What to do with transfer listed players with huge salaries?

Hello all,

I've been around in some forums and I've noticed a common complain in all of them. Sometimes there is this great player *cough* Tevez *cough* that is sidelined in his club, transfer listed by request and pretty much no club can ever buy him because of his huge salaries. Even though the player will never smell virtual grass again, because of how the transfer system works, they usually end up leaving for free after 2 or 3 seasons of sitting around doing nothing and earning millions.

How to deal with this situation? I have two suggestions:

1 - Tweak the players' AI: modify a player's AI so that when he is transfer listed by request for not getting enough first team football / manager issues / whatever, he is more likely to accept a wage cut. And that likelihood increases with the amount of time the player is sidelined - think of it as an increasing probability x of accepting y % of cut in his salary over time not playing. Not that hard.

2 - Implement a clause on buying such players that allows the selling club to support part of the player's wages for some time. This already occurs when a human controlled team sells an unwanted player, so why not the other way around? Add a clause on transfer fee negotiations that goes something along the line of "selling club supports a% of salary for b years" - even it leads to a slightly higher selling price. More often than not, the clubs can buy the player with little problem, but just can't afford the salaries.

I hope these ideas get taken into consideration. Best regards to all.

I think that the first suggestion would have to be used in conjunction with another hidden stat like "Greed," this could motivate how long a player would want to do a Winston Bogarde for and just sit around earning his money without doing anything at all.

^Maybe ambition could cover that. An ambitious player would be willing to take a cut in pay to get back to playing and showing off how great he is (or thinks he is) to move up the ranks while an unambitious player would sit around collecting a paycheque.

It probably wouldn't be too much of a chore to come up with a formula that would take into account greed and ambition scores, plus a weight factor for the monthly pay (I'd say that players that earn more per month would be more prone to lay back than those who earn less) and games played over time. Get on it, math geeks.