[Suggestion] Finances should be about liquidity

[Piperita]

Right now the Finance subscreen is somewhat lacking as most elements in it are either in the hands of the board, are mostly fluff information, or are just having little value for how the game unfolds.

This is especially true for Germany in its first seasons. There are huge bonuses for league results and many teams starting with relatively low amounts of money in the bank. Which results in many teams going into the red three or four months in and only recovering right at the end.

But you wouldn't know that from how the world reacts. You still can use your transfer/wage budgets as you like, nobody raises a fuzz if you are momentarily 8 digits in the red and everything goes on as usual.

I think the game would profit from a financial overhaul where liquidity matters. Going back to Germany for a minute, there is a pretty extensive process in the league for guaranteeing clubs can pay their obligations on time and can stay afloat during the season. I'd like to see some of these elements incorporated into the game

Going red should matter. If there is no money available, how are players and staff going paid? For smaller amounts or when future income is already guaranteed, the team should automatically take out loans (with the repayment rate ultimately being deducted from available budgets). If it gets too high or uncontrolled, there should be consequences.

1) Players losing morale or demanding to leave as they are not paid or not in full. If it continues some potentially even quitting and leaving on a free. The board or league should demand the manager to reduce the wage bill or to generate some transfer revenue, otherwise there'd be consequences (loss of trust/job, transfer ban or loss of points).

2) Transfers. The board should keep finances in mind when signing off on transfers to make sure liquidity is guaranteed or that the transfer is valuable enough for small loans. This would also significantly improve the value of installments or loan-buy agreements to make the closer to their real-life usage. It would also help combat the ridiculous amount the budgets can swell up to when playing mostly to develop players. This and the morale modifiers also should give us some steals from teams that are not in order or make players more demanding of cash up front if they expect your team to lack longterm funding.

3) More interactions. More reasons to cut players or bully them into reducing wages (without new signing or agent fees that would otherwise negate the effect almost entirely). Emergency team meetings. The board may decide to raise ticket prizes (resulting in upset fans and potentially less visitors) or take up controversial sponsors (same deal) which can lead to some meaningful press conferences with actual consequences.

4) The inverse Recruitment Meeting. The board and manager discuss goals on how much money needs to be freed up or generated. They identify players not pulling their weight or being potential money makers. Early on the manager is rather free to do as he likes and has enormous pull to keep players or try wage reduction schemes first. He just has a financial target list (e.g. "make 15m€ in transfer surplus and reduce wages by 4m€/year") to meet and suggestions on how to make it. During the last transfer week however the board gets more involved and may offer players around or accept offers if no progress is being made.

5) Especially for lower league teams: Special friendlies becoming available. Say what you want about Bayern Munich in real life but whenever a team is facing severe troubles, they come over for a free friendly to generate money.

6) In leagues that have it, licensing. Most of it happens board-side so no player intervention needed. But there should be basic plans and results the player has to abide by. The aforementioned target lists. Point reductions or in extreme cases even loss of starting place in your league if you fail hard.

7) Wage structures that are actually enforced. Right now there's a comparative maximal value but it doesn't matter whether or not you give it to a star player who is worth it or a youth player just for the fun of it. It also doesn't matter if your funding is entirely based on "hard" money (merch, sponsorship, expected placements) or softer money (transfers).
If you can almost guarantee 100m or even multiple times that of transfer revenue a year, you can also pretty much pay wages way above your natural revenue. A proper board should not allow this or demand such transfers be made early each window or such high earners being the absolute exception only allowed for top merch seller/club legends/world class players! There should be hard caps depending on how much you expect to earn naturally (league/continental/cup) AND your reserves in the bank. However, if there is not much more money to be made outside transfers, the cap should stay. The board may allow [0...3] exceptions depending on the buffer and your ability to talk them into it but not much more.

To illustrate: If I sell big (what happens inevitably when making a "youth first"-kind of game and play some Champions League I could easily pay my first squad in the excess of 10m€/year (what Bayern pays and Dortmund gives its stars) and my reserve 5m€/year (what they should earn based on success and team standing). It has a reason these kinds of sums are not the norm and they should not become it unless I can back it up with continued success in the league and CL and actually can compete with Bayern financially. Otherwise I am too much dependent on sales and when they dry up the club goes under fast!

However, as seen with Hertha for example, the boards should have different personalities in this regard and be more or less risky with funding or gambles for success. A spending offensive one year and when it fails a quick 180 the next? Entirely possible!

[destmez]

 

Going red should matter , we have beautiful exemple Barcelona and Leo Messi they could register him , they ask several player to renew their contract and lower their wage ,

Especially that in the lower division clubs this could have a big impact

i thinks your suggestion is likable with mine can you check this  ? @Piperita 

 

Edited August 30, 2021 by destmez

[destmez]

à l’instant, destmez a dit :

"Going red should matter. If there is no money available, how are players and staff going paid? For smaller amounts or when future income is already guaranteed, the team should automatically take out loans (with the repayment rate ultimately being deducted from available budgets). If it gets too high or uncontrolled, there should be consequences.

Players losing morale or demanding to leave as they are not paid or not in full. If it continues some potentially even quitting and leaving on a free. The board or league should demand the manager to reduce the wage bill or to generate some transfer revenue, otherwise there'd be consequences (loss of trust/job, transfer ban or loss of points).

this is Brillant @Piperita if player are not paid they should ask the board to cut there contract , and if player are not paid they should leak information on Media and theses information should hurt Club reputation

[Michael Sant]

Many clubs have credit facilities in place (overdrafts, loans, mortgaged income against season ticket revenue etc) so while FM does depict clubs going into a negative it's not necessarily to indicate a club has no money. How do these possibilities tie in with the solvency rules you're mentioning from Germany?

[Michael Sant]

We haven't heard back on this since. If you do have further thoughts and considerations on this aspect we're always open to reviewing them further. At this stage we've reviewed the idea as originally presented.