If you look to make an impact on the transfer market, you need to know the products available. Gaining this insight into the available options is where your scouting network comes in, constantly scouring various leagues and nations for talent that you can bring into your side. An ideal scenario would consist Read more…
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.
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?
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.
Football is just like the rest of the world. It is all about money. Crazy amounts of money, mostly, when football is involved. In the real world, you should plan your money wisely. I advise doing the same in FM.
In this article, I will talk about my planning. Feel free to use it as you see fit.
When you’re dealing in the transfer market, you are always looking for the best possible offer. Regardless if you’re intention is to buy or to sell, you want to make sure you’re getting the best deal possible. At this point, you really ought to take the reputation of the various leagues into consideration. Why, you ask?
That’s a fairly decent transfer window, isn’t it? All these players were bought cheap and sold for far more than their actual worth at the time. So besides shrewd negotiating, what’s the secret ingredient here? Why does the market work the way it does? The answer to that question is fairly simple; league reputation…
I intend to show you how you can use it to your adventure when you are navigating the transfer market. It can help you get players cheap and sell them far more expensively than you had ever imagined. All you have to do is factor league reputation into the equation.
The following article is not something very spectacular, it’s not a ground-breaking piece of information. It’s a simple flaw in the game that can be manipulated to get rich rather quick. Using this method you can acquire high rates of return for a modest initial investment, with little risk, little skill, and not much effort. It is a way of working that been around for a while but it surprisingly not well documented. I presume this is because it’s a bit of a shady approach to playing the game, but I’ll let everyone decide for themselves on the ethics of playing a video game.
Teams like Udinese and Basel are hardly world class teams, filled to the brim with superstars. They are certainly not the teams who compete for the Champions League every season, despite occassional stunts in the tournament. Yet despite all of this, these are teams who excel in a very particular area of the game: the transfer market. While some teams have acquired fame for their overwhelming spending summer after summer —more often than not thanks to the monetary backing of Eastern European or Middle Eastern investors— Udinese and Basel have mastered an investment approach that any Wall Street stockbroker would envy. Their keen eye for scouting young and affordable talents, combined with the common sense to actually field these youngsters instead of letting them rot away in the reserves, allows for these clubs to dramatically increase the market value of their players over relatively short periods of time. In short, these clubs have demonstrated the enviable knack of buying players relatively cheaply, benefiting from their prowess for a couple of seasons, then selling them for a very good price to richer European teams.
Modern football is changing. With money becoming more and more important, the club landscape has changed. That applies to FM just as well as real life by the way. There is now a top tier of untouchable clubs who, like big businesses, get constantly richer and keep football alive with a trickle down of capital (Man City, PSG, Chelsea, Bayern) and then there is a secondary tier of clubs who provide a safe shop window for investors.
It seems rather unlikely we will ever see another ‘Ajax ’95’, a team which (arguably pre-Bosman ruling) bypassed economic restrains to achieve romantic glory. However, the most organised and forward thinking boards can overachieve and rise up the tiers. Take real-life examples such as FC Basel, Ajax, Porto and Sevilla. They 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 blogpost, I want to focus on the business side of things. If you’re a smaller club trying to break the strangle-hold of the traditional top clubs, be it nationally or internationally, how could you sign the right players for the right price? Which strategies can you employ to scout and sign players, how can you get the most value for players you intend to sell, basically, how can you be a smart wheeler-dealer?
Pre-season is good for a great many things. It can help you raise tactical familiarity, you get the chance to assess your squad and new signings, raise the overall fitness level of your players, boost morale in time for the new league campaign and there’s the opportunity to make some serious cash during pre-season.
Whilst I find all of these aspects to be equally important, I do find that I often overlook the financial aspect of the pre-season. However, the commercial and financial impact of the right pre-season friendlies can be immense. I wrote about this for FM14 and I’ve decided to re-vamp this approach after reading about it again on AlexOnFM.