Football Manager 2010 new features blog Day 18: Improved player transfers and contract negotiations
Hello everyone, and welcome to the last Football Manager 2010 blog of the week.
Although for us at Sports Interactive, one week is pretty much merging
into another at the moment as we’re in the last few weeks of developing
the game now.
A few of us are looking more like zombies than humans at the moment
after some very late nights and early starts, and not for the fun
partying reasons.
Despite us having been making games for a long time and going through
the same process year on year, I still forget quite how tiring and all
consuming it becomes, but it’ll be worth it once the game is out there
and we get to see lots of smiling faces playing the game.
Today’s blog is going to deal with transfers and contracts, which is a massive and very important part of the game.
Despite our previous games being famed in some press quarters for being
able to predict transfers that have gone on to happen, and for having
the best transfer engine out there, it was also one of the areas of the
game with the most bugs reported.
It’s very difficult balancing transfers for the 50 playable leagues in
the game, let alone the moves to and from clubs that are inactive, with
different transfer rules in each country too, so it’s not that
surprising that a few anomalies were found over the years.
So we decided that this would be a year of fixing and balancing in the
transfer area, with hundreds of reported issues gone through and fixed.
What you’ll therefore see in FM2010 is the most balanced and
realistic transfer system from any of our games, with better
negotiation from clubs and even more moves that you could (and
potentially will!) see happen in real life.
I’m not going to sit here and type that it’s perfect, because nothing
ever is, but it’s certainly the best it’s ever been, and the best seen
in a football management game.
We have, however, also found some time for a few new features along the
way to make it easier for the manager, lifelike, and flexible.
A really nice new addition to the transfers and contracts area of the
game is that you can now buy transfer clauses out. For example, if
you’ve signed a player with a clause whereby you will pay his former
club L500k when he makes 50 appearances for the club, you can now try
and buy that clause for a cheaper price at an earlier point.
So let’s say you’ve got a bit of money lying around, and know that
his former club are skint, you could offer to buy the clause back and
they might agree to sell it to you for a L100k less just to get the
money there and then.
A really nice new addition to the transfers and contracts area of the
game is that you now have the opportunity to buy or sell some clauses
that have been negotiated on a previous transfer.
So for example if you’ve sold a player with a clause whereby you will
get L500k when he makes 50 appearances for his new club you may want to
sell this clause for L250k taking the 'bird in the hand' philosophy
that less money now is worth more to you.
These clause fee but outs are negotiated between your board and
corresponding board of the club you have the clause agreement with.
When deciding on a price for a clause they will take into account
factors such as the financial states of the clubs, player injury
proneness, the likelihood of the player featuring in many games, player
value, player contract length etc.
One change we’ve noticed in football over the last few years in the
increased poaching of young talent, which has been in the news quite a
lot recently. We always stay well within the rules of football with our
games, and for many years you have been able to sign young players from
other clubs with tribunal agreed compensation.
However, the big clubs in the game were always more interested in
signing players for then and there, rather than looking to the future,
and great prospects will now find many clubs interested in them at a
much earlier age, with clubs looking to improve their youth teams a lot
more than in previous versions of the game.
With the credit crunch going on around the world at the moment, our
football spies tell us that payment of deals are now being spread
across longer periods of time, so as well as cash upfront deals and the
previously available options to spread payment over 2 years, we’ve
increased this now so that you can spread payment over up to 48 months
now if you so desire.
There are improvements to loan possibilities too, with you being
able to offer multiple players out for loan at one time, clubs
indicating to you what kind of deal they require when enquiring about a
player for loan, and if you do offer a player out for loan, there’s an
option for him to be automatically loan listed by doing so.
If you get lots of clubs bidding for one of your players at the same
time, you can also now negotiate one of them, and then use that
negotiated offer for the others, rather than having to individually
change the clauses in each one.
Oh, and if you’re offering players out to clubs, you now have an option
to exclude foreign clubs, which means that if that player only has a
few months left to go on his contract, you won’t be alerting all the
clubs who can sign him on a Bosman deal to his availability.
So there are some of the new features in transfers and contracts for
FM2010. You’ll find a lot more improvements too, but we can’t give
everything away in one go…
If you’re lucky enough to get one, have a great weekend!