AI teams and a lot of money

[RealSmokePL]

Whenever I play in Poland, one of the bigger teams tends to get a front end sugar daddy take over, they get pumped with a crap ton of money but nothing ever really comes from this, they might win a league title like once in 10 years, but that's okay I guess, since a lot of money doesn't necessarily mean success. But my issue kind of comes from this, they get great maxed out facilities quite quickly awesome, and then... they just give quite crappy players 20-30x more than what they should be earning even the big teams at the start at best pay like 7k a week but that's for their best players, they generally don't actually spend a lot on transfers, just the wages, this in practice would make sense would they be buying players of quality but no, they tend to just buy average players for the league, like around 120-130 ca (keep in mind I'm quite far in this save so the bigger teams in the league have players of around 130-140 ca) but the only difference is that they pay them much more then they should, I get it that they'll most likely offer more than the run of the mill club that relies on tv league and european competition money but does about 20-30x really make any sense? Of course I don't really expect for them to instantly do a PSG and get Neymar and such since such players would most likely not even come to Poland, even if it's a top 6 league like in my save but still, all that money on such crappy players where they're still at the point of finishing bottom of any UCL group still and at best getting knockout of UEL or UECL. Similar occurs in the lower leagues, team got taken over by a front end sugar daddy whilst in the semi-pro 4th division! they were giving 80-90ca players 10k a week?!?! Hell sure give maybe 1k-2k since that's still about 2-4x more than any other team in the league but jeez, around 16x more is a bit too much, and I don't believe these kinds of players wouldn't play for such money since 2k is still like 4x more than at any other club, heck even more than some top division clubs would offer.

 

So is it just me or are AI teams god awful with money? Especially a lot of it? Or is it something else?

[RealSmokePL]

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[Freakiie]

Obviously the AI is much worse with money than the human player, although I think that this isn't a case of the AI simply being bad with money. Hertha and Newcastle show that if the AI has money they will turn their clubs into competitive forces pretty quickly. I think the issue here is much more that Poland's inherent transfer preferences in the database are tuned in a way that doesn't accommodate big money at all, so even if they have the cash their transfer preferences leaves them severely limited in how they use this money.

[Prepper_Jack]

Well, one of the problems is that the players know how much money is in the piggy bank. They will then demand much larger sums for their services, regardless of what their typical market value is for the country and division. This increases year after year, and after a while that 3rd division club that got 15 million, and originally had a payroll of 15k a year, will be spending 500k a year for the same quality players. There really isn't a way for the AI, or even a player really, to counteract this eventual effect, other than blow the money on facilities as quickly as possible.

[RealSmokePL]

3 minutes ago, Prepper_Jack said:

Well, one of the problems is that the players know how much money is in the piggy bank. They will then demand much larger sums for their services, regardless of what their typical market value is for the country and division. This increases year after year, and after a while that 3rd division club that got 15 million, and originally had a payroll of 15k a year, will be spending 500k a year for the same quality players. There really isn't a way for the AI, or even a player really, to counteract this eventual effect, other than blow the money on facilities as quickly as possible.

Hmm this might be a good take, I've never personally been a manager of a 'front end' sugar daddy club so I'm not sure how these players behave during negotiations, but I've managed a former Front end sugar daddy club, at the point they had none and were 33M in the red, I had to clear some of the way overpaid players and got the wage budget at least under and mainly relied on loans, but one players that I bought from Crvena Zvezda if I recall was 140 ca and I got him on 23K a week, this is with the club, all be now in the red on general finances, having a high wage budget, but it could be that the players instantly ask for absurd wages just cause the club 'can afford it'.

[Freakiie]

48 minutes ago, Prepper_Jack said:

Well, one of the problems is that the players know how much money is in the piggy bank. They will then demand much larger sums for their services, regardless of what their typical market value is for the country and division. This increases year after year, and after a while that 3rd division club that got 15 million, and originally had a payroll of 15k a year, will be spending 500k a year for the same quality players. There really isn't a way for the AI, or even a player really, to counteract this eventual effect, other than blow the money on facilities as quickly as possible.

You can somewhat cheese this by moving all your wage budget into your transfer budget. Might get some complaints from the board about wage budget management, but as long as you're performing they won't care about you being slightly over (and they might cut how much % you retain from player sales, but with millions moved towards your transfer budget anyway, who cares ).

[Draakon]

8 hours ago, Prepper_Jack said:

Well, one of the problems is that the players know how much money is in the piggy bank. They will then demand much larger sums for their services, regardless of what their typical market value is for the country and division. This increases year after year, and after a while that 3rd division club that got 15 million, and originally had a payroll of 15k a year, will be spending 500k a year for the same quality players. There really isn't a way for the AI, or even a player really, to counteract this eventual effect, other than blow the money on facilities as quickly as possible.

I disagree. This effect is much more evident in real life, not in FM.

I have a long experience managing in Eredivisie in different FM series and that's a huge talent pool for European football. Eredivisie is a selling league - all wonderkids eventually leave for England, Spain, Italy or Germany. Half of the clubs have good (or even great) youth systems, so each season big European clubs poach talented youngsters for small money (but with a promise of future fees) and often even top half clubs can make a sell worth appr. £20m for their young star players. At one point we had I think six clubs in the league that were touted to be 'Rich'. In FM terms it means that club value is exceeding £50m, IIRC and that club could have easily transfer funds around £10-20m per season. 

So, what did those clubs do?

Not much. I rarely saw any signings over £5m (except an odd one from Feyenoord and PSV) and those signings were of questionable value, in the league where your scouts could easily find quite a talented youngsters who could be bought for £1-2m from smaller clubs. Yes - there were some new stadiums. That was the most noticable feature. I think in 10 years half of the clubs in the league had expanded their stadium or built the new one (or at least started the process of building the new one), but that was it. On the transfer market AI made extremely lousy decisions.

What is characteristic to all AI clubs (and not only rich clubs) is transfers that have no point in my eyes. There were numerous examples of a mediocre club that spends around £2m in one transfer window and half of it (around £1m) was paid for one player. Looks reasonable if it's the future starter, but very often that player they spent half of their transfer money didn't even get a chance. I mean - literally - didn't get a chance. In the first season one start and two substitute appearances (or something like that) and by the next Summer he was alienated and requested transfer, or was just rotting on the bench until his contract ran out. Why would you spend so big (relatively) for a player you have no intention to field in your line-up?