The Summer Transfer Window

Folks I'm intrigued to know if any of you have experienced this dilemma in your football manager careers? Let me set the scene.

I'm into season 3 of my FM16 Southampton save. The team is doing well. In the 1st season we finished 8th. The 2nd season we finished 4th. In this current season I'm 6th with 10 games to go. Which is fairly good in a highly competitive Barclays Premier League

The squad is a collection of good experienced players and promising youngsters. I'm happy with the standard of player and can't see too much room for improvement. None of the players are particularly old (30 or younger) and there are a lot of gifted regens in the U21 and U18 squads.

Right here lies my dilemma;

1.Should I still look to improve the squad in the summer and sell a few of decent and solid performers (i.e. 3 stars or less current and potential ability, 6.90 average rating etc).

2.Stick with what I've got in the summer and give more game time to the promising youngsters next season.

Usually in my saves I always refresh the squad in the summer transfer window. To ward off the fear of stagnation. However in this save a lot of the players are performing well. Maybe I'm being too loyal? Or do you as managers always sign at least 1 new player in the summer transfer window?

Whenever I try to rely on younger players I seem to have a few disgruntled players who want me to invest in the first team squad lol

I would try to sign one or two extremely good first team players but maintain the same squad. In my experience it tends to be who is available will dictate who I sign.

My goalie was unhappy when we sold my star midfielder (the money was ridiculous though) and he wanted quality signings. I signed a better goalie and he was happy, but not for long!

Thank you for the responses guys.

Start planning for the future. Buy potential stars and focus on developing them. When your current crop is aging you will have ready made replacements for them.

A squad is never finished imo. There is always that 1 (or more) position(s) where u can get a better player for. And if ur happy with ur squad just look to make that 1 quality deal that can (potentially) get u a few places higher next season.

One or Two signings per window when you have a squad you're happy with and developing, this tends to weed out complacency.

I have a bad habit of seeing £££ signs when teams bid in for my players (Sold Januzaj for £57M and a World Class Regen DM for £50M when it would have made more sense to keep them, as I didn't need the money or like to spend big on replacing players like that) But it seems to work for me

In FM, I'm a believer in continuous improvement, rather than a settled squad. It is usually easy to sell high-performing players for silly money, and replace them with better players or at worst better potential players for far less. I have never really noticed any negative effect from changing many players either in terms of on-field cohesion or off field harmony.