Good strategy on renewing players (transfer profit vs losing them end of contract)

[DavyDepuydt1]

This is something I've always struggled for, and I'm really looking if someone can give a good "quick and easy strategy" or "rule of thumb" that they follow

My issue is that I'm rarely selling players or making any profit, as most of the time I'm encoutering any of these cases:

• I don't bother about non-first teamers until the last 6months of their contract and then mostly they are unhappy to sign a new contract so they leave for free, or they even ask for a raise when they do want to talk, but they aren't even fitting in my plan
• I'm not pro-active enough, I wait until the "these expire in 6 months time"
• When I do find the courage the sit down and renew some guys who don't really fit into my plans anymore, just to make sure I don't need to let them go on a free, I'm finding that I have to spent a lot of wage budget just hopen for a bid to come in at some point, which is far from guaranteed 
• I find it difficult to identify "who to offer a renewal" and at which point. the easiest for me is to renew my starters when they are nearing the end of the contract, but for all the rest I don't have a good strategy

that being said, I'm not the one with hours of spare time available, who can do some very difficult and time consuming strategy on renewing the contracts, that would feel like a chore to me and is not where I want to spend my precious FM time on.

 

So I'm actually looking for a "simple and easy to maintain" high-level strategy on when I should think about which players to renew, and which I can actually just don't put the effort in, into renewing.

This with the end result of being able to make some more outgoing transfers for people who don't fit my plans (instead of losing the End of contract) and make some profit on actual starters because they don't run out to.

Edited December 20, 2023 by DavyDepuydt1

[turnip]

It depends what kind of team you want to build. If you want to stack your team with players who are as good as you can get, then you'll probably have to offer new contracts at minimum every 18-24 months. Start with your best, or most irreplaceable players, and work backwards from there. This should mean that whatever money you have available for contracts always goes on the most important players. 

For players were you can't keep them or don't want to keep them, try to identify these guys - again - 18-24 months in advance of their contract running out. This gives you plenty of time to either give them a run in the team in the lead-up to a transfer window opening, find them a loan to do much the same thing, or start shopping them around. The exception here is if you've got a very talented youngster who's improving. Here, if there's already interest, you can usually get away with waiting until 12 months before his contract expires. But, I'm talking "very talented" here - 'good for League 2' won't be good enough unless clubs think he'll be good enough for the Premier League. 

[Justified]

The best advice I can give is start planning 18 months before contracts expire. If you want to keep then renew, if you want to sell you have the winter/summer to do so. I know that sounds very simplistic but that's always worked for me. Circumstances of up and coming youngsters or transfer targets should dictate which way you go on your non-starters.