Limited wage budget despite selling

I've been at a smallish club and have had a relatively low wage budget which I reached. I sold several players to free up the wage bill which was shown on the wage budget/transfer budget adjuster, but I was still only allowed to offer £220 per week (with players needing around £2-3k per week).

I eventually left the club because of this and the newly appointment manager quickly makes a signing, paying him £3,000 a week! Is this some sort of bug or am I missing something?

I also asked the board to increase my budget, they agreed sayign they'd give 30% of funds towards transfers but this didn't appear.

Have you had several offers running at the same time by any chance?

IIRC the game treats every offer you make as if you had signed the player already, as far as the budget is concerned. Thus, if you have 3k p/w left in your wage budget and you offer a contract to a player in that amount, your board will restrict your ability to make further offers due to treating the first one as completed already.

This is to prevent a circumvention of the budget. Should all your offers be accepted, you would otherwise be in the position to bust your limit by completing e.g. ten transfers with the residual 3k p/w being offered in wage. I have to say, that I'd prefer the transfers to be blocked upon completion by the board if the wage budget is reached, just as it works when there is no more transfer budget left (you would also irl talk to many agents at the same time, offering what you have left without any such restriction and only make a decision if one or more players are happy to join), but this for some reason is how it works so far.

So maybe that's the answer you were looking for