🔄 Transfers
Player contracts — wages, length, release clauses
How to structure contracts to protect the club without losing the player.
A contract is more than a wage number. Length and the weekly wage shape both the cost and the player's future relationship with the club. A well-structured contract protects you from market shifts and from your own success.
Length
- 1 year — flexibility, but the player can leave on a free at the end. Common for veterans and short-term fixes.
- 2–3 years — the standard for mid-career signings. Protects resale value and locks in stability.
- 4–5 years — long deals for young prospects or key players. Protects against poaching but ties up wages.
Bonuses
A signing in the current build carries no bonuses. A transfer completes at the salary you proposed — leave it blank and the player keeps his current wage — and a renewal negotiates the wage and the length alone. The backend does model an agent negotiation with a signing bonus (wage weighted 60%, bonus 40%), but no screen calls it yet: until one does, treat bonuses as absent.
Release clauses
A release clause in the data model is a fixed fee that lets a club sign a player without negotiating — the buyer pays the clause plus the agent's fee, the selling club receives the clause amount, and the player arrives on a wage 5% above his previous one. In the current build the clause is dormant: nothing writes one into a new contract and no screen triggers one, so the clause line on a player page is display-only for now.
What the player weighs
Renewal talks boil down to one comparison: the wage you offer against the wage the player already earns. Loyalty lowers the bar — the more loyal the player, the closer to his current wage he will sign — and ambition raises it. Land within about 10% below his bar and he counters at 15% above your offer; just over it he still pushes for a nudge past his current wage — unless he is highly professional (14+), in which case he signs instead of haggling. Further below the band he refuses outright, and the refusal reaches your inbox. A quick-renew option on a player's own page skips the talks entirely: it re-signs him on his current wage for eight weeks.