Unhappy Players

I have been having some success with my team in FM2009, a promotion from League 1 to the Championship and a solid 8th place finish in the the Championship.

Naturally my success has attracted other clubs to look at my players and make offers, express interest via the media and generally contribute to unsettling several key members of the 1st 11. No issue with that but I am just curious as the the various stratergies involved in dealing with a player who has either become uphappy or is unsettled.

You can offer them a better contract, you can make public compliments, you can set them to " indispensable " player status, you can set them as captain, you can put them on the market for a while.....you can try dozens of strategies BUT if he is intentioned to leave and if a big club is over him there is pretty nothing you can do to change the will beside selling them @ the best bidder and try to catch him again few months later if it is worth the deal

DO NOT respond to transfer speculation. My first successfull season with QPR, the big teams started sniffing round my Brazilian stars - I issued a ton of hands-off warnings, and the press kept going on about it until they had completely unsettled all of my best players. Next time, I just kept quiet and everything stayed relatively calm.

If they do get unsettled and demand to move, you can still hang onto them (if they're on a long-term contract) - they might not play as well, but if they're you're best players "not as well" might still be better than your alternatives.

If they're really stroppy sometimes accepting transfer offers, then delaying them weeks and weeks till the club drops out, or delaying then cancelling them, can work. The players sometimes don't see this as you refusing to let them leave the club.

Bear also in mind that despiting set " reject all offers " it may happen that your board shut your mouth selling a player when an offer is good enough to refuse.

I have followed Dekker advance as the January transfer window progressed and "said nowt"!

The only complaint I had was from my Spanish striker, who I was offered a stupidly low amount of money for from a divisional rival...but he complains if he is on the bench for a few matches anyway...so I took no notice of him!

I've had success with getting players to stay loyal to the club if I am their favored personnel and they don't have an "ambitious" personality and I give them the chance to move, but the transfer fees are significantly high. Then, it eases the pain once I accept a transfer fee worth 10 times the players value IF the player agrees to transfer. One of my best players ever never left the club despite numerous accepted bids, but his personality type was listed as unambitious.