Mike J

I had him in my Boro save. He was great in the Championship and turned out to be a fairly decent player in the EPL. He's not really a top-tier RB, though, and I eventually sold him as he just wasn't quite good enough when challenging for Europe and going for the CL places. He is great value, though, and in some games probably can develop into a top player.

This definitely seems like a situation where the game lacks a little bit of nuance. Players don't seem to understand that a home match against the league's bottom side is nowhere near as important as the CL semi-final three days later. There doesn't seem to be a way to tell them this via conversation.

This is pretty much the consequence of back to back promotions. If you dominated the league as much as you say last season it implies you likely have players who are already good enough for the Championship. They'll want Championship money. At this level you'll need to accept the fact you'll struggle to keep hold of your best players and you'll need to maximise the profit you can make when selling them. More generally, in these types of saves you need to keep a closer eye on contracts so you don't end up with lots of players with 12 months left on their contracts all wanting new deals. You need to renew earlier, before they can ask for wages appropriate for the league above you. You can also add contract extension clauses you can trigger to keep people on a lower deal for longer. They might get annoyed, but as long as you're successful it shouldn't matter too much.

Player interactions are infuriating but I think the main reason is because we're not actually interacting. The options are too limited and the effects too binary to be realistic. I've had players complaining about a lack of depth at GK. I then sign a backup GK who is second choice for England. Not good enough, apparently. I have players demanding to play more who have a Squad Player squad status. I can understand their personality will affect how they interact with me, but what annoys me is when some of the team leaders come to me complaining he should get more game time, including the star player who plays in they guy's position. I think the lack of transparency in the interactions and the exaggerated effect they have on the team is the problem here.

I assume Genk aren't really raking in vast amounts of money from their domestic league, so if we assume this isn't a bug, the explanation could be that you're actually spending above your means right now. What's your wage budget and how much of it are you spending? What are the terms on the loan repayments? Some loans have terms that change over time so it may be that a loan that was once serviceable has changed to be more of a hindrance now. One problem with the game's financial planning is it doesn't really take future player sales into account, so if you're relying heavily on sales to finance the team it can cause problems eventually.

Club reputation has quite a big influence on player value. I think FM generally doesn't do a great job recognising shifts in reputation and club rep tends to rise and fall too slowly, which often leads to this sort of situation. The game is probably still treating your Cardiff team as a mid-table EPL club at best, despite your success, while Barca will be among the highest reps in the game, even if they haven't won La Liga in a while (as is the case in my save). I think things like the overall financial health of the club may also factor into a player's valuation, since a healthy bank balance will mean less need to sell to balance the books.

Others have pointed out the comparison with players promised the same amount of playing time in the league as a reason. Another could be due to one or more players receiving a pay rise as part of their contract, or a new player coming into the team and being paid closer to what a "normal" wage would be in the league for that type of player while your other players are still on their League 1 salaries. I've had a similar issue with my Boro team after getting promoted to the EPL. Wages are gradually going up as I sign better players and have to pay them higher wages. Then all the other "Important Players" see that and all want similar amounts. It's a bit annoying, but not entirely unrealistic. It's something you have to budget for if you can, or just accept as a newly promoted team you simply won't have the financial muscle to compete in the league yet and this is one aspect of that.

The squad planner is one of those relatively new additions that doesn't seem so well integrated yet, and this is one example of that. It's purely there to help with transfer planning in-game and has no effect on how your AM ranks your players in their selection advice. It's not even very good at that, as I've had suggestions to sell my star midfielder because he "doesn't feature in my plans according tot he squad planner" when he's started every game but I've forgotten to add him to the planner so he's at the bottom of the list. It's p[particularly annoying because the game already tracks playing time and that feels like something that your AM and DoF could use to effectively highlight who you're using and who you aren't.

The computer-controlled clubs do have some agency in these situations. They likely do at least a cursory analysis of your club to see if the playing time you're promising is likely. They may have decided the other teams were more likely to give their players playing time. You said yourself they'd be competing for places, rather than being a nailed-on starter. I do think reputation probably plays a little bit too much of a role in signings and that's likely what caused Hermoso to move to Southampton. I think rep should probably fluctuate more rapidly than it does and events like relegation should have a much bigger effect on it than they seem to have.

There's a box you can tick when setting up a Recruitment Focus that excludes players from other focuses. That might help. Other than that, are you sending your scouts to different locations, or keeping them in the same places the whole time? Depending on the paramters of your focuses, the quality of your team and the ability of your scouts, there may not actually be a huge pool of players to choose from.

Do they? I don't think I've ever seen any developer prove anything of the sort. You'd literally be asking most developers to reveal the secrets to what makes their games work. SI aren't going to give away the secrets of how parts of the engine work since that's the thing making them money and having people be able to copy it would potentially be corporate suicide. While I think interactions could use some work, especially around communicating the effects a little better, I've not had any real problems with praising players for training well. Not sure how much difference it makes to the engine, but it feels like praising the top trainer that week is something managers would do and it's never hurt me to do it, as far as I know, so why not?

I've never encountered this myself in over 20 years of playing FM, including managing some of the biggest clubs in the world, so I can see how it's likely not a priority for SI to fix. It may also be that the limit is intrinsic to a whole host of systems within the game so it's not as simple a fix as just increasing a number somewhere in the code. I agree with @Dagenham_Dave that the best solution here is probably to look at the mechanisms that allow clubs to generate such massive revenues in the first place as that seems like the biggest problem here.

Sometimes it's to do with wages already offered to players you're trying to sign - the board won't let you enter negotiations with 10 players and commit to offering them all high wages without placing some restrictions at some point, even if you don't intend to sign all of them. As you've just been promoted, it may also be to do with promotion wage rise clauses that are due to kick in once the season officially ticks over to the new one. I had this at Boro in my save - got promotion and a a decent wage budget increase, but that was then eaten up by all the 35% wage rise clauses in my player contracts for winning promotion. If none of those things apply, it could be a bug.

That's probably true, but it's the reasons that are frustrating. In any squad there'll be 1 or 2 players who don't like your training, a couple who want more game time, maybe a few who want new contracts or want to leave, and that probably adds up to about a third overall. The problem is when really minor or random things torpedo your dynamics for ne logical reason. I can handle a player coming to me wanting more playing time when their contract says they should be a starter but I've signed a better player in their position. That's my fault and something I can understand and attempt to fix. Having the whole squad threaten to attack you because you told them they were playing pretty well recently is just a bizarre reaction with no rhyme or reason to it. It feels like the problem is the game includes random elements in any interaction, to simulate real life, but they can sometimes lead to completely unrealistic outcomes. There should be a natural limit to how extreme certain reactions can be. If I tell a squad that's doing well that I'm happy with their form, maybe one or two don't care, a couple might think we could be doing a little better, but I wouldn't expect anything like the anger I got in my game.

I've had similar crazy reactions. Player reactions and dynamics seem like more of a lottery this year. I had a team meeting when top of the Championship as Boro, playing pretty well, just before a rivalry match with Leeds. I told the players they were doing well and to keep up the good work and the entire dressing room turned against me. I've no idea how you're supposed to predict player reactions when even praising them for being in a good position can go so horribly wrong.