Grouping a list of items in to as equal in numbers as possible - excel

Question

Requirement: Split a list in to 4 separate groups, based on a value for each row.
| Player | Skill |
| ------------- |:-------------:|
| Player 1 | 10000 |
| Player 2 | 50000 |
| Player 3 | 2000 |
| Player 4 | 11000 |
| Player 5 | 7525 |
| Player 6 | 100 |
| Player 7 | 999 |
| Player 8 | 14579 |
| Player 9 | 26700 |
So in the example above, these players would be split in to 4 groups:
| Group | # of players |
| ------------- |:-------------:|
| Group1 | 2 |
| Group2 | 2 |
| Group3 | 2 |
| Group4 | 3 |
The number of players in a group needs to be as close as possible, however, as a group, the groups total Skill needs to around similar in numbers each time.
Before I go too far down the rabbit hole (as wording a question like this in a simple google search is not turning out very well) are there any built in functions of Excel that can be leveraged to achieve this or possible efforts in VBA that can be explored to achieve the required result?

Answer 1

This isn't an answer! But suppose you try a simple algorithm:
Calculate average skill level (ASL) for all 9 players
Set TSG (total skill for group) to zero.
Loop:Take largest skill Level (LSL) of remaining players
If TSG+LSL>ASL
Go to next group
Else
Add to total skill (TSG) for this group
Remove player from list
Repeat loop until no players remaining.
If you apply this by hand to your data you should get:
Average=30725.75
+---------+---------+---------+---------+
| Group 1 | Group 2 | Group 3 | Group 4 |
+---------+---------+---------+---------+
| 50000 | 26700 | 14579 | 10000 |
| | 2000 | 11000 | 7525 |
| | 999 | | |
| | 100 | | |
| | | | |
| 50000 | 29799 | 25579 | 17525 |
+---------+---------+---------+---------+
Clearly there are a couple of issues - you might not want a single group containing only player with highest skill level. Also you might want to re-average the remaining players after taking out the most skilful player. Should be a starting point though - could be implemented fairly easily with formulas or VBA.