Subject: Youth school

I have not stopped my youth school, but have to say I have had absolute dross from it for at least a year.

I would love to have a wide range of stats on this, but my hunch is that on average you will lose money from your youth school.

Here are my costs of having a youth school in a 15 week season with some assumptions;

20 open spaces * cost of one space £600 = £180,000 per season.
coach wages £29,000 = £435,000 per season.
7 home junior games * average ticket revenue £5,000 = (£35,000) per season.

Total cost per season = £580,000

Feel free to tailor this to your circumstances. I appreciate ticket revenue is going to be lower to a newer club, but i haven't factored in any sell-on revenue (when your u23 youth is re-sold you get 5% of the sale price).

Now clearly looking at these figures, the coach wage is the biggest cost, and it is making me reconsider downgrading significantly there. The best pulls i ever had were with a formidable coach. You can see the yearly rates for other coaches at the bottom of this post. An outstanding coach will give you a cost total of just £265,000 per season.

In one season, you may be lucky enough to sell a junior from your own school for £2.9m. This would fund a decent youth school (mine) for 5 seasons. I think there is a fair chance you could do this in 5 seasons to break even on one player, but not everybody is so lucky.

Forgetting about stats - and even if it does turn out to be slightly loss making for you - the joy of being able to pull the next "Jacob Blue" from your school, and/or blooding your own youth school is worth the price you pay, in my opinion :)

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Approx minimum wage for each coach level [sourced from another thread in this forum];

formidable 5k = £75,000 per season.
outstanding 8k = £120,000 per season.
incredible 10.5k = £157,500 per season.
brilliant 14k = £210,000 per season.
magical 18k = £270,000 per season.
unearthly 35k = £525,000 per season.

Average ticket revenue sourced from my last 6 home games.

20 open spaces is a fair average for a well managed youth school.

I've been playing 22 seasons now. If i use my current season youth school costs over those 22 seasons (which is obviously more than actual because i had a weaker coach at first) my total cost would be...

£12,760,000

And looking at my stats, i've made £15,113,512 in junior sales.

PROFIT!

These figures don't include home grown players i haven't sold, lack of ticket revenue in many of those seasons, and sell-on revenue.

Looking at all of these numbers I have to question whether my money wouldn't actually be better spent on other things?

That being said, I think the only thing going to keep my youth school open is the fact that we need English players for the U21 and NT sides.

Well, one avenue i didn't expore was saving this money, and buying one £500k trainee every season.

But then you have no guarantee of talent, and they may not make much/any money either.

I'm not quite sure after spelling out all the costs to you and potential reward i have managed to talk you out of it?!

My stats tell me I have made £42m from my juniors, but I don't really know if that would have been higher had I just bought in trainees instead.

My main interest is in training youths, preferably English and from my own school, so as far as I am concerned the system works for me. Might seem less attractive if you are trying to balance success on the pitch with training though..
(edited)

The sales from juniors is a tough one, because i for one generally always kept my best youths, therefore my sales are lower. You could of course keep juniors that wouldn't sell well initially, train them, then sell for a good amount.

I guess the point is from either route; if you are new to the game, you won't be able to afford to buy anybody for £500k for at least several seasons, yet you could pull a junior worth that or more in that time...

In time when you can afford to buy whatever player you want, to fit your training plans, it starts to make the youth school less appealing i think.

I've never really looked at it like this; i actually think it is better and more profitable to have a junior school the newer you are to the game, than compared to established users.

42 million from juniors **** me!

I preferred the old junior system and tbh looking at the costs of juniors now I don't see much difference from when we had perfect talent graphs.

One conversation I had though was tailoring your youth school, a lot of it is down to luck but you can put things in your favour. Like 17/18yo are worth a ton in the first few weeks of the season. So it might be worth having the lower ranked coach and only giving places to juniors who would be ready in the first few weeks of the season.
(edited)

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Thanks for all the replies. I think I might just reopen the youth school. Try it out for a season or two. It'll at least give me something to look forward to each week if anything.

Although how you've made 42 mil from the youth school is beyond me.

@ eirikr. Is all of that money from fresh juniors that you sold straight away or did you train them first?

I don't think I have pulled many superstar juniors that I have sold straight away, so training accounts for a big chunk of that £42m I expect.

At the moment all 6 of my trainees have been bought in, at a cost of £20m, so one advantage at least of a youth school is the lower up front cost of getting trainees..

It is if you overpay ;)

This is why I've never been big on English trainees they always cost a bomb, for some reason they are really popular with foreign users as well

So few decent English trainees around, unfortunately. I might have to look abroad for the next lot..

Bright Fearns, age: 17
club: Armitage Shanks, country: England,
value: 65 250 £, wage: 555 £,
magical form, adequate tactical discipline,
height: 181 cm, weight: 75.9 kg, BMI: 23.17

adequate stamina hopeless keeper
very good+2 pace hopeless defender
very good+1 technique weak playmaker
poor passing unsatisfactory striker

2 to very good technique, never popped in passing. Your next overpay?

Just switching away from striker training to pace and tech. I think I might go for tcd_uk's 16 year old he should be listing this weekend..

Yes, I will be listing on Saturday evening, unless I forget then it will be Sunday evening ;-)