How do you actually sell a player in this years game

[CoolDjGuyFromBerlin]

In the summer before my second season and I have a number of players I want to sell from my squad. I have all of them placed on the transfer list and offered them to clubs first at slightly over their value. Then at value, then below and most of the now are at half of their value. Some of these are players who played a good portion of games in a premier league winning season. None of the players have had an offers submitted and even my DOF cant find anyone interested no matter what the price. I have had one off on the whole group of players and that offer was half of the players value, no negotiations could take place and they expected my club to subsidise 49k a week of a player on 62k a week. The only offers I get are loan offers and their is no point loaning every player and letting them go free at the end of their contract. It happens every year in FM I dont know why they think an entertaining football game means its impossible to sell players.

[louissiscool]

I always offer them out without a specified amount of money and that seems to work quite well and if people make offers that they will negotiate on then you can work from there, of course it doesn't always work but works better then asking for a set price.

[Guest]

Generating interest in unwanted players is difficult but not impossible irl & that can be the case in FM however once you understand the basic logic of the transfer system it can actually be very easy to move players on.

You need to plan ahead, the standard rule of thumb when looking to offload players who do not have a club interested is to try & generate interest before the transfer window opens as you may find that clubs who would have contemplated an offer have already made a decision to sign someone else.

There are a lot of other techniques but they are circumstance specific & you’ll need to give a lot more information about your club, the player’s age, contract length, reputation & previous importance in the squad & your game setup are the main factors to be considered.

It’s also important to be willing to sell a player who may be important to you now but who will be less important by the end of the following season based on your planned incoming transfers when there is interest in him.

[CoolDjGuyFromBerlin]

25 minutes ago, Barside said:

Generating interest in unwanted players is difficult but not impossible irl & that can be the case in FM however once you understand the basic logic of the transfer system it can actually be very easy to move players on.

You need to plan ahead, the standard rule of thumb when looking to offload players who do not have a club interested is to try & generate interest before the transfer window opens as you may find that clubs who would have contemplated an offer have already made a decision to sign someone else.

There are a lot of other techniques but they are circumstance specific & you’ll need to give a lot more information about your club, the player’s age, contract length, reputation & previous importance in the squad & your game setup are the main factors to be considered.

It’s also important to be willing to sell a player who may be important to you now but who will be less important by the end of the following season based on your planned incoming transfers when there is interest in him.

These just arnt some unwanted players, im managing Liverpool and it includes Danny Inges, Lazar Markovic, Moreno and Dejan Lovern (who keeps complaining im blocking his promised move to Barcelona despite them not being interested). There is no way clubs would offer out players like that for half their value and nobody will be interested

[Lem]

Happens every year bud. If you offer them for free they'll take them but won't pay a dime. Obviously in the real world there would be lots of interest in those players, probably without you needing to list them. Unfortunately you either suck it up, take over another team and bid on them yourself, or stop playing and paying for the game in the hopes they someday fix it.

[Guest]

Think about the reasons why other clubs are not coming forward with interest & post them once you have a few.

[Winto]

It's like this every year, but seems even harder this year.

I have Julian Brant, now 29, worth £61m apparently. Can't give him away. Best I could do was get Stoke to offer £10m. How is value worked out if no one will even consider it. He's been transfer listed all summer window, tried offering everything from £0-£80m. Not one half decent bid. Only Stoke and (now mid-table) Arsenal interested.

It seems the only time you can sell someone is if another club actually starts with an offer. If you want to sell someone, even those who would be the best player at many clubs, at a reasonable fee, no one is interested.

I also have 3 21-year old wonderkids that I cant get anyone to loan, even for 0% of wages.

 

[HUNT3R]

I have no issues moving on players, but then, I have a lot of leagues loaded so will have a lot of active clubs.

[HUNT3R]

6 hours ago, Winto said:

I have Julian Brant, now 29, worth £61m apparently. Can't give him away. Best I could do was get Stoke to offer £10m. How is value worked out if no one will even consider it. He's been transfer listed all summer window, tried offering everything from £0-£80m. Not one half decent bid. Only Stoke and (now mid-table) Arsenal interested.

It seems the only time you can sell someone is if another club actually starts with an offer. If you want to sell someone, even those who would be the best player at many clubs, at a reasonable fee, no one is interested.

I also have 3 21-year old wonderkids that I cant get anyone to loan, even for 0% of wages.

 

But there are very obvious possibilities for this though.

A player's interest in moving to clubs, clubs' interest in him, possible wage demands (you may be over-paying him, so his demands will too high) etc etc.

It's the same with the wonderkids. They may not want to go to the lower divisions who are interested in them.

[Weston]

7 hours ago, Winto said:

I have Julian Brant, now 29, worth £61m apparently. Can't give him away. Best I could do was get Stoke to offer £10m. How is value worked out if no one will even consider it. He's been transfer listed all summer window, tried offering everything from £0-£80m. Not one half decent bid. Only Stoke and (now mid-table) Arsenal interested.

I also have 3 21-year old wonderkids that I cant get anyone to loan, even for 0% of wages.

 

I could be wrong, but the Brant issue could be because of his value being so inflated that no one can match it. Conversely, being in Serie A, all of my players are undervalued, so I'm getting lowballed with incessant 20 million bids for the 2nd top scorer in the league we won.

I have noticed weird things happening with the loan offers, though. I too will offer very good youngsters for very low wage percentages to absolutely no interest which is ridiculous. In fact, I feel like when I play lower leagues I usually do so much better than all rival teams because I actually loan in great players at low cost as the AI ignores many of them.

[Guest]

2 hours ago, Weston said:

I have noticed weird things happening with the loan offers, though. I too will offer very good youngsters for very low wage percentages to absolutely no interest which is ridiculous. In fact, I feel like when I play lower leagues I usually do so much better than all rival teams because I actually loan in great players at low cost as the AI ignores many of them.

As HUNT3R has said if a player has no interest in a loan deal to a lower league club those clubs will not waste their time by making an approach & potentially missing out on a player who is interested.

The issue is that AFAIK there is no way to speak with your player about a possible short term loan moves although if such a conversation existed I probably wouldn’t trust it for fear of the conversation script tree having a player must be happy/unhappy ending.

[sporadicsmiles]

14 hours ago, CoolDjGuyFromBerlin said:

In the summer before my second season and I have a number of players I want to sell from my squad. I have all of them placed on the transfer list and offered them to clubs first at slightly over their value. Then at value, then below and most of the now are at half of their value. Some of these are players who played a good portion of games in a premier league winning season. None of the players have had an offers submitted and even my DOF cant find anyone interested no matter what the price. I have had one off on the whole group of players and that offer was half of the players value, no negotiations could take place and they expected my club to subsidise 49k a week of a player on 62k a week. The only offers I get are loan offers and their is no point loaning every player and letting them go free at the end of their contract. It happens every year in FM I dont know why they think an entertaining football game means its impossible to sell players.

From this I surmise that you are trying to sell players in the final year of their contracts? Of course it is therefore harder to sell those players. Unless I had a pressing need of a player in his final contract year, I would not put a bid in for him. Why would I? I can get him for free in January starting the season after. It makes no financial sense to spend money in that case, unless I really need the player. You have to understand that with a player transfer listed it is also clear you will not be offering them a new deal. A player is worth peanuts in that scenario.

Even when I am bidding for a player in his last contract year who is not on the transfer list, I will rarely offer more than their value (probably never, in fact). Between 50 and 100% value is where I would be aiming. If I cannot get a player for that, I wait for him to have 6 months left and offer a contract directly.

In general, I have had no problem selling players anyway. All the players I have listed thus far in my current save have been sold except for a truly crappy striker who is on wages that in no way match his ability. I will struggle to get offers for him because he will demand more than most clubs who would want him would be willing to pay. Not much I can do there. Do you have only a few leagues running? This can impact the transfer market significantly.

[Weston]

7 hours ago, Barside said:

As HUNT3R has said if a player has no interest in a loan deal to a lower league club those clubs will not waste their time by making an approach & potentially missing out on a player who is interested.

The issue is that AFAIK there is no way to speak with your player about a possible short term loan moves although if such a conversation existed I probably wouldn’t trust it for fear of the conversation script tree having a player must be happy/unhappy ending.

The only time I can recall my player not wanting to leave was the one time the lad demanded a new contract first. Once he got it, he agreed to go out on loan. I even had a player get angry in the goodbye chat where he claimed he was good enough to stay but he still begrudgingly accepted the move. What's strange is players with no indication they don't want to leave and players wanting to go on loan getting no interest.

[Weston]

7 hours ago, sporadicsmiles said:

From this I surmise that you are trying to sell players in the final year of their contracts? Of course it is therefore harder to sell those players. Unless I had a pressing need of a player in his final contract year, I would not put a bid in for him. Why would I? I can get him for free in January starting the season after. It makes no financial sense to spend money in that case, unless I really need the player. You have to understand that with a player transfer listed it is also clear you will not be offering them a new deal. A player is worth peanuts in that scenario.

Even when I am bidding for a player in his last contract year who is not on the transfer list, I will rarely offer more than their value (probably never, in fact). Between 50 and 100% value is where I would be aiming. If I cannot get a player for that, I wait for him to have 6 months left and offer a contract directly.

In general, I have had no problem selling players anyway. All the players I have listed thus far in my current save have been sold except for a truly crappy striker who is on wages that in no way match his ability. I will struggle to get offers for him because he will demand more than most clubs who would want him would be willing to pay. Not much I can do there. Do you have only a few leagues running? This can impact the transfer market significantly.

These are good points. Sometimes if you know you plan to sell a player far enough in advance you could even sign them to a new contract a year or two ahead of time just up their value and get rid of the chance he leaves on a free, you just have to make sure you don't waste too much on a loyalty bonus nor up his wage too high so other clubs can't afford him.

[CoolDjGuyFromBerlin]

Even clubs with large wage budgets are still looking to have most of the wages paid. Shaktar put in a bid for one player but wanted 34k a player on 50k. They would normally have a huge wage budget so there should be no reason clubs that big should be looking to have their wages paid

[Roo]

Few things to consider:

WHEN ARE YOU TRYING TO SELL THESE PLAYERS? Has the transfer window started already? If so clubs that might have been interested could have already spent their budgets on other players, or they might be in the process of bidding for other players (saving their budgets in case another transfer goes through). If a club is asking you to pay part of the players wages, it may be because they've already spent most of their budgets already. The solutions would be to put your players up for sale as soon as next season's budget comes in (or start of June before most clubs start spending). That way clubs will have their full budgets to use.

WHICH LEAGUES DO YOU HAVE LOADED AND SET TO PLAYABLE? This has been something noticeable for years in FM. Leagues that haven't been loaded as playable are rarely active in the transfer market. They will sell their players to playable leagues/clubs, but they won't do much as far as actively pursuing players. So try to load up more leagues, continue for a few days, and then offer to clubs again. I have never tried this myself since I always play with a lot of leagues loaded from the beginning, so I dont' know if it will take some time for the clubs to become more active.

SIGN PLAYERS TO SALARIES AS LOW AS POSSIBLE. At least in my experience, salary is the main deterrent for clubs to bid on any player, and it rarely helps offering to pay for part of it yourself. So when you do negotiate contracts with players you might sell later on, don't just blindly accept whatever the agent is asking for, always attempt to lower their demands. This helps your own budget as well.

[Neil Brock]

Some really good points made above by Roo and all well worth considering. 

[Bigpapa42]

This was kinda mentioned already, but consider why you are trying to sell them. Chances are that its either that they aren't good enough for you, might be good enough as a whole but have notable weaknesses, or are overpaid. Those are all going to be factors for any club that might be interested in them. It happens in reality all the time when clubs are promoted - they are trying to get rid of Championship-caliber players who aren't really good enough for the Prem, but are getting Prem wages. Other Prem clubs probably don't want them and Championship clubs often can't afford the wages, even if the player is interested in moving down a level.

[jujigatame]

I don't see why salary would be a deterrent to making a bid.  Part of the bid can be a clause that the selling team pays a percentage of wages.

[HUNT3R]

1 hour ago, jujigatame said:

I don't see why salary would be a deterrent to making a bid.  Part of the bid can be a clause that the selling team pays a percentage of wages.

I suppose it depends on how much, really. But there have been improvements in a recent edition (FM17, I think?) where teams do this if you've transfer listed a player, as you're clearly then just trying to get rid of a player.

[michael]

A lot of it comes down to how much you think a player is worth, just because his profile value says 60 million is he really worth that much. I've lost count the amount of times i have looked at a high value players and then when you take a good hard look at his stats, age, personality etc, you just end up thinking how you wouldn't even pay half that amount to buy him. Maybe the game thinks the same way.

[Robioto]

I think loaded leagues has a lot to do with it. I've not had an issue at all with offloading unwanted players in my 10 years with Salford City in FM2018. My problem come from there being little to no interest in my best players as I came up through the leagues, most notably my star striker who scored over 120 goals in three seasons, no interest whatsoever - but that's for another thread...

[Spurs08]

16 hours ago, jujigatame said:

I don't see why salary would be a deterrent to making a bid.  Part of the bid can be a clause that the selling team pays a percentage of wages.

One reason is that it can lead to other players or potential signings expecting comparable wages, which obviously you won't be subsidising and which the club can't afford.