Every new Football Manager fan has been there: you’ve built your recruiting focuses, scoured your list of prospects and identified the player you think your team needs to kick on and all that’s left to do is make the contract and you don’t know what to do.
While it can be intimidating to complete your first transfer and contract negotiation, with time, you’ll learn to do so as second nature. Until then, this guide has you covered:
How Negotiations Work In Football Manager 26
Signing a new player to your team is a process that comes in a series of steps, each progressing you closer to bringing in your new star. This begins with negotiating with their current club, unless you are shopping for bargains on the free agent market. This sets how much you have to pay for the right to sign the player, how installments are scheduled if not paying fully up front and potentially clauses like retaining a portion of the player’s next sale or extra costs if they hit certain milestones.
Once you’ve agreed on terms with the club, you can move on to the player, which is a phase that has two steps. First, you and your potential signing’s agent will discuss their playing time expectations. This is their role in the club and how many minutes they are likely to see. Once agreed, you can finally move on to the fine details of signing a contract with your potential signing.
Tips For Mastering Negotiations In Football Manager 26
Now that you understand how contracts work you need to know what to keep in mind as you begin negotiating. These tips will help you strike the best possible deals next window:
Pay Attention To Expiring Contracts
It’s easy to get excited about new signings and splashy arrivals, but winning squads are built around not just finding the best players but keeping them. Monitor the lengths of your ongoing contracts and always look to keep your best players locked down.
While negotiating a year out from expiration was normal in the football world not long ago, as more teams have begun capitalizing on Bosman signings, it’s now much more common to not let anyone in long-term plans run their contract for more than two years without renegotiating. Every great player you keep is one fewer you need to scout, buy, and sign.
Use Their Agents To Prepare
Enquiring with an agent is an excellent way to get a feel for what to expect when you enter into negotiations. While this system is not perfect, it does usually offer a relatively reliable ballpark of what you should expect to pay to bring a player in and what their playing time demands are likely to be.
This can help you avoid wasting time on unrealistic transfers and let you prepare more effectively before negotiating your deals, as you know roughly what they’re going to demand.
Add Clauses And Bonuses Effectively But Cautiously
The added clauses and bonuses on the bottom of the negotiation screen can be useful tools, particularly when trying to roll out the red carpet but running into max pay limits.
When applied appropriately, they offer little boosts to keep your guaranteed pay down; however, you should monitor how extensively bonuses like appearance or bench bonuses are stacking in your squad, or you could see operating costs skyrocket beyond your capabilities.
Watch Your Playing Time Promises
Setting playing time expectations in the first phase of negotiations may seem like a simple box ticking exercise before the careful penny pinching of salary negotiations but it’s a mistake to treat them that way.
Pay attention to the promises already on your squad and make sure your plans actually align with the requested role. While it can be tempting to oversell an opportunity if needed to seal a move you want, over-promising can create a timeshare nightmare where it’s impossible to meet every player’s expectations.
Leave Room For Compromise
Most of the time you don’t have to worry about nailing a price the player is happy with on the first go. As long as you’re not making a derisory offer that is significantly lower than the requested contract size you should feel comfortable coming back with a counter-offer that is below the most you’re ultimately willing to pay.
Most negotiations will allow for multiple offers back and forth before you risk losing the deal, and the money you save by getting a little bit extra shaved off adds up over all the contracts in the club.
Now you’re ready to make your next signing a bargain so get hunting and get buying!
