How to improve your club's finances on Football Manager

Transfers

Written by Arvind

Football Manager can be really challenging at times when you take over a club with a messed-up squad consisting of aging overpaid players, and practically no transfer budget to work with.

Take Inter Milan, for example. There are probably one too many "legends" who have been allowed to stay on spectacularly high wages well into their 30s. None of these guys can be sold for very much, not that many people will want them with their high wage demands, so your transfer budget doesn't appear to benefit out of it either. Most of the rest of the squad consist of either very poor players or very young players with great potential who haven't hit their peak yet. So you've got nobody to sell to support your transfer spending, and the owners have ridiculously high expectations of you. And keeping all the older ones for another season might not be the best strategy either, given that the club is up to its neck in debt(around £300m).

Step 1: Start Afresh

The first step when you take over a squad like this is to start afresh. Get rid of the people on high wages as fast as you can, and if you can make a decent sum from their sale, that's a bonus. While you may only receive around £500k for such a player(if you can even get a fee for him at all), you can transfer the wage budget cleared up by his sale into your transfer budget. Getting rid of a player earning £100k a week nets you nearly £5m in your transfer budget. Every little counts when clearing out your squad.

Step 2: Bargain Hunting

Throwing money solves a lot of problems in FM, but there's not much you can do when you don't have any to throw, is there? When you've got just a few millions in your pocket (or less, depending on the league you're playing in) but several holes in the squad, you have to hunt for bargains. The transfer list is a decent place to start, but not often do you find someone worth buying from there.

A temporary solution could be a loan deal. Rather than searching in the 'loan list', untick "Unrealistic transfers" and tick "Unrealistic fee paying loans." What this does is show a list of players than you can actually get on loan. They're usually much better than the ones on the loan list, and there are many more here as well.
While these loans do help you cover up some cracks in your squad, in the long term you need some players of your own that you can also make money off of in the future. Here's where the bargains come in.

Playing as a low level team in a top league, it's not a very good idea to restrict your searching and purchases just to that one league. Scouts can do a decent job of finding good players outside of the country, but more often than not they find players belonging to clubs who are unwilling to let them go cheaply.

You'll need to search manually, by browsing through various teams and clicking on dozens of player profiles, hoping to find someone at the right age and the right price and with enough ability to improve your team. While it might seem like a monumental task - especially if you're looking for around 6 or 7 players, it definitely does narrow down your task if you know where to look. If you're managing a team like Cardiff, you should be looking at teams in the bottom half of the Bundesliga, teams that are around mid-table in Ligue 1, teams outside the top 4-5 in the Liga Zon Sagres(Portugal), as well as the best teams in the 2.Bundesliga, Liga adelante etc. You can definitely find a handful of bargains here, but the best place to look would be in countries like Norway, Mexico, Argentina, Turkey, Denmark, Serbia etc. where the leagues are probably a step or two below the one you're in and where the value of the players are much lower due to low league reputations.

A quick way to do so is to click on the country, and check out the top 5-6 clubs on the bottom left hand corner of your screen. Check each top club's squad and filter players by their values. Look for players worth anywhere between 500k-1m between the ages of 19-26. If you've found any player whose stats look good, scout him to see how much he'll cost you as well as your scout's recommendation.

A lot of the time, your scout will probably give the player lower stars than you'd expect, but that does not necessarily mean that he's a bad player. If he's got the right stats to play the role you want him to, then use your own discretion and sign him anyway. A couple of years down the line, there's a good chance his value would have increased a half a dozen times and you can sell him for a tidy profit.

Step 3: Selling Players

I try to sell players in every transfer window. While maintaining team cohesion is always nice, I'd rather prefer to maintain my finances. Assess your squad right before every transfer window starts, and try to identify 1-3 players that you'd like to sell. If you get an offer from another club which is over the player's value as well as his worth to you, consider it and maybe even try to negotiate. Even if you don't get an offer from anybody else, you can always offer out your players, and a little less than twice their value is an optimistic start, and you can bring down the asking price later on depending on the interest. These players should fall into the following categories -

1) Starting to age

When your player hits the age of 28, be on the lookout for a replacement. Selling players when they're around 29 is a good guideline to go by, because at that time they're still at their peak - meaning their value will be high and won't start to come down just yet. Moreover, you would have still gotten most of the years of his peak, and getting a good sum for him ensures you can also get an equally good - or better - replacement.

2) Value is more than his worth to you

There will be several occasions where you can notice players of yours whose value is probably higher than what it should be - at least to you. If you've got a guy who's worth £6m, but his stats indicate that he's simply not that good, he doesn't do that well for you but still has a high value - sell. Since he's overpriced anyway, finding a replacement for less money than you sold him for shouldn't be an issue, and the rest of it goes into the club's coffers.

3)A flop

All of us do have them, don't we? You can be sure to a reasonable extent after a while that a player simply isn't going to perform for you, or that other players in front of him in the pecking order are just playing too good. Often, the problem with these players is that you find it hard to move them out.
This is because they do not play a lot of games. Its usually much harder to get offers for players who have only played 1 or 2 games. If you know that you want to ship out a player, plan in advance so that you can give him a run of 6-7 games right before the transfer window starts and that will put him in the shop window and attract more bids when you offer him to clubs.

Trying to play Moneyball may not be the easiest thing to do, and will probably take some more of your time, but everybody loves a good bargain, and everybody loves to make a good profit.