Two issues here, world class players with expiring contracts and some player potential bug.

[Arsy]

1. A player like this can never become a free agent. To enter the last six months in such a player's contract and despite many top teams being continually interested in him no one ever offering him anything is quite ridiculous. If he remains a free agent a couple more weeks/months even I might be able to sign him, as a newly promoted team to the Bundesliga... He just needs to become desperate enough...

 

2. We have here "potential to improve a lot", "global superstar", "could improve immensely" followed up by "unlikely to improve significantly ". He does look like a potential world class keeper BTW.

[Marc Vaughan]

The 'potential' issue is something I've got a prototype fix in for here, but its with QA - it's not a huge deal, basically its a text issue - the player won't develop at present because he's not mature enough to take onboard the lessons/info he needs to in order to improve past this point, however when he matures (depends on his personality and some other factors) he'll grow further. The string should say 'needs to mature to improve further' but it wasn't displaying for 'reasons' (ie. geeky bug stuff).

Apologies for any annoyance this has caused.

With regards to:
[quote]1. A player like this can never become a free agent. To enter the last six months in such a player's contract and despite many top teams being continually interested in him no one ever offering him anything is quite ridiculous. If he remains a free agent a couple more weeks/months even I might be able to sign him, as a newly promoted team to the Bundesliga... He just needs to become desperate enough...[/quote]

Actually its fairly common that players wait until they're actually out of contract to negotiate deals - there are two sides to this, clubs might be wary of sigining a pre-contract for a hugely expensive player just in case he breaks a leg before joining them, secondly once the player is out of contract there is less 'flack' likely to head his way because of the media around him negotiating with various clubs who might be rivals of his current club etc.

Cases ongoing at present in the Premiership -N'Golo Kante (Chelsea), Wilfried Zaha (Crystal Palace), Youri Tielemans (Leicester), Roberto Firmino (Liverpool), Ilkay Gundogan.

These are all technically out of contract or about to go out of contract with their clubs (and thus elligable to talk to other clubs under the bosman ruling) - some will probably stay, but not all.

Most information on other out of contract players in the Premiership can be found here - https://theathletic.com/4563063/2023/06/04/premier-league-out-of-contract-free-agents-transfer-window-2023/

PS - One of the things I have tightened up (more) for next year is making clubs try to secure deals on important players long-before their contracts wind down.

[Arsy]

About the potential thing, I posted in case it's not a known bug, even if it's something minor.

 

As for the contract expiry thing, I know it happens to players all the time in real life too, it's just that a player of this caliber never actually becomes a free agent like Bellingham here, he is basically unemployed right now. If you can tighten up this for next year's game it's great.

 

Thanks!