Whether youth investment repays over the long horizon

Determine whether investing in youth academies in FM-Bench reliably produces sufficient later value to repay its costs under the benchmark’s long-horizon dynamics.

Background

Youth investment in FM-Bench has delayed returns: academy players begin with low ability and mature slowly, while the benchmark’s 20-year horizon makes the timing of such returns consequential. A human player remained uncertain whether academy investment eventually paid off.

The paper reports that the youth-harvest metric appeared informative on one seed but failed to maintain its relationship across three seeds. The authors therefore leave unresolved whether youth investment is reliably beneficial, rather than merely observing an unstable correlation in the available runs.

References

Two further timing effects went unnoticed until late: the transfer market thins out as seasons pass, so buying early is worth more than it looks, and academy players are cheap but start low and mature slowly, which left one player unsure whether youth investment ever repaid. The models leave the same question open: the academy-harvest metric that looked informative on one seed does not survive three (Appendix~\ref{app:behavior}).

— FM-Bench: A Benchmark for Long-Horizon Management with Competing Agents  (2608.18423 - Wang et al., 19 Aug 2026) in Appendix, Section “What the Human Players Reported,” paragraph “Cumulative consequences, reported as delayed bills”