Contracts

[romo123]

Firstly, thanks for making this game - as a massive Football Manager and NFL fan from England, this is the exactly the kind of game I've been looking for for years!

One issue I'm having is with contract renewals. I know the contracts are not designed to be completely accurate representations of the way they work in the NFL, but I find that upcoming free agents tend to request excessively high contracts - a backup CB (72 OVR) requesting 10-12m a year, for example, or a low-level linebacker asking for 8-10m to re-sign. There are other factors involved (how highly they value money etc) and FA is obviously a place for overspending, but it still seems unrealistic and detracts from the immersion. There's less incentive to draft and develop a player to be a functional backup or rotation option if you know they are going to demand way more money than you can afford to spend. The knock-on effect is that in free agency a lot of players end up going unsigned (and subsequently retire) because they effectively price themselves out of the market - this happens sometimes in real life but not to the same extent.

Am I missing something, is there a way to fix it, or could this be part of an update? I've tried lowering the maximum contracts per position, but this seemed to make the problem worse.

My second problem is mechanical and I'm probably doing something wrong. Is there a way to watch the game without calling the players? I've tried playing the game but when I turn off the 'call plays' options, the game just skips to the end. Is there a way around this or have I missed something obvious?

Thanks again!

[AKH]

There is a contract setting that related to overall as well, thats probably the one you want to tinker with.

In the league settings you can switch whether or not it hides the scores of simmed games - then you can simulate the game and watch it without knowing the score in advance.

[Sweed]

My first year with the game too. As far as watching games I just hit the sim button and then a "watch game" button appears. Click that and watch the game. I have the scores hidden so seeing the score first is not an issue.
I have seen some post that turning off play calling works to watch but it seems you've done that and it doesn't. At least for you. Myself I haven't tried as the other method works for me. Hopefully someone else replies and clarifies how this works.

Just picked up the new FM. My first version since '14. Started watching football around 2006 and educated myself on the beautiful game. Fortunate enough to visit friends in Walthamstow, before covid hit, and attend a Premiere League match 2019.
Love the game and attending a match is an awesome experience.

[romo123]

Thanks both! Probably should've worked out the 'Watch Game' solution myself...

Do you know where the contract setting related to overall is? I checked League Options - Financials before, but I could only see the individual max contract modifiers?

[AKH]

oh shoot, thought we still had that in..mybad

[brooks_piggott]

You may need to lower the top end contract asks for CB. We also don't go by overall when evaluating the players, so it could be the 72 OVR in your league actually rates higher than that OVR would lead you to believe. But more than likely it's just your top CB contracts are just higher and it's trickling down to mid-tier players as well.

[romo123]

Thanks for the replies!

I'll lower the top CB contracts and see if that works - it's no big issue anyway.