If you’re anything like me, you hate wasting money when you’re trying to sign reinforcements for your squad. One of the thorns in my side in that regard consists of the ultimate douchebag-fee; the agent fee. Seriously, I’m forced to pay some pretentious prick, sitting in an office on his arse money to negotiate a deal with the player. Most of these pricks must have watched Jerry Maguire, because the higher profile their clients have, the more ridiculous their fees become.

Not an actual agent in-game, just in case you were wondering.

Not an actual agent in-game, just in case you were wondering.

So fortunately for me and everyone else who wants to reduce the cut of these vultures, there is a way to work around them by simply tricking them. This sounds good, right?

So how does it work? Say for instance we want to buy the Brazilian Bernard from Shakhtar. He’s definitely not going to be cheap.

agents002

The transfer fee is excessive, but look at that greedy fucker asking for nearly 10% of the transfer fee on top of that… He’s not asking you to show him the money, he’s asking for the keys to the clubs vault so he can go swimming in there, Scrooge McDuck-style.

Bernard's agent, after completing this ludicrous deal.

Bernard’s agent, after completing this ludicrous deal.

So yeah, we’re not going to have any of that. The transfer fee is silly enough as is, we’re not wasting another wad on cash on some low-life vulture brokering the deal. How can we get him to give us a break? Let’s look into our relationship with said agent.

agents001

He’s obvious not too keen on us, though he doesn’t dislike us either. However, if you want to get an agent to cut you a good deal, you have to get on his good side. As with so many other things in life, it’s not always about what you know, but who you know. Managing relationships is a key skill in FM, which goes beyond managing a squad. Being on good terms with an agent tends to help as well. So how do we become pals with this man? We can’t go out and buy him a bag of coke and some prostitutes, so we have to become creative.

Agents are greedy, so they are generally tempted to lower their prices when they can do some sort of massive deal. So what we are going to do is make the agent believe there’s a massive deal coming up for him. When you look at an agents profile, you can see the other players he represents.

agents004

What we’re going to do basically boils down to outright lying to the agent. We’re going to make massive bids for at least four or five of his other clients. It doesn’t matter if we can even afford these deals in terms of money, because we have no intention of ever seeing these deals through. Offer contracts to said players as well, make sure the players accept these contract offers as well. You can still cancel the transfers so don’t worry about the financial repercussions.

When we make another offer for Bernard, we can see the agent has lowered his demands considerably, both in terms of wages, bonusses and signing-on fees.

agents003

Look at the discount the bastard is giving us… 4,65 million on agent fees alone, 2,2 million on agent fees… The total discount if you take wages into consideration is nearly 8 million for the entire deal, all because the agent thinks we’re being his best mate.

agents005

The other deals will get cancelled ofcourse, but you get a nearly 8 million discount on this still excessive deal, which is still a lot of money. So yeah, lying to the agents gets you a big discount and can earn you some extra spending money.

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Guido

Guido is the founding father of Strikerless and main nutjob running the show.


Guido

Guido is the founding father of Strikerless and main nutjob running the show.

21 Comments

Jimmy · March 2, 2015 at 9:04 pm

Amazing post. I will try this for sure. But what really caught my eye was this:

“We can’t go out and buy him a bag of coke and some prostitutes, so we have to become creative.”

Legendary man.

rodrigo feijó (@pilhoverman) · March 2, 2015 at 10:50 pm

as someone who was raised with porteño and south-brazilian football, i’d love to see the dirty side of the game on FM as well. telling your players to try and hurt a specific player would be awesome (it could backfire if the player has high sportmanship for example).

now, if there was an option ‘buy coke and hookers to suck up agent’ then i would never ever play another game in my whole life. 🙂

    strikerlessGuido · March 9, 2015 at 6:29 am

    Don’t think SI will ever add it in out of fear for law suits though 😀

laxo · March 2, 2015 at 11:27 pm

I can’t believe I never thought of that. This is an absolute gem of information. 🙂

Can’t wait to couple it with your new tactics for the 15.3. patch. 😉

Jamie Sheehan · March 3, 2015 at 2:08 am

Do they not see through it eventually? Or is it some kind of bug in the game that we are exploiting here?

    strikerlessGuido · March 3, 2015 at 6:35 am

    I reckon they will understand they are being conned eventually, but by that time, you have the player you want. It probably is some sort of bug though.

luke · March 6, 2015 at 6:48 pm

does this work with transfer fees aswell (ie making a club look like they are going to make 100 mil on a crap player) or does it only work with agent fees. ive also noticed that paying slightly higher wages gives you a better deal aswell

    strikerlessGuido · March 7, 2015 at 7:32 am

    I don’t think clubs can get suckered into this deal as well.

Tery Whenett · March 16, 2015 at 1:44 pm

Wow, that was new to me. I even think that it’s not a bug (depending on the agent’s reaction to the cancelled deals). The next time you want to sign one of his players, he’ll probably demand 50% of the transfer fee and raises it for every additional player you speak to the same time 😉

    strikerlessGuido · March 16, 2015 at 3:22 pm

    That would make sense, but this is FM 😉 There’s a pretty decent chance you can repeat this trick ad infinitum.

      Tery Whenett · March 16, 2015 at 3:29 pm

      Right, I sometimes forget that 😉

      strikerlessGuido · March 16, 2015 at 3:30 pm

      I haven’t actually tried it, most my signings are Free Agents.

exwind · March 30, 2015 at 5:55 am

After you cancel the deals and confirm the one you want, where are you on his list of people? Liked/Disliked/neutral?

    strikerlessGuido · March 30, 2015 at 5:57 am

    Let’s just say I won’t be invited to any birthday parties in the near future.

bob · April 10, 2017 at 9:03 am

what is the FM management system in the pictures of this article?

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