Hey, I'm currently managing Exeter City in League 1 and am struggling to do a few things.
1) Reduce the wage bill. I could release some players but I'd prefer to sell them. Any ideas??
2)Getting good free players. I manage to get 2 good centre-backs (Lucien Mettemo and Mahamadou Seck) but that's about it.
3)Getting cash to be able to have higher wage bill allowing better calibre players.
For the cash problem, I organised some pre-season friendlies with Rangers, Celtic, Tottenham, Everton and a foreign team that I've forgotten the name of and was wondering if this would've helped at all?
Any help would be appreciated!!
1. If you can't transfer them out for anything of value, I'd cut bait and just release your excess players. I've played my way up from the BSS so I know the importance of managing your expenses.
2. Can't comment personally here, but just send your scouts out. Keep them roaming around looking for players with a wage no greater than zero.
3. You have the right idea with scheduling friendlies. During the preseason I try to schedule a big money game at least every 5 days to generate revenue. When you schedule the games, you can see how much you will pay the opposing team and how much revenue to expect from the game. IIRC, most of the better known teams in the premier league will bring in 45k.
This money helps your bottom line and it will ultimately help convince the board to spend money during the offseason. When I was playing as Newport County in FM09, I always scheduled a ton of friendlies to drive up my income levels. That paid off with stadium expansions, improvements to facilities, and better budgets.
Ahhh cheers for that. Very helpful. Will scouts actually find good players with wages no higher than zero?? That's awesome if so. Also, I managed to schedule friendlies that brought in £85k to £95k after paying the other team which I was quite happy with.
That's what I did all the way up to the Championship League. You can always adjust your parameters as you see fit - set the maximum wage to whatever you're willing to budget and work from there. And in looking through my old Newport blogs, here's where I broke into League 1 in 2013:
http://www.fmscout.com/p-weblogs/m-page/id-563.html
I don't know how useful the player information will be, since it's from FM09 and several years from the start of a typical game.
With regards to #1, I've got the same problem.
I recently started the game and so I foolishly allowed my youth coach to handle contract renewals. He fucked me by giving one player who is not even in my first team plans a 5 year contract at 55k p/w (I'm using Sunderland so my finances are not too bad but it still bogs me down quite a bit) along with a bunch of other lousy players that I don't want.
The wage bill on my "not needed" players comes up to more than half as much as my first team, something like 200k compared with 300k.
The problem is I can't get rid of these players. They refuse to mutually terminate because they're getting paid well, I can't terminate them because it'd cost me in the tens of millions, and I can't sell them!
I've offered them to clubs at 0$, and there are no takers. Right now I'm loaning some of them out for free at 50-60% wage, whatever I can get so it's not such a burden on me because these guys are really deadweight and I can't fit them in my first team at all.
Any ideas on how to get rid of em?
saplingg :
With regards to #1, I've got the same problem.
I recently started the game and so I foolishly allowed my youth coach to handle contract renewals. He fucked me by giving one player who is not even in my first team plans a 5 year contract at 55k p/w (I'm using Sunderland so my finances are not too bad but it still bogs me down quite a bit) along with a bunch of other lousy players that I don't want.
The wage bill on my "not needed" players comes up to more than half as much as my first team, something like 200k compared with 300k.
The problem is I can't get rid of these players. They refuse to mutually terminate because they're getting paid well, I can't terminate them because it'd cost me in the tens of millions, and I can't sell them!
I've offered them to clubs at 0$, and there are no takers. Right now I'm loaning some of them out for free at 50-60% wage, whatever I can get so it's not such a burden on me because these guys are really deadweight and I can't fit them in my first team at all.
Any ideas on how to get rid of em?
Sounds like you're doing all you can by loaning those players out at relieving yourself of some of the wage burden, albeit temporarily. Just have to sit tight and wait for those contracts to expire. Tough way to learn the value of working out all contracts on your own. Even when I was playing as City, the only contracts that I didn't handle were for my U18 team; and that was after I made sure all of my best youths were already signed to longterm contracts.
