Buying players and paying for their wages is no doubt the largest outgoings you have at your club. Players get greedy, clubs command huge fees for the best players and you want to succeed, paying anything in the that search. But once you get that success without a decent transfer policy that success can soon disappear as you run out of money and your team starts to age. One way though to save the pennies is to make sure you use those contract negotiations to get the best possible deal for your accountant.
Remove Those Pesky Clauses & Bonuses
Removing clauses is becoming much harder with the introduction of agents in Football Manager 2011. They can make success expensive as you just throw money at players just to get their signature. The majority of players will look for massive goal & win bonuses to bump up already generous wage packets. If you have a steady fixed outgoings making your finances easy to keep a track on.
But the easiest and the biggest clause I like to remove is the yearly rise. Which could mean that as time goes buy and you have many players on long term contracts, your wage bill will just spiral up and up getting out of hand. Keep things as fixed as possible will mean things are much more simple for you to plan.
Love Thy Agent
Many people hate the introduction of the snaky greedy characters into our Football Manager games. But the introduction of agents can be used in your favour, exploiting that very greed that makes us hate them.
Offering agents more money can often make them act selfishly forgetting that their job is actually to get the best deal for their client. I will often half the asking wage price of a player, while while offering the agent £1m more in fees (or whatever you can get away with). Make sure you do a bit of quick maths before finalising the deal, you don’t want to rob Peter, to give to John. Make sure are making saving by offering the agent more.
Don’t Let Contracts Run Down
The earlier you can tie down your wonderkid the cheaper the price of their contract will be. Try reviewing those players who have a contract running low, expiring in say 18-24 months but in good form. Sign them up with a longer contract and keep the wages as low as possible, before they start attracting attention from bigger clubs. Agents will use this interest to bump the price of wages higher. This will also prevent losing these players on the cheap.
How Many Key Players Can You Have?
I had been looking to write this post for a while, but it was a piece at FM Story that really inspired me to get a move on to get it down. Here Darren demonstrates a common trap for many Football Manager players. Giving in to players wants, just for their signature. Know what you need and when to stop.
I was recently been trying to negotiate a deal with Yuri Zhirkov. Unwanted at Chelsea and looking like he would end up moving on on a free transfer, I looked to swoop. But Yuri still had ideas of a Chelsea wage. eye watering £90k, it just couldn’t do. I stuck strong and offered him a deal that fitted in with what the rest of my squad was earning and his status within it. It ended up that he was never going to sign unless I offered him those wages. Despite desperate for a left winger, I walked away and managed to find another players for free at a nice price.
Great post Thomas. My favourite points are with regards to contracts not running down and also exploiting the agents greed. Both extremely important and isn’t it weird how folking money out early on a new contract actually helps make extra cash in the long run. Same thing with the agent fees, although agent fees can look ridiculous, doing the maths and spending more on day one can save a bunch years down the line.
ps thanks for the mention, you wrote Danny instead of Darren. But don’t worry, you’d be surprised how many times that happens…maybe I write more like a Danny.
Ha Ha. I know the feeling. I often get called James which isn’t even close to what my name is.
Sorry about that
changed now! thanks for the comment.
Good post, you’re right about the clauses that I always seem to overlook and then find that the club has no money left, signing on fee’s are the killer for me. Some of the wages the players want is ridiculous, but I guess that’s just the way the modern game is.
Agree, exploiting agents greediness is often the best way to save money on player wages, however this new feature, I mean agents, should have been implemented better, just an unfinished article at the moment.
It would be noted, for those like me that like to start in a small team in a low division, that for us a good part of our squad is made out of veteran players that we must cling to, as we lack either the money or the reputation to get anything even similar, and more often than none we lack both.
In these cases, the rule is inverted: we want to renew the contract as late as possible, once the player gets to 30 or so years old. As they get older, they lower their demands. And if we are lucky and there’s no interest in him, when his contract is about to run out he lowers it a good proportion as seemingly he fears the prospect of not having a club to sign for.
That is how, for example, I got my key centreback, who asked 70,000€ per annum the summer before his contract’s end to accept staying for just 32,000€ per annum when I offered it two weeks before. (Numbers may be a little off, since this was a couple months ago).