Can't enter Contract Negotiations with Free Agents because they are leaving options open however other teams are offering contracts.

Hello, this is not a bug. That message is specific to your team, the player is always going to be open to negotiation if a bigger club comes in.

In screenshot attached the player is receiving an offer from a Portuguese Premier Division club which will be much more attractive than your club.

Hi Zach,

 

That's fair, I'd just expect the message to mention something about club reputation if that is intended. Thanks for clarifying.

I'm sorry for reviving this thread, but I did not want to create a duplicate when I'm facing the exact same problem. The explanation provided by the SI Staff member is not correct since in the file I have uploaded to the ownCloud server (Rubinho de Siqueira - CoritibaB2.fm) I have experienced this problem multiple times. Please see the shortlist 'BUG'. I have included all of the players with which I've had this issue over the course of this save (I unfortunately overwrite the save files to save storage space, so I don't have earlier saves for reference). At this point in time, I am facing this issue with Juan Santos. Other teams with similar reputation to mine (ranging between 2.5 and 3.5 stars, while Coritiba is a 3-star reputation club at the time) were/are able to sign these expiring contract players while I'm unable to do so myself.

From my experience in the save, it seems that players with expiring contracts have some sort of flag on whether they want to wait to explore their options or accept contract offers at a given point in time. If the human manager tries to offer the contract while the flag for accepting offers is not active, the player refuses, and the manager is restricted from offering them a contract for the next X months (similar to how players with recently signed contracts will refuse offers to move to a different club for the first ~6 months of the new deal)

The issue/bug/design flaw at hand is that this restriction is not lifted when this player flag seemingly changes to "now accepting contract offers", and the human manager gets messages about AI managers offering contracts to the player. Apparently the only way to deal with this problem at the moment is to shortlist everybody and only offer them a contract after another AI club has done so.

This not only has prevented me from making a bunch of great deals the first time I noticed, but having to "metagame" to work around this issue ever since is terrible for my immersion. I'd really appreciate it if SI could get such a simple problem taken care of. Thanks.