 32Greens) but it would have been more costly to take the player from 74 to 84 or 84 to 94. That said, I focused my training on specific white skills while in the YA all skills go up by the percentage shown. Meaning my 10% increase had a greater increase on the white skills (f.e. Positioning went up by 39 pts, from 55 to 94) and less of an increase on the grey skills. So depending if you like a player high in white skills and low in grey versus a player even in all skills you may prefer the self training method.
All in all not too bad a case for the YA so far. When you compare the Youth Academy versus self-training the YA is comparable in cost.
However, when you compare the cost of buying a YA player and then training to your desired quality level versus purchasing the same quality player in the Auction market the YA is considerably more expensive.
For the basis of this comparison I assume most attractive young players on the Auction market can be purchased for ˜35Tokens +/- 10T depending on the number of bidders.
If you take my 64% MC from the YA improved to 74%, I have already invested 32Greens (29.4T) for this 10% improvement (yes, with greater improvement in key white skills). I could definitely have purchased a 90% - 95% 18 or 19yo on the Auction market for the same 29Tokens and had better overall ATT and DEF quality.
Let’s compare the cost of improving my current MC, in the YA, using the Head Coach. The Head Coach option would improve my 63.4% YA-MC by 32.1% making him 94.5%. (Would be nice to start the season with a 94.5% 18yo MC). But at a cost of 106.4Tokens (65T +45G). For 106 Tokens I could normally purchase 2 to 3 ˜95%, 18yo players on the Auction market - assuming I can find them.
So there you have it, spend 24hours per day for a couple of days monitoring the Auction market for the player positions you want (with the added bonus you might get a multi-position player) versus spending 2 to 3 times the cost of an auction player for the certainty of the Youth Academy.
To me this is backwards - it should cost less to develop players in the Youth Academy versus buying them on the free market. (By this I am not, in any way, prompting Nordeus to further ruin the Auction market for us).
Conclusions:
If you are looking for your team to start the season in the 80% range then training in the Youth Academy is relatively equal to just picking the free YA players and then training them yourself - though you won’t have the high White v. Grey skill differential.
If you are looking to start your season with your team ˜100% then it is more cost effective, in Tokens not in time, to spend a few days stalking the Auction market.
I am still working on the >100% comparison. Will look at some of the options offered during the season to see if when combined with the other coaching options it becomes less costly to create higher Q players versus the high cost of training after a player is over 100%.
I hope the above was useful to you and helps you save some Tokens or, at least, spend them wisely.
