How to keep hold of 'The New Michael Owen'!?

I had a regen come through my youth system who is dubbed the new mickey owen.

before i knew what was happening man united and arsenal put bids in, meaning id just get 650k in compensation. panicing, i offered him a contract for when he completes his youth contract - due to his love for torquay he accepted!!

He signs his first professional contract in a few months and is having Juande Ramos at Spurs and Carlo Ancellotti praising him, in which he says he's in dreamland at the thought of playing for such clubs. Ancellotti was in fact at Lincoln City to watch Barton open the scoring in a 3-0 win. I used him sparingly in the first half of the season, but i find myself starting him most weeks now. He scored a hat-trick, which was followed by 2 yellow cards in 5 minutes in his next match...but i desperately want to hold onto him and avoid my chairman accepting a bid for a few million over my head when the big clubs come calling. Does anyone have any advice to help me keep hold of him.

I'll post screenshots when i get home if people would like.

Well if he turns out anything like Owen, I'd milk him for all he's worth as he's not one for the long term

Id put a asking price on his head of stupid money and offer him a contract with a HUGE Min fee release clause In my experience if the contract has a huge min fee release clause,

Clubs either wont bid or the chairman will reject as its no where near the value you have put on him.

That and if someone does match the release fee go to town on the fee.

demand:

30-40m up front

10-20 after 10 goals

10-20 after an international debut

and a massive sell on clause so if the worst happens he will keep your club going for a fair few years

Id put a asking price on his head of stupid money and offer him a contract with a HUGE Min fee release clause In my experience if the contract has a huge min fee release clause,

Clubs either wont bid or the chairman will reject as its no where near the value you have put on him.

That and if someone does match the release fee go to town on the fee.

demand:

30-40m up front

10-20 after 10 goals

10-20 after an international debut

and a massive sell on clause so if the worst happens he will keep your club going for a fair few years

now ur being daft even if you put a sick amount on release and transfer ask it only takes a 2.5 million offer and ur board will bite there hand off

Have you tried setting asking price to £0 with "reject all offers" instruction?

The bidding club will offer you £0 to match your asking price.

The bid will automatically be rejected through your "reject all offers" instruction.

Even the stupidest chairman won;t intervene to accept a £0 offer.

Changing the asking price to zero with reject all offers will work. You'll have a ton of offers in your inbox every day during the transfer windows but you will hold onto the player

Yeah keep exploiting the game As some wise man said (or was it yoda lol): "you have to learn to let go of the things you love" So try to keep him by standart means (not cheating, exploiting the game) but if it's not meant to be just let him go with huge future bonuses like 50% profit of next transfer.

Not the end of the world

now ur being daft even if you put a sick amount on release and transfer ask it only takes a 2.5 million offer and ur board will bite there hand off

how so? i find if i put a BIG Min fee release clause on him the board wont accept bids unless its Very close to the release fee.

hopefully getting promoted to the championship this season so its not like im at a really bad standard for him to develop. plus he loves torquay which will help things i think. he wont go demanding transfers, etc - at least not straight away anyway!

Would i still get away with it if i set his asking price to 0 but left it at that. then when an offer came in i could e.g. ask for 50 million, 50% next transfer fee, 10 mill after international appearence, etc and then see what the club come back with. as surely they'll either come back with no thanks or ok here you go. they wont come back with: 'you want 100 million....umm we'll give you 2 instead' and then the chairman comes in and accepte 2 million!

When it comes to the point where you HAVE to sell him, I highly recommend putting 'offer to clubs' for a stupid amount! I had an unhappy players who was worth 5.5 million, so offered him out for 20mill...the responce I got back was teams negotiating to just pay 15 million instead

i had loads of bids for him at £0 which was my valuation of him. didnt get annoyed by me rejecting the bids all the time.

transfer window has shut now so hopefully thatll be the end of the bids until january.

he's now 17 and has scored 2 in 4 in the league, am mid table in the championship - a pretty good place to be for a 17 year old wonderkid me thinks.

I wouldn't want a player as injury prone as Michael. Get a tasty bit of a money out of him

When I was in Italian C1, I got a great regen goalie. Juventus, Inter, Man U, and Barca put in bids for him. I had to reload a couple times to make sure he stayed with me (I had no goalies, he started at age 16 for me). I offered him a pretty good full time contract, and set an asking price over 10 million. Luckily he stayed with me, and at age 18, he's a beast.

I made sure to stock up on cheap high potential goalies, I figured they would be worth a lot, and could get at least 5 million if not more in 3-4 years.

Mind posting a pic of this player?

the new owen? sell him

you'll save yourself a lot of money not having to take him to hospital every other week