What's your highest transfer budget that you've been given? I just recieved..

[Magicz]

I got £150 million for Man United on 10.

I sold a couple of players though and rounded it up to a nice, circular £200 million

[Smurf]

If team gelling isn't working - hold a team meeting before the season starts and get them all on board.

Usually can get them gelled quicker then. If you mess it up though...

And I also put the training focus thing on Teamwork.

After I've sold players - they probably haven't played a game for me in 6 months anyway as their potential is still so low that I wouldn't even consider them. So not sure how that affects the team morale.

When I buy players in they're either a superstar, or great potential. With the superstars - the team morale picks up a bit. With young players, they can sneak in without disrupting too much.

So come the start of the season I have either 3 or 4 youngsters, and/or 2 or 3 new superstars. I rotate the players regularly.

[Smurf]

Here's how I spent the money when I arrived at Arsenal from 1st to current season

(should be able to right click the image and choose "view image" or something like that)

[Frankchickens1]

I play about the same as Eugene Tyson.

I agree that I would like to see it in the game that players begin to not want to sign for you because they know you buy and sell too many players

[Carmi88]

selling song and vermaelin, Eug you monster!

[Smurf]

Eh yeh also like to see the board look at the transfers and say "eh no, you've signed too many players already". I'd like to see a bit more unrest amongst players at the transfer listing of a lot of players.

And I'd also like to add - it was 2018! Song and Vermalen were past it at 31 and 33 or something.

I got a good deal

[x42bn6]

That's insane! You have the yearly imports and exports of a medium-sized city...

[Hibserpool]

I don't know. I buy players on 48 month deals. So the transfer budget is only scratched. The next season I'm offered a larger transfer budget. I do the same again. Buy the best, sell the worst.

All in all I'll spend about 20m in one transfer window (really something like 250m), but I'll sell off players for 20 or 30m when the AI bids for them that high. But it's usually just selling off anyone who has fallen to 3 stars or below in the Assistant Report.

And I always put in 25% of next transfer when selling a player. 6 seasons down the line "KACHING" you get 5m for a player you sold off years ago.

The main thing to do is - keep the players with 3.5 stars and above. Then sell the 3 star or below. Only buy players that you have scouted thoroughly (3 matches or more) that have 4 stars or more.

I took over Arsenal after a long stint in Brazil and a short stint with Sunderland. And when I got to Arsenal I signed really good coaches. Theo Walcott had fallen to below 3 stars.

Sold him for 40m to Inter. The fans were pissed, but I didn't care. I just signed better players.

The key is to use 48 month transfers when you're buying, and only buy 4* players or more. When you're selling off players below 3.5* then make sure you include a 25% of next transfer fee.

You'll make money that season in transfers, as you'll spend a fraction of what you are actually paying for them. But every year your transfer budget goes up and up and up.

No you didn't. You sold him for £19.25m according to the screenshot above. Stop telling porkies

[Smurf]

Must have been another game. I have lots of saves

[Smurf]

That's insane! You have the yearly imports and exports of a medium-sized city...

I wasn't joking when I said I exploit the transfer system

[Smurf]

That guy I paid for in 3rd season Kelisa, he was 30m at 18 years of age. Fans went "mad".

But he went on to win world player of the year from 24 years old to 28 years old - I stopped playing after that. He was better than Messi!

Take that fans!

[scribs]

50 million euros for adam johnson what were u thinking eugene!!

[Freakiie]

50 million euros for adam johnson what were u thinking eugene!!

Ability: 10million

Nationality: Ah crud, he's english, right 40mil.

Total: 50mil

[speedas]

I got approached by Barcelona in 2023 and they had 300 million as their budget, scared me

If the clubs have all this money in your party, what about the amount of money for transfers between AI ? A world class player is selled 150 million right ?

[JAStewart]

Billion + with Chelsea on 05 or 07 or 08. Can't remember which.

[Ranquelme]

I never really look at the transfer budget if it goes higher than £30m. I just look at the balance and plan if I can afford paying a lot of money.

With Napoli I have a £77m budget.

[Vicente14]

This is easily solved by making the treansfer budget a percentage of the bank balance and hard cap it at a certain point. Why would Chelsea offer a budget of 350m and put themselves 100m in debt? They wouldn't. If there was that much cash floating around they take it and build a new stadium or just stick it in a bank account and forget about it, or just run the club off it for the next 5 years or something, not just throw it all at one manager.

Also a guy on a forum I post at bought a CB for about E200m (It was 190m quid). An amazing CB granted, but yah.

[Smurf]

50 million euros for adam johnson what were u thinking eugene!!

Ability: 10million

Nationality: Ah crud, he's english, right 40mil.

Total: 50mil

I needed to fill the quota of players trained in England. I also needed a winger. Adam Johnson was the best scouted winger trained in England with a 4 star rating.

I didn't want to spend 50m on him. But it was that or 3 star scouted player for 30m.

[scott MUFC]

blackpool save.. got offered the man utd job.. 60 million budget

[luton]

In the second season with my Man City save i got £200million then in January i got a further £180 million.

[Cougar2010]

I needed to fill the quota of players trained in England. I also needed a winger. Adam Johnson was the best scouted winger trained in England with a 4 star rating.

I didn't want to spend 50m on him. But it was that or 3 star scouted player for 30m.

Do you only look at stars when making your signings Eugene?

What about attributes? personality? strengths? weaknesses?

Overall I think the way you approach transfers is a little unrealistic and as with many things in FM if the inputs are extreme the results often are too - In this case money & transfer budgets.

I like the idea of SI introducing something to discourage this sort of approach and some of the ideas that have been posted are possibly worth looking at.

[scott MUFC]

Adam Johnson went for under 5 million on my save

[Smurf]

Do you only look at stars when making your signings Eugene?

What about attributes? personality? strengths? weaknesses?

Overall I think the way you approach transfers is a little unrealistic and as with many things in FM if the inputs are extreme the results often are too - In this case money & transfer budgets.

I like the idea of SI introducing something to discourage this sort of approach and some of the ideas that have been posted are possibly worth looking at.

As with Adam Johnson, I was familiar already with him, so I didn't really look into attribute, personality, strenths, or weaknesess.. etc.

If it's a player I'm unfamiliar with - I'll scout them and scout them and scout them - perhaps 9 or 10 times, sometimes the Potential Ability drops stars.

I'll compare players I don't know with players I do know, and I'll check the Scout recommendation. See who are they matching up against.

Usually though, I'll scout the players with 3.5 stars or above for potential. Then I'll sort it by Potential Ability - then I'll start sifting through them. Getting scout reports for 3 games etc.

It was actually doing this that I discovered the player search slowed down when you had too many scout reports, like a 10 second delay, and I reported it as a bug.

But for Adam Johnson - I wanted an English winger, and he rated at 4 stars, and there was no other English winger that was close to him. So I bought him.

[Smurf]

Don't know why people are getting tied up with Adam Johnson - it was 1 player. I've signed plenty of other players that turned into world stars.

Jesus Marcia won world player of the year after a few seasons - cost me €2.1m

Here's how that Arsenal team did in the league.

Can anyone dispute my methods are flawed? It was like that for maybe 5 or 6 seasons.

[x42bn6]

Flawed in reality, but perhaps not in-game, where you are just milking a flawed AI.

[Smurf]

Exactly my point there x42bn6. People come on complaining about the ME - and that corner bug exploit and etc. and that's fixed straight-away. When this gets aired, season after season (I think I've been exploiting this for about 3 years now), and nobody has done anything with it?

Perhaps it's too complex a system to tamper with, and perhaps a coding nightmare to put in restrictions or something... But no matter what club I'm at the Board turn a blind-eye to my spending, and thus I can do the above.

[x42bn6]

Exactly my point there x42bn6. People come on complaining about the ME - and that corner bug exploit and etc. and that's fixed straight-away. When this gets aired, season after season (I think I've been exploiting this for about 3 years now), and nobody has done anything with it?

Perhaps it's too complex a system to tamper with, and perhaps a coding nightmare to put in restrictions or something... But no matter what club I'm at the Board turn a blind-eye to my spending, and thus I can do the above.

Because I think quartering transfer budgets and making everyone's finances poor would make people very very unhappy because they can't sign their favourite players.

I mean, look at this: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/soccer/01/25/clubs.losses.ap/

Financial accounts from about 665 clubs revealed 56 percent lost money in the 2010 financial year, and their total debt was $10.9 billion.

It should be an absolute nightmare for clubs to break even. Sugar daddy clubs are the exception, not the rule - the vast majority of clubs don't have sugar daddies, but we don't hear about them.

Out of curiosity - you are in 2070 in one of your games. Are there a lot of clubs in financial difficulty? Said article suggests 56% of clubs lost money in 2010 - given there should be no inflation in-game, around 56% of teams should be losing money in 2070.

I suspect it's because takeovers wipe out debts too easily - in reality, we should have distressed takeovers like Portsmouth (recent article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/16710949.stm). In a lot of ways, I felt that in FM10, getting into debt was a godsend for a club because they would likely get taken-over and their debt cut into pieces without any footballing consequence. While the debt is indeed cut in most bankruptcy cases, it only happens after the company mass-downsizes and sells most of its assets. I remember putting a club into serious debt into FM10 via FMRTE and it escaped relatively-unscathed with several of its top players retained.

One way is to ensure that the amount of money in the game (i.e. the sum of every club's bank balance) should remain relatively constant over time.

From your perspective, the board should be looking at your transfer activity rather dimly - from a pure financial perspective, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to have a revolving door policy, as you are clearly making money off developing players and selling them (I'd question whether this is realistic, of course). From a footballing perspective, however, I think there's a bug - nobody should want to join your club as you are trigger-happy when it comes to buying and selling players. Your existing players should be constantly having poor morale as there is no stability whatsoever. Your team should struggle to produce cohesive results as they are constantly changing teammates.

Manchester City's early days when Abu Dhabi first entered the picture should represent your team - agent fees through the roof, plenty of unhappy players that cannot be shifted, no teamwork whatsoever, etc.

And certainly, net spends of ~£100m every season is unrealistic - City aside, nobody will be allowed to spend that much money. And perhaps even turn a profit in doing so.

The 48-month bug only makes things worse, too. If you have a "£25m" transfer budget on-screen, that is £100m over 48 months and if you spend £100m over 48 months right now, you should have a pitiful transfer budget for the next 3 years. FM doesn't even try to enforce that.

And let's not forget wage budgets - if you go anywhere near your wage budget limit in FM, you face financial collapse. Wage budget limits need to be brought down. Most of us experienced FM-ers know this, but what about newcomers to the series? "£5m/week wage budget? £4.5m/week sounds like a good figure to aim for..."

[paganizer]

When fairplay rules are introduced in FM this should be fixed automaticly.

[Smurf]

I agree with you there x42bn6.

In regard to Wage Budgets. I often go over my budget on wages. And there isn't even a notice about it. Players have threatened to go on strike over not receiving wages. So if I'm over my Wage budget I should be getting scathed by the players, morale should be abysmal, etc.

My revolving door policy seems to bypass morale for some reason. Technically buying and selling players should result in poor morale.

But on taking over a club:

1. Tell media I am getting rid of deadwood

2. Sell players 3* or less

3. Scout players to the hilt to find 4 star ability players

4. Scout players to find the 4 star potential players

5. Sign top players if possible to bulk up positions as a result of #2 above (max 3 per position), i.e., if I sold 2 left backs and only have 1 remaining, I will buy 2 left backs.

6. Sign top youngsters of at most 18 years of age (these can also make up numbers in Reserves).

With this model - I can't go wrong on taking over a club. I've warned deadwood players they'd be gone. I then sign top players to replace them. And top youngsters, which don't seem to have affect on morale. If you have 5 players who play as a left back and you sign a 18 year old, players won't get upset with too much competition for players. But if you were to sign a 26 year old you'd have a battle on your hands.

Roll onto January transfer window

I've been playing my players in rotation, picking player with the best Ability for the tough games, and the players with best potential for the easy games. Ability stars fluctuate. Some by this stage may have fallen below 3.5 stars. I don't concern myself with 3 star players at this point. I look only at players who are now rated at 2.5 stars or below (if any). I then attempt to offload these players (chances are they didn't play any games). After 6 months of not playing, it's no surprise to the team that they're gone. It has rarely had an affect on morale.

I continue to do #3 and #4 above. The only time I'll sign a player in January is if they are scouted at 4 stars or more. I will then continually scout them for 3 matches over and over and over again. Some that were rated at 4.5 stars may drop to 4 stars or below.

It's only towards the end of the transfer window that if I have found a 4.5 star or higher player I will sign them. That most of the time is zero players. But every now and then there is 1 or 2 players.

Roll on the Summer

At this point I've been playing my players in rotation, picking player with the best Ability for the tough games, and the players with best potential for the easy games.

I wouldn't have picked a player that has under 3.5 stars to play. Unless I had to. So if I haven't sold them at the start of the season, or in the January transfer window, then it's unlikely that they played at all with a 3 star or below.

Now selling these players - I'll sell them off at half price if I have to. They were probably on the Transfer list since the start of the season, or since January, and if they are under 3 stars, then they are transfer listed and offered out.

In Summary

Start

Tell media you're ridding dead wood.

Sell off as many under 3.5 star players as you can - transfer list the rest

Buy in players of better quality than you already have - if not try get potential player

Buy in top youth players with high potential stars.

January

Sell of players not playing and under 3.5 stars.

Only buy 4 star Abiltity or higher players

Only buy 4 star Potential or higher players.

Check squad for depth (at least 3 players per position) (3 gk, 3DL, 3DR, 6DC, 3MR, 3MC, 3ML, 3AMC, 6ST))

Summer

Repeat January

Doing this has very little effect on my team.

And if I buy in June - the players gel. Buying too many in August is risk.

Doing this I can literally buy and sell players to my hearts content - and nobody gets upset.