Silly Season

It’s that time of year again, Pre-Season, John Bosman would have been proud. The first pre-season is by far the worst as when you sign your initial squad they all receive one season contracts, and you cant lock more than 5 over twenty year olds, so this means there is a huge amount of players going to wage auction.

We’re just two days into silly season and already there’s bumper pay packets being passed around. Carlos Vela went for a £140k wages, youngster Marquinos got £100k, and it was just the wonderkids picking up the big wages, Ledley King managed to get himself 80k!

The Arsenal wonderkid Carlos Vela left his club for a £140,000 pay packet, with his pay and transfer fee taken into account its going to cost his new club a staggering £5million over the coming season, which really is madness as that kind of money could have bought you a just as good player on a much lower wage and one you could lock to your squad, its likely he’ll be back up for grabs next preseason as I doubt his club will be able to sustain his wage for much more than four weeks, how do I know that? Well wage auctions are one of the few ways you can spend your projected 28 day balance, you can do a instalment plans with private deals but most managers will want the cash upfront so they can buy a replacement.

Its not just the signing clubs who are hurting, think of the teams the players leave behind, for most of the players their market value will be in the millions, but clubs don’t pay that, they pay acquisition fee which is a lot lower, sometimes as much 10 times lower.

What we then often see is seven days later is the player will be up for transfer auction for the players market value so the club can make a tidy profit but that’s going to be changed in a future update with the inclusion of wage x 10 signing on fee, it will help but is the best option to suck even more money out of the gameworld? Especially with more money sinks coming early next year like Stadiums, Profit Tax, Agents Fees and Competition Tax.

Rampant transfer fees and wages are about to be countered with rampant taxes, but is it the way forward? Will we all be so skint the game will become boring as everyone can barely able to scrape a dime together?

An idea I’ve had to make things fairer in wage auctions is to ditch them and replace them with a more friendly transfer auction, one that will benefit the club with cool hard cash. When a player reaches the end of his contract it starts a transfer auction for the acquisition fee of the player, teams can then bid the same as a normal one but with a slight difference, their offer can involve a instalment plans, but they must pay a deposit of the acquisition fee. This idea would make the losing club more money when the player leaves and the buying club would benefit from paying the player cheaper wages.

Not to say this idea hasn’t got its pitfalls, it has as the buying club won’t be able to retain their player, but how many players who go to end of contract wage auctions (with at least 2 bidders) actually stay at the their original club? That’d be a nice figure for SI to show us, id stake my £140,000 a week waged player it’s a very low percentage.