Rhymin Simon, I meant to respond to your post a while ago with this sentiment, but didn't have time to right it out in full so put it off. Sorry for the delay.
First of all I appreciate the care you have taken with attempting to find two players with similar builds. The analysis is sound overall, but I do not draw the same conclusions you draw.
Although the costs per week may be similar, the fact that you have to pay a larger portion of this cost up front is significant because this extra money can be put to better uses. To illustrate this point, let's say that 100k saved on the older player was instead used to buy a better version of the older player with higher secondaries, Player C. Let's say player C also is 32 and depreciates to 53.3% of initial value over 21 weeks (like
, from 250k to 136k, and has the same salary as player B. Using your formula:
Player C's aCPW = ($250k - $136k + [$15.5k/wk * 21 wks] ) / 21 wks = $20.9k/wk
Still very slightly less per week than Player A, and paying 67% higher initial price compared to player B will buy a good amount of secondaries, and his performance will be significantly better overall. The team would clearly be better off with this player.
Now you may be thinking that this is only works out like it did because the example players had bad secondaries, but the truth is any team in d4 or d5 needs players with better secondaries. On these example players initial cost wasn't much compared to salary, because their secondaries sucked. But the more secondaries you add, the higher initial cost will become compared to salary.
This quickly becomes the limiting factor for newer teams; because they do not have enough cash to buy high secondary builds at every position, they compromise build efficiency for cost. This is a compromise they make whether they realize it or not. The key issue here is that high secondaries isn't the only thing that drives up initial costs, it is also age. In this way teams that buy younger players are necessarily buying players with worse builds. For the vast majority of the teams in d4 or d5 it is better to spend this initial cost on build efficiency instead of age for every player that they aren't training.
Edit for cliff notes: It's better to compare players with similar cost profiles than similar builds, and when similar cost profiles are used the older player will always have a better build.
Last edited by w_alloy at 10/22/2012 6:45:33 AM