How does Youth Academies work?

This is something I've been wondering about. Every year you get a batch of youth talent even with poor youth facilities. Now as they come to your team I believe they are not not picked up on the street but rather have trained independently or in the case of State of the Art academies come from the children teams of the club.

So far so good. Now the real question. The better your facilities are the bigger the chance your newgens have a huge potential ability? Is that how it works?

I have no idea but this is how I think it should be (if it's not already so):

poor facilities - You can have a 200PA player in there but the CA will be very low as you can't develop him well. So in essence the PA won't be decreased during the generation process just because you don't have good facilities but the CA will tend to be low.

top facilities - Pretty much the same thing with PA, but CA will be much higher than a club who has poor facilities.

You can have a batch of not so great upcoming youth players in a team like Barcelona for example, but their CA will be pretty high because that's what the Academy and the great coaches do. While at the same time with poor facilities you don't get that luxury and besides most of the times a player with great potential in small clubs is snatched right away.

I hope I managed to get my point across

the thing is if someone has great potential it's likely it would have been spotted at an earlier age and he'd have gone somewhere with better facillities. Not always...but often....so that has to be replicated in game.

I don't really know, but I had another theory, based on monitoring my own youth intakes for some seasons...

It looks like every year your youth academy [or whatever facility you have] will produce a certain amount of CA/PA, and it will be "spread" over a random amount of players, accordingly with the league, nation and club reputation and facility.

So let's assume Barcelona has a "Youth Points" quota ranging from 500 to 700, the new players can have an average ability of 100-140 depending on how many of them you get... The fewer they are, the higher the chance of getting a Wonderkid.

Of course you can just get a bunch of 120s, or one 180 with all the others being total rubbish.

The more obscure the nation/league/club and the poorer the youth structures, the lower the quality of the players...

The more obscure the nation/league/club and the poorer the youth structures, the lower the quality of the players...

See that's what I don't consider to be right if true. You are not guaranteed genious prospects only because you have great youth facilities. If that was true all of the best footballers in the world would've been produced in the extremely modern facilities of europe's top clubs.

Instead we get brilliant players from Brazil, Argentina, Ivory Coast and so on. As I already said I believe that top facilities should only ensure you that your youth intake has a really high CA. The PA should probably be random but in a higher scale, or maybe based on your scouts' stats somehow to make it more realistic. The better your scouts the higher the random range of PA you will be able to get.

And in modern football 16-7 is already an age when a player is pretty much showing how he will turn out. So in a top facilities environment he should be at a pretty decent CA level when arrives.

I'm really intrested to know how this exactly works.