This article is the first time I’ve attempted to write anything about Football Manager that isn’t a weird story or a basic season update post. This post won’t be long and should hopefully shed light on a little trick I suppose you’d call it, to find wonderkids easily. Every person that plays FM hopes to uncover some wonderkid from a far-off country that takes their team to the next level.
Unless you have been living under a rock the past year, you will have heard about Brexit, one of the biggest political decisions taken in the UK since the Second World War. Before the EU referendum, debate raged about what the impact would be of a vote to leave the EU. Now the country has backed Brexit, the consequences and ramifications of this decision are still somewhat murky.
While the rest of the world holds its breath to see what happens now that Article 50 has been triggered, Football Manager 2019 features a Brexit scenario, which models some of the consequences of the UK leaving Europe. In this article, I want to look at a strategy you can use to benefit from Brexit by making a tidy profit on some of your players.
In the transfer market, wheeling and dealing is an art. When engaging within transfer negotiations, clearly, the buying club aims to bargain for the lowest price possible, while the selling club naturally tries to market the player for a much higher amount. The final transfer sum will be somewhere between these two, depending on the two teams’ ability to negotiate a good deal. Clearly, a manager worth his salt can earn his club millions by negotiating the right conditions for a transfer.
As we have seen in the previous instalment of this series, a transfer deal can be influenced by a number of factors. I am not going to delve into all of these again, as it would mean copy-pasting half the previous article. What I am interested in is the art of negotiation. What are the interesting tips and tricks you can use to secure yourself a good deal on the transfer market?
Being able to maximise your recruitment process – your conveyor belt of talent from either your academy or other clubs – is just one part of what makes or breaks a club in the transfer market. When engaging within transfer negotiations, clearly, the buying club aims to bargain for the lowest price possible, while the selling club naturally tries to market the player for a much higher amount. The final transfer sum will be somewhere between these two, depending on the two teams bargaining power.
It can be influenced by the possible available substitutes (i.e. other players), the talent and skills of the player(s) in question, and the estimates that the respective clubs assign regarding the marginal utility of the player’s talent. Considering that it is a team sport, the value of individual talent and skills greatly depends on the team the player is contracted to. The extent of how much the buying and selling clubs’ bargaining power influences the signing price is still debated and vary according to a number of factors that may even come from the player himself.
The start of the negotiation process, from the selling point of view, is the part where a good manager (or Director of Football) is also able to negotiate a reasonable price, as this can earn his club many millions extra. Negotiating a good deal is a complicated game between guestimating the value of a player, assessing what the buying club is willing to pay for him and being able to extract as much money as you can out of the deal.
Looking at modern football – how is it possible that the richest clubs own more wealth than the rest of the clubs combined? The circumstances are often in their favour, whether that be in terms of the country they are from, potential markets they can access and financial windfalls that can be generated as a result. Yet, at times, they still lose out to smaller, financially less powerful clubs, be it in individual matches or even over the course of a season. Is this a fluke, some random event where the underdogs were favoured by Lady Luck? Or do some clubs continue to defy the odds and is there a lesson to be learned here?
Clubs, such as Basel, Sevilla, Porto, Ajax, are entrepreneurial – they attempt through the lens of time, the need, and aspiration of the market. Their achievements over the past decade or so, both domestically and internationally, did not happen by chance. They all laboured strenuously to get to and stay in the position they are in this world and remain there. Opportunity is created daily and it’s all around us. Yet, only a few are able to seize it and turn it into a blessing. Football management is nothing different.
To say that transfers are an essential aspect of world football would not only be a massive understatement but also quite evident. Now more than ever, clubs spend enormous, almost obscene sums of money to attract good players. The record fees for players continue to rise every season, as the amount of money splashed around by the select few at the top continues to skyrocket to levels deemed preposterous a mere decade ago.
One of the effects of this gradual influx of money is the inflation of the transfer market. The transfer fees that both clubs and fans consider normal for relatively good players have risen exponentially in the last decade or so. Clubs like Real Madrid and the tycoon-lead English clubs have initiated this tendency to spend outrageous fees on often lukewarm players. Often, clubs will flex their respective financial muscles as much as they can to lure a specific player in or even keep players away from the competition. A club like FC Bayern, for example, is renowned for simply buying up the best players from potential competitors, even if they have no direct need for a specific player.
With this sort of panorama, it has become more and more important for clubs to anticipate their own needs and plan ahead. Swift and decisive action in the transfer market has become the deciding factor in getting great players’ signatures in contracts. In this regard, Football Manager is no different from the real world it attempts to simulate. The central question is, how do you plan ahead exactly?
So let’s just imagine for a moment your average Football Manager scenario. You are the newly appointed manager of a football club predicted to finish in the bottom half of the table of Premier League. In fact, your club just barely escaped by the skin of its teeth last season, narrowly avoiding the drop.
Analysing the squad, you quickly come to the conclusion that you have inherited a team with a traditional scouting network and a few data analysts. The squad itself is both ageing and shallow. Meanwhile, the one or two genuine stars you do have are outside the protected period in their contracts are likely to move on in the summer. Though the first team is almost certainly in need of a radical overhaul, ownership has provided you with a rather limited maximum transfer budget to work with.
After questioning why you took this job in the first place, you sit down and consider your options. You have to make the best out of a potentially disastrous situation with the means you have at hand. How do you maximise the output of the scouting team you do have? How can you strengthen this team? What are the kind of orders and assignments you give to your scouts and analysts? These are the topics I intend to focus on in this blog post. I will not be looking at the technical aspects but the strategical ones instead.
Managing your finances is always a tricky part of the immersive Football Manager adventure. Many of us are tempted to splash around a lot of cash like an Arab sheikh on a quest to win the Champions League but since most clubs do not have a sugar daddy backing them up, such a strategy will ultimately lead to a rude awakening and inevitable downfall. Being more prudent with the financial resources at your disposal is a far more wise strategy. The following tips will help you in saving some money along the way.
As modern football is changing and evolving, the influence of the financial moguls cannot be underestimated. Money is becoming more and more important, changing the club landscape throughout the world. The rise of financially powerful corporations backed by big corporations or rich owners has led to a trickle-down of capital and subsequently the rise of shop window clubs or selling clubs.
These clubs have perfected their scouting approaches and deliver a steady stream of talented towards the absolute top clubs, overachieving somewhat along the way in European competitions. Real-life examples such as FC Basel, Benfica, Porto, Sevilla and perhaps to a lesser extent Ajax have mastered the concept of signing players with the objective of selling them on for a profit; sign-to-sell.
These clubs, or actually their boards, understand that, in capitalist football, all staff are up for sale and will only remain at the club until they have reached their peak. The best businessmen know who to sign cheap and even more importantly; when to cash in before hitting a glass ceiling.
In this blog post, I want to focus on the concept of sign-to-sell. Essentially, this is the resale factor; the Monchi factor if you will. When I sign this player, will I be able to sell him on to another club? Which factors determine this resale factor? How can I maximise my chances of finding a player with resale potential? (more…)
One of the things Monchi excelled at was buying low and selling high. During his tenure at the club, Sevilla’s scouting network branched far and wide and the club has gained plenty of success by tapping into underappreciated markets in South America and smaller European leagues. His success stories were also numerous.
Monchi ranks Dani Alves as one of his best ever signings, and it is not hard to see why. At the age of 19, Alves was plucked from the obscurity of Brazilian club Bahia, initially on loan and then on a permanent basis for under a million euros. Six years, 246 appearances, two UEFA Cups and a Copa del Rey later, he was transferred to Barcelona for 30 million euros, becoming the most expensive right-back of all time.
Another example of Sevilla recognising the potential of a player in time was Julio Baptista, who arrived at Sevilla as a solid, if unspectacular defensive midfielder from Brazilian football, but left just two years later as a prolific brute of a striker. Nicknamed “The Beast” due to his immense frame, Baptista struck 47 goals in his two seasons at the Ramón Sánchez Pizjuán, earning a big-money move to Real Madrid in 2005.
Yet another starlet signed from a lower league club abroad, Geoffrey Kondogbia moved to Spanish football after just one full season in Ligue 2 with Lens, but quickly made a big impression on La Liga and European football. The Frenchman’s excellent displays in central midfield sparked interest from a host of top European clubs, but it was newly-promoted Monaco who took the plunge on him for 20 million euro’s, which is five times what Sevilla paid for him just one year previously.
A final example of just how far-reaching Sevilla’s scouting network spans is Carlos Bacca, who was signed from Club Brugge in the Belgian Pro League for just over £5 million. The Colombian hit the ground running straight away, netting 21 goals in his first season and then 28 the next campaign to secure a dream move to Milan in 2015.
These are all prime examples of getting value for your money. Finding players with obvious talent who are somehow underrated by the market system. Bring these players in on sufficiently low deals, develop them, see them blossom and sell them for a major profit. The concept of value for money underlines all of these transfers and thus should underline this entire series.