Does anybody actually know what "Reserve investment fund" is?

[Scarecroww]

First I'll put everything into perspective and explain why this is a big deal to me.

I am managing English Tier 11 team, after I got promoted to Premier League my board decided to build a 20000 capacity stadium(now maxed out at 30k) for 45M Euros even tho I had 500M in the bank. During construction we played on 40K stadium and we were already filling it for every game so that already pissed me off.

This put me in incredibly difficult position where I had to balance between high board demands while keeping low wages, meaning I had to keep selling all my best players due to high wage demands. Now I could have just increased the wages and messed up the wage structure and it would be fine in short therm but it would eventually catch up with me because of the pathetic stadium that they built, and I would end up with constantly low money balance, which would mean that the board would never allow for new stadium to be built due to uncertain financial situation. 

So the plan was to just keep the wages low and keep selling the players so that when 20 years finally passes that there would be enough money for board to build a proper stadium.

8 years into the future after the 20k stadium was built and I am sitting on 1.5B Euros in the bank and the board does this

So I move on thinking that's surely not going to happen again in near future. Then I sell my best player for 250M aaaand


So here we are filling a ****** stadium for 8 years for every single game and the board won't decide to build a new one but they will just take 800M out of the club...

Now the question is, does anybody actually know for a fact what reserve investment fund is? From what I read there are differing opinions on this but nothing coming official from the developers. It's clear that the game has a limit on the money you can have and will do this after you reach it, but the question is whether the board will actually use that money in a situation where it's needed, like building a new stadium? Or is it the more likely scenario that the money is just deleted from the game, considering that in expenditure page is stands as: Dividends- Amount of dividends paid out to the owners by the club.

I think the whole dealing with the board thing is done really poorly in FM but this is just ridiculous

[turnip]

There's an upper (and lower) limit to any specific number the game can store due to coding. In FM21 (a 64-bit programme), that number is roughly 1.8bn.

Basically, if the board didn't stuff some money under the mattress, if you got to £1.8bn the value would overflow and all of a sudden you'd now have -£1.8bn.

 

And no, you can't have a new stadium until 20 years after the last one was built. 

[Scarecroww]

As I said, I know I can't ask for a new stadium. But I am pretty sure that the board can decide on their own to build it. I even read it as one of those tips during processing screen. 
The limit could be properly fixed by adding actual some kind of reserve fund where money gets deposited to, instead of just breaking the game and removing the money. 

[turnip]

The board can decide to build a new stadium, but they absolutely won't until your stadium is at least 20 years old.

[XaW]

3 minutes ago, turnip said:

The board can decide to build a new stadium, but they absolutely won't until your stadium is at least 20 years old.

That's not true anymore. I had a new one built after 5 years. Can't find the screenshot now, but I posted it here back when it happened.

[afced7]

Realistically in the Premier League your money isn't coming from ticket sales, it's coming from TV, so I really don't think there was that much need to be so frugal that you reached the cap. However when it comes to new stadiums it does seem like boards are too conservative in situations like this, and the message about the reserve investment fund is very misleading, since the money is in fact completely gone.

Edited June 1, 2021 by afced7

[phnompenhandy]

2 hours ago, turnip said:

The board can decide to build a new stadium, but they absolutely won't until your stadium is at least 20 years old.

Not so. I also took a Tier 11 team up to the Premier League. When we got to National League, the board announced it was to build me a new stadium - capacity 5000, expandable to 8000. We played there for 2 years but when I got to the Championship we moved to Carrow Road while the board expanded the stadium. Then I got promoted to the Premier League. The week before the end of the season the board announced we were moving back to our expanded stadium. The week after (not having played a match there) they announced they were building a second new stadium. Of course they were - the minimum regulation stadium is 11,500 for the PL and we'd maxed out at 8000. What a waste of time and money. This new new stadium is due to have a capacity of about 30K IIRC so that will be our home for a generation.

[Scarecroww]

Actually tickets are still quite a big factor when you include all competitions. So basically, I lost my best player and 400M in latest happenings, and couple of important players and 800M overall? Now that is beyond stupid... I don't understand how can that be a way to deal with a problem. 
 

[Nacaw]

34 minutes ago, Scarecroww said:

Actually tickets are still quite a big factor when you include all competitions. So basically, I lost my best player and 400M in latest happenings, and couple of important players and 800M overall? Now that is beyond stupid... I don't understand how can that be a way to deal with a problem. 
 

Sold out 60k stadium, full EPL season + 8 cup/CL home games: £53.4m gate recipes + £26m season tickets. It's not nothing, but compared to the numbers you are throwing around, it's really not a big factor. EPL TV money is £100m+.

But yes, that money is lost and it's generally super pointless to try to hoard cash in this game. The best advice is don't worry about spending too much on wages, as long as you are successful you can afford it, and if you aren't you'll get fired anyway so who cares. 

[Scarecroww]

11 hours ago, Nacaw said:

Sold out 60k stadium, full EPL season + 8 cup/CL home games: £53.4m gate recipes + £26m season tickets. It's not nothing, but compared to the numbers you are throwing around, it's really not a big factor. EPL TV money is £100m+.

But yes, that money is lost and it's generally super pointless to try to hoard cash in this game. The best advice is don't worry about spending too much on wages, as long as you are successful you can afford it, and if you aren't you'll get fired anyway so who cares. 

The numbers I am throwing around is money that I accumulated for 20 years without spending barely anything. So I joined the premier league with 500M, that means I earned 1B over 10 years. That means 100M a year average. I sell a player or 2 every season that gets me around 100M. So basically I am extremely successful and on extremely low wages and still not making money outside sales. If I paid anything near my players demands I'd be losing money rapidly which would mean that I would sit on pretty low budget now. So like 50M a season from tickets would be 500M over 10 years, in this long save I am paying attention to details and I know what I am doing, unfortunately the game screwed me over again. 

You do need to worry about spending too much on wages especially in longer save. I played a save with Liverpool where I was winning everything for like 5-6 seasons and I started losing a lot of money annually because I inflated wages from buying Mbappe and Haaland. Winning everything and selling a couple of players still wasn't enough to cover the expenses. Even with huge commercial income, a lot of super stars in the team

[Nacaw]

43 minutes ago, Scarecroww said:

The numbers I am throwing around is money that I accumulated for 20 years without spending barely anything. So I joined the premier league with 500M, that means I earned 1B over 10 years. That means 100M a year average. I sell a player or 2 every season that gets me around 100M. So basically I am extremely successful and on extremely low wages and still not making money outside sales. If I paid anything near my players demands I'd be losing money rapidly which would mean that I would sit on pretty low budget now. So like 50M a season from tickets would be 500M over 10 years, in this long save I am paying attention to details and I know what I am doing, unfortunately the game screwed me over again. 

You do need to worry about spending too much on wages especially in longer save. I played a save with Liverpool where I was winning everything for like 5-6 seasons and I started losing a lot of money annually because I inflated wages from buying Mbappe and Haaland. Winning everything and selling a couple of players still wasn't enough to cover the expenses. Even with huge commercial income, a lot of super stars in the team

It sounds like you have very limited experience with this game, so forgive me for being blunt; most of the things you've said just aren't true.

When you extrapolate over 10 years, even 10 mill a year will seem significant. But it really isn't. Anyone with experience that play this game for 10+ seasons will not run into money problems, because the game makes it so easy to generate. You mentioned selling a player for £200 mill. That's basically five seasons of the difference in income between a 30k and a 60k stadium. And that's from a single player. 

Can you run into trouble spending all your transfer budget and giving everyone £500k per week? Of course you can. But a player that knows what he is doing can spend £10 mill p/w on wages without any worries.

Ticket sales in the save game I mentioned were £80 million out of £1.2b total income. That's 6.6%. A bigger stadium used to be something that changed your life as a club, but it really doesn't anymore, especially not for clubs already in the EPL and/or CL. The top clubs will rack up £200-300 million in TV money/prize money. Even as average EPL club will be at £120 mill. Why would you think an extra £30 mill from a bigger stadium is going to change your life and let you pay much higher wages?

Make the investment into wages, improve your club, improve your income, keep spending. Hoarding money has been a useless strategy for years. 

[Scarecroww]

3 hours ago, Nacaw said:

It sounds like you have very limited experience with this game, so forgive me for being blunt; most of the things you've said just aren't true.

When you extrapolate over 10 years, even 10 mill a year will seem significant. But it really isn't. Anyone with experience that play this game for 10+ seasons will not run into money problems, because the game makes it so easy to generate. You mentioned selling a player for £200 mill. That's basically five seasons of the difference in income between a 30k and a 60k stadium. And that's from a single player. 

Can you run into trouble spending all your transfer budget and giving everyone £500k per week? Of course you can. But a player that knows what he is doing can spend £10 mill p/w on wages without any worries.

Ticket sales in the save game I mentioned were £80 million out of £1.2b total income. That's 6.6%. A bigger stadium used to be something that changed your life as a club, but it really doesn't anymore, especially not for clubs already in the EPL and/or CL. The top clubs will rack up £200-300 million in TV money/prize money. Even as average EPL club will be at £120 mill. Why would you think an extra £30 mill from a bigger stadium is going to change your life and let you pay much higher wages?

Make the investment into wages, improve your club, improve your income, keep spending. Hoarding money has been a useless strategy for years. 

Well I will take that personally because what I said were mostly facts so you either called me a liar or stupid. I don't know how much experience you have but I have enough to see that I understand these finances a bit better than you. 

As we established, over 10 years period, yes that money can be and is significant and that is my whole point. As I explained it, on average for past 10 years I've been earning 100M/Y.
So that is with being very successful while keeping the wages low and constantly selling players. With inflated wages, that would be significantly lower.
Yes you are right, making such a huge sale does cover years worth that of bigger stadium. The key thing is, that I don't want to have to rely on selling players to keep nice bank balance.
1 reason being obvious that I want to keep my best players and the other reason being that the taxes are huge on profit. Last season I paid 80M just for taxes, so selling expensive players isn't that good. 
Also with success comes huge performance based bonuses which are also really high. I am good enough at maths that I can understand what I can and can't afford to do.
If your experience has been having such huge total income, maybe then you can go more loosely and not worry too much about money. I think my total income with Liverpool never went above like 350M or something, that's with winning everything every season. 

Anyway, original point wasn't even about that, it was about that dumb feature. The way I am gonna solve that is probably buy **** ton of cheap wonderkids that won't demand huge wages so they will be my actual reserve fund. Instead of the game deleting my money I'll actually invest it and get it back when if I need it

[Baodan]

11 hours ago, Scarecroww said:

Anyway, original point wasn't even about that, it was about that dumb feature. The way I am gonna solve that is probably buy **** ton of cheap wonderkids that won't demand huge wages so they will be my actual reserve fund. Instead of the game deleting my money I'll actually invest it and get it back when if I need it

Sounds like the way to go.