After our article this week on “Finding Wonderkids easily on Football Manager” I’ve decided to add further information to this article and essentially a follow up. In this article I will be teaching you some nifty tricks to sign the best wonderkids and stars. I’ll also be teaching you how to keep them when bigger clubs come sniffing. These tips should help with your Transfers & Contracts and work in 2020 too!

Tip 1: Sneaky Transfers & Contracts

This is Henry Acuña, he’s a 19 year old Colombian right back. A week ago he was bought for less than £1m using the strategies documented in the above-mentioned article.

Now this is where it got interesting; clubs across the world including Real Madrid and Manchester City were also considering putting a bid on this player. So I used a trick I called WARGing: Wage After Reaching Games… -ing

Here’s the general thinking behind the system: we use the promise of a bigger contract in the future to entice players now. By offering more money after reaching a certain amount of games but leaving their playing time low. A player will sign thinking they’ll receive a huge pay rise if they break through.

To add to this, the chances are that when the player does reach the number of games required, they’ll either be a regular or have signed a new deal without the clauses.

Another Example- Transfers & Contracts

Furthermore, in another example this player looks pretty good in my opinion; at 19 years of age he could easily grow into a star central midfielder. He already has the vision and physicals to be a presence. However he lacks the technical skills which my top facilities can help train.

Whilst amounting more than three times his market value, this transfer offer’s split up to avoid your budget spiraling out of control. Also loaning back the player to encourage development without needing to look after the player. His international clause is entirely justified: when he’s playing for Mexico, he’ll be worth five times this. Even selling him for £20m (not impossible in today’s inflated market) is 150% of his purchase price.

Tip 1.5: The German Clause

This is fairly well known already, but newer players may appreciate this tip! Certain national teams (such as Germany) aren’t yet fully implemented due to licencing constraints. See this below:

 

However, upon looking further into this it seems the German Transfer Exploit has been fixed! I can’t seem to offer full national german players any international clauses in their contracts. If you have been able to pull this trick off in FM2019 please let me know!

Tip 2: The Low-Ball Asking Price

Now I’d like to preface this by saying that some of you will probably not like this tip. This tip isn’t exactly morally correct and a true football manager would argue that this is unjust. However, after losing so many good players to bigger clubs, this has saved my interest. It ultimately kept me playing. If you don’t like the way-around then that’s fine. Despite this I don’t think you can say I’m cheating, or exploiting the game. The mechanic is in the game and SI didn’t fix it. I’m fairly sure they’re aware of it too; it’s not up to me to decide if it’s wrong.

Now, let me set the scene:

Benjamin Henrichs; signed for £37m a few years back and in his fourth year at the club he’s now my vice captain. He made over 130 appearances in the first three years and I’d like that rate to continue. Here’s the problem though; Manchester City offered him a huge deal and he considered going for a better contract.

The work around:

You explain to your player that the finances weren’t right. If they come back with a bid (we agreed £68m I think, but this isn’t important) then I’ll accept the bid, but we’re going to do the opposite.

Now we’re confusing the game here, because what happens is the big clubs will only offer £2.5m. Even if I reject these offers, Henrichs won’t be annoyed; it’s nowhere near the agreed fee. Obviously a lot of clubs will now come sniffing, but setting your assistant manager to accept no offers helps.

Obviously this won’t stop players wanting to leave for other reasons like being home-sick or wanting a new challenge. However, the rich clubs poach A LOT of players. This is a nice way to keep hold of them!

So that concludes our transfers and contracts advice. If you can think of any other tips for other players please comment down below. Alternatively let us know on our Twitter or Facebook page.

Also we have recently paired up with Facebook group FM Central. it’s a great place for football managers worldwide to share their stories and get advice from other players! Check it out here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/FMCentral/

If you like Youth Development pieces check out our guides here:

• Football Manager 2019 Guides | Training the next Generation
• FM19 | Youth Development | Lucky Leipzig’s Golden Generation
• Football Manager 2019 Guides | Youth Scouting
• Training in FM19: How to develop, motivate and condition players
• Football Manager 2019 Guides | Youth Development

And some other great content from this week!

• Roma, the most fun club to play on FM – Running with Wolves #4
• Dictate the Game Podcast | #18
• Comparing FM19 Tactics: FM Statistics Lab