Help with my wage budget

I just started a game with Ajax so I am not doing all that well on the financial front. Sold two of my top players for a joint 14mil...only got about 7mil of it back to spend...which I expected.

However I wanted to bring in Van Nistelrooy from real for 1.9mil. Knowing his wages would be the stumbling block I decided to edit my budget so I only had just over 2mil left for spending and put my wage budget right up.

I had my bid for RVN accepted but when it came to offering him a contract I could only offer £25,000 a week which he obviously wouldn't take. I found this weird since I was £140,000 under my wage budget. I figured they maybe didn't want to give him too much since he was so old. So as an experiment I bid for Aguero (release clause, I can't afford it but its an experiment). Offer accepted and when I can offer him a contract I can only offer £23,000.

So you can see my problem...is there any way to get the board to give me the money that I deliberately freed up in my budget to spend on wages....I thought that was kinda the point of editing your wage budget...

Any advice?

Hey there, sounds like you're running into one of the long-running controls that the board puts on your wages: the "wage structure".

The board are limiting your offer based on the salaries of other players at the club. They don't want to set things up with one player - national legend or no - earning six or seven times as much as the next-highest paid player at the club. That way, they aren't risking a huge chunk of salary should the player go injured, or a bunch of players revolting and demanding to be paid a similar wage, which the club couldn't afford to do.

The typical advice is "offer raises to several other key players, in sort of inverse order". So, for example, give your fifth-best player a raise to £23k p/w, and then maybe the board will let you give your fourth-best player a raise to £30k p/w, and you can keep pushing it up until you get it to the point you want it .. but I doubt you'll be able to get it from £25k p/w to £140k p/w using that strategy; that's more for when the two numbers are close but just slightly out of reach.

You could use the editor to set up somebody else at the club on a similar wage; in general, once one player is on a wage, its considered part of the "wage scale" at the club, and the board are willing to allow you to sign a second player at the same wage. I'm not sure if it would work, but maybe you could set somebody up with a high wage but a "future transfer" which will take them off the books by the end of the first transfer window .. you might have just long enough to sign RVN on the same wage scale without actually wrecking your finances.

If you're set on this transfer, for story reasons, and are willing to use the editor anyways .. why not use the editor to set the transfer up? You could set it as a "Future Transfer" with a specific date, even right at the end of the first transfer window, or January 1st to openthe second transfer window. Deals set up in that manner aren't subject to the board's controls - or the player's whims! - so you could set it up with a £100k p/w contract without worrying that either the board or the player will veto that.

If you really prefer to work on the "No, I want the feeling of excitement for landing this transfer myself", you might be able to make a few edits that make RVN more likely to accept a move: set Ajax as his favorite club, set Real as a disliked club, set your Assistant Manager and one of your key players as his favorite personnel, etc - this should all make your club more attractive to him when considering the move .. especially if you start by declaring interest in him to start the media pounding on it as well.

You could also try extreme variations of contract offer; maybe he'd accept something closer to what your board will allow if you give him a much larger signing bonus than he's asking for; you could also maximize his per-appearance and per-goal bonuses to make the contract more acceptable. Release clauses should also help, though of course you risk losing him when they are invoked.