AI clubs poaching your staff - Does it only occur in their contract's final year?

I'm trying to keep my staff wages down for the first few seasons but i've found a coach that has a high reputation that is willing to join my club for a fairly cheap wages (half of the maximum wage I can offer) if I offer him a five-year deal. Obviously that's great for me initially, as long as I don't lose him to the AI clubs (due to his high rep) in the first couple of years as I doubt I will be able to afford any renegotiations in the next season or two. In fact I doubt he'll even be interested in signing a new contract with me due to his reputation - this has been the case with scouts of similar reputation that have signed for me: they're not interested in new contracts so I can't offer them extensions or more money.

To be quite blunt I have no idea if it's really worthwhile trying to keep the staff wages in check - after halving the staff payments and winning promotion with such measly staff wage budgets last season I find that I can only offer the exact same lowly maximum wages this season (and the club is not in debt). But I like to play the game in the right spirit though, and in real life I'd be trying to keep them down.

So can anyone please tell me if my fancy coach is likely to be poached in the next couple of seasons, or if the AI will wait until the final year of his contract before approaching him?

Also can anyone tell me if there is any advantage in trying to keep staff wages as low as possible?

I tend to face a constant battle to hold on to my staff. The only way they seem to be left to their devices is if they are on ludicrously high contracts. Generally I sign them on as cheap a contract as possible and every time a club approaches them I offer them a raise.

And the advantage of keeping staff wages low is it allows more to spend on your players, secures the clubs financial future and the board will approve of you for it.

I tend to face a constant battle to hold on to my staff. The only way they seem to be left to their devices is if they are on ludicrously high contracts. Generally I sign them on as cheap a contract as possible and every time a club approaches them I offer them a raise.

I don't think that tactic is going to work with this coach, he has a higher reputation than my club and it's one of those quirks that I'm going to be able to sign him at all (he's an unatteched player/coach).

In the previous season I signed two scouts but on one-year contracts because they were only mediocre scouts and I didn't want to be faced with big compensation fees for sacking them at the end of the season if I got promoted (which I did). I'd thought that getting promoted, having kept within the players' wage buget and having saved money on the staff wages I'd be rewarded with a bigger budget for staff wages (instead I'm allowed more staff but not higher individual wages - and I can have almost as many physios as coaches!) and might then be able to sign the scores of better scouts that at the time wanted £20 more than my budget would allow. (I couldn't and that's even more frustrating because the staff at the club at the start of the game were being paid almost double what I can offer and they were signed when the club was two-tiers below the league I've just taken them too!).

But in the last couple of months of the season one of those scouts started to improve, but he wasn't interested in discussing a new contract with me. Nor was the other one. I noticed they had high reputations and reloaded the old save and saw that curiously they'd had that rep at the start, odd because they had mediocre stats and were 30-something year-old Newgens, so they didn't have a history in which to acquire such a reputation. I skipped forward a couple of months to a save that the other staff would accept new contracts, but these two weren't interested even then. So I'm expecting the same to be true of this coach - I'll have one shot of signing him and that will be his contract until either he is poached away from me or my club improves it's reputation considerably.

And the advantage of keeping staff wages low is it allows more to spend on your players, secures the clubs financial future and the board will approve of you for it.

Ahh I addressed this in the other bit - that I can't offer any more (actually less than the start staff were paid) despite the club having no debts, my keeping within budgets and the club being promoted again.

Nice location by the way - local to the team I'm playing as (BUfc)