Finances + player wage demands

[Brockstaa]

Casual player here so apologies if it's a well known thing already.  I started a save in Tier 13 of the English pyramid system.  In tier 7 I was about £600k in the red and the board decided to sell my training ground for almost £5m.  After this, my wage budget went from £1.9k/week to almost £70k/week, which sounds great but all of a sudden every player wants 10x or more than what they were on previously.

Obviously to fill a squad I ended up paying 30-40k in wages per week and the £5m windfall soon was wiped with the board having to inject money every month as I bleed massively paying £1.5m+ in wages per year (now in the vanarama national).  Players are being sold by the chairman, others are moaning about the training facilities and as my finances/wage budget decreases, so do the demands from players.  

Is this normal?  It almost feels like I want to be broke with a £5k/week budget because the players are affordable and the cup runs mean something.  Right now I'm just throwing the cups away as an extra £50k means nothing but the extra games are killing the players.

Will I ever be able to stabilise this financial situation?

[Meanonsunday]

Unfortunately there seems to be logic in the game where players ask for more  money based on how much remaining wage budget you have rather than only being based on some absolute sense of what they are worth.  This can be favorable when money is tight, but as you found it can create massive inflation if you suddenly have a big wage budget.  All you can really do is shift that extra wage money over into the transfer budget and save it there; usually the wage demands will decrease right away.  The guys on high wages are not going to accept pay cuts so you need to ditch them at the end of the season.  I would never have anyone on more than 1k/week before you reach League 2.

[santy001]

When going down to such a level in FM it's not designed with that level to actively be played at so some oddities will emerge. 

You can reign wages in but it takes a good degree of careful management and being prepared to lose out on players. If you can keep on ascending up the leagues though you will eventually be able to hit a point where you stabilise things. It's whether the current challenges make that too difficult that is really the question.

[Brockstaa]

Cheers guys.  I never thought about reducing the wage budget manually to have them demand less.  It appears to be working but then I also get quite a lot of players that won't even negotiate because I don't have the financial muscle.

In the past 2 years in the Vanarama NL I've had countless injections from the board and a £1.3m bank loan.  My wage budget is down from 70k to 22k (which I've now reduced to 13k manually).  I have gone from play-offs last season to fighting relegation this season but probably a good thing to stabilise financially first.