I Broke Football Manager 

Another trick you can do if the agent chucks on a "non-negotiable" release clause in contract talks with a key player. Exit talks and assign your DoF to negotiate the contract. Skip forward one day and go and re-negotiate the contract. The release clause will now be removable so you can get rid of it and exclude it from negotiations. You will likely have to up the wages a bit but it keeps your wonder kids safe from being poached without you being able to stop it.

I've had to set artifically low asking prices to avoid release clauses being triggered in my build a nation Gibraltar save - the league rep being so low initially made my player values way lower than they should have been. After a while I ended up selling players with 50% sell on clauses after the rep increased to a viable level... Now 2042/43 and finally values in line with the club rep as league is 9th in europe. Champs league semi final is the best finish and Gibraltar to Euros Group stages. Getting there....!

Zealand: So, what's our next move? Editor: I'm thinking Disney World. Also Egg.

These kind of things can feel a bit “gamey” but I would consider doing any and all of them if it felt right…or if I just simply refuse to lose my #1 guy after 10 years of a save I’ve worked hard on! 😂

I want to start this comment by saying, im a fan of Zealand and ive loved watching the Tauton save. That being said, this whole situation has left a sour taste in my mouth. I completely agree that Z can play the game however he wants, but part of the reason I watch a save like this, is cause I like the part which is watching a club come from nothing to something. Part of that experience is sadly having these big clubs come in and take those players we absolutely love. But the fun of it is how you find the next Bulow and Kiss, instead of just saying that they are irreplaceable. I think we what gets me the most about this strategy is that the only reason you got the players to sign these contracts was the acceptance of a release clause. You yourself know that release clauses "add value" to the contract that they are signing, which is why you use things like relegation release clauses to bring down salary. I feel like that should influence how you kind of perceive these things. I feel like not honouring the release clause has the same energy as just going into the editor and just removing it. Or if you do not want to have a release clause, make it a non negotiable in the contract, but as stated earlier, those players would not have signed in the first place and you wouldnt have got their services and made huge profits from them. At the end of the day, you are right to say that its a game how you can play however you want. But if you dont want to honour contracts, you might as well just remove them in the editor. Or if you dont want to lose out on players to higher reputation teams, play as Man City. At the end of the day, im still going to watch the videos and support the peacocks, but i think you should also consider that as the fans, we want to watch you overcome these hard challenges and show how your expertise can do so. No hate being sent your way or such, but i know its been a talking point and wanted to state my opinion 👍

Great video and editing and animation masterclass as well! Egg!

I think it's fine to strike a balance like this. What's important is that someone on a RU-vid channel is open and honest about it so that people can choose if they want to watch. What you don't want is someone reloading in the background and pretending they aren't.

I knew both of these, and I have used them before when it came to my absolute, absolute top players, but it's not something I'd recommend doing on a regular basis. If you wanna do one, I'd choose the second because there's still a chance to fail so it's not outright, foolproof cheating. But like Z said, what I really would like are more options for the dialogue. In many cases, not just transfers. For example, I'm playing a custom database with an european league pyramid. My team is in the third tier and won the cup last season, meaning I'm playing Europa League now despite being in 3rd tier. Naturally, some of the more ambitious players want to leave because they want to join a club to play in the Champions League. I'd like to have dialogue options to point to recent success (won the cup, back to back promotions and sitting in a promotion spot again, quarter finals of the Europa League with a good chance of winning) or to the status quo and likely implications - telling him that if we win the Europa League, we too will play in the Champions League, and asking him to wait until then before making a decision on wanting to leave. Or to talk about specifically not wanting to sell to certain clubs. As for other game-breaking exploits, I think by far the worst one this year is the future fee glitch for loans, because it often allows you to get players for like 10% of their actual value (sometimes even less, sometimes more). It's madness that most clubs will just accept an offer of a 1 month loan (if possible), a monthly fee of 5m for a player worth 30-60m with a mandatory Future Fee clause of like 1k. That one really needs to get fixed, because you can essentially stack just about any clubs with the highest quality players that are willing to join so cheaply. Absolutely never use this imo.

Editor had a masterclass here

You are incredible bro, keep it up!

one thing re: player unhappiness that has worked absolute wonders for me is the following: - offer comes in for a team leader, reject, he gets unhappy - tell him "you're such a great leader w0wee", he's happy - tell every subsequent unhappy player that said leader came to me with a similar issue it's worked about 80-90% of the time for me in my current save. it might even be worth offering out a team leader at the start of a window so you can do this, but that might be a bit bold lol

these are totally understandable. I do wish there were better dialogue options. Unfortunately, we're not going to get true dialogue options until the GPT enabled version of the game comes out.

The use of memes in this clip is godlike

One of these that feels fairly vital at times when building from the lower leagues is selling a player to a club with money with a % of profit or next sale included in the deal. Once that appears as a clause you can buy out, offer well above the asking price and then walk away. The clause usually reappears at an greatly inflated level.

I am also a massive Dynamos🇿🇼🇿🇼 (DeMbare) fan. Man that's just wonderful. Never thought I would see Zealand wearing our kit. Lol

The Release Clause-Asking Price trick also works for the "Sell Player" promises. Agree to a value, then set an Asking Price lower than the agreed value, and they will never get mad because you rejected the offer since, after all, no team offered the amount you agreed with him. Let's just hope they drop the promise and not extend it, though... This is around the same level as the "giving International Games Wage Increase clause when you know the player won't play internationally" trick.

Love from Zimbabwe❤

The first thing I do in contract negotiations is lock in the rrlease clause at the maximum possible amount (581 million euro in FM 2020). I almost always also lock in a 3 year extension option unless the player will lilely be past his prime by the time the contract ends. The player (and/or his agent) will demand a significantly better contract but I just accept that as the cost of doing business. Sometimes their demands will become so high that it's just too much and negotiations will collapse, in which case I may try it again a few months later while locking in only a 2 year extension instead of 3. On a rare occasion (extremely good player, extremely good transfer deal, etc) I will accept only 1 year instead of 3. The 581 million euro release clause however is non-negotiable. I am willing to pay them a lot more (preferably in different types of bonuses) but if they don't want to sign such a contract or their demands become too crazy I don't sign them. This will cost more in the short term but you will maintain so much more control. You can sign a great 23 year old player for 5 + 3 years with no release clause and they will be at your mercy for 8 years. If they start whining about wanting to leave I tell them to f off. Eventually the other club will lose interest or my own club will have grown in stature enough for them to stop whining. If they start whining about a better contract I tell them they still have a long contract and will not get a new one. My favorite thing is when they hand in a transfer request and instead of accepting it I immediately activate the 3 year contract extension instead. In my current game I signed a very talented young goalkeeper and had to offer him 2 million euro per year (much more than he initially asked for) to agree to the 581 million release clause and optional 3 year contract extension. A few years later he had improved enough to become my first choice and shortly after that he developed into a world class goalkeeper. I was able to extend his contract and keep the best in the world around for that same 2 million euro a year while my.main competitors were paying their best goalkeepers (who is inferior to mine) 10-15 million a year. Of course, I also never accept "match highest earner" clauses or yearly wage increases. Once you sign a player with a yearly increase you will never be able to get rid of it when you extend the contract. So even when you sign a young talent who is not costing much at all, they will often ask for 10% or even 15% or 20% yearly increase. I will exclude this from negotiations and just just offer them 50% more salary right away instead. Compound interest is a thing! And if they develop well and you have to give them a proper contract eventually (which will take a long time if you sign them.for 5+3 years) they will always demand at least the same % yearly increase so if you have committed to 15% of a tiny wage in the past you now have to keep that in and their new high salary will keep increasing like that every year. I like to offer big bonuses, especially for things that players are unlikely to achieve anyway - for example a striker who will be playing only 20-25.out of 38 league matches will get a very big bonus if he scores 30 goals and an enormous bonus if he becomes the league's top scorer. Either he doesn't become top scorer and it costs me nothing extra or he will perform so well that he outscores other strikers who play 35 matches in which case I am happy to pay up. Also very nice is using the "salary after X matches" for players who you already know will take a many years to get to X matches, especially if they don't expect this. Offering a much higher salary after 30 games for a temporary backup player who you already know will never play 30 games for you is great. I will also offer this player high bonuses for starting games, for scoring and (my favorite) for making the "team of the year" which will obviously never happen.

I did a couple of times the low asking price with my Livorno team while in Serie C in Italy. Now in Serie A, because of your video, I just saved my main creator because of the other tactic when he didn't go to Southampton after they triggered his release clause.... doesn't feel like cheating 🥰

Very guilty of that first tip! Bahahahha

If you lock the release clause during negotiations, once they've agreed a deal but before you hit finalize you can keep upping the release clause to £300 million and they'll just keep accepting the contract.

i have tried a few trials on how teams bid your players using FM editor, and what i found is pretty interesting, and here it is : 1. Even if you have the best player in the world and you want to sell him by "offer player to clubs" and set an amount of fee, the difference between you get the highest bid possible and not getting any bid at all is very small, it's about 1M euros (the currency that i use). 2. If you are expecting big transfer money from big/rich club you have to offer him before the transfer windows open or very early, because clubs like Real Madrid are often sign their big players in early transfer window, and when they finished the transfer, even if they interested with your players they will offer small amount of money as they transfer budget have already depleted.

EGG

I love football manager and as an ex programmer I fully appreciate what a terrific job they’ve done making it as realistic as possible. However it does still have some bugs in it that drive me mad. Where it’s a clear that’s never going to happen scenario I have no issues opening up the editor and fixing it. Or even just changing it for things I prefer. One of my simple favourites is having 12 subs.

With my current Leyton Orient save, ive got a few really good young players, due to a few years of buying wonderkids, and being able to play them... one of which was Endrik (not sure why but he actually chose me over Spurs), after my first year in EPL where i survived on final day of season. I've simply had to offer them new contracts... Endrik got 2 new contracts in 14 months ffs. But agents just wont allow me to get rid of minimum release clause. Thankfully all of them are playing well, and i've managed to get high release clauses on those that insisted upon them, so found that other teams never match it. Thankfully this nonsense coincided with my first season in Europe, and it was the CL, from 6th place in EPL, so that made it easier to offer them the new deals on lucrative money. Currently worth it and sustainable as due to so many good youngsters and end of contract deals, i only spent about 20m of my 80m transfer budget this season. But i'm sure this wont last. lol

egg

Egg

Very curious to see if Football Manager will include some sort of AI text functionality, to allow us to have morE orGanic dialoGues with players.

2:10 That YEET killed me 🤣

This is hilarious to me as someone who played the old Championship Managers in the mid 1990s as there was a similar trick. You’d get players who insisted on a having a big club release clause, all you would need to do is list the player for loan and no club would ever make a cash offer only a loan offer which you were free to reject.

Great that you made a video about this. The dialogue options in the game are far too poor and sometimes the options or the result make absolutely no sence. While i don't use any ingame tricks like this, i do save the game before dialogues. This allows me to work around unrealistic dialogues, that would otherwise break the immersion for me. The conversations, aswell as the contract and transfer negations are the biggest frustrations in the game for me. All of these are supposed to simulate a dialogue with a real human being. Unfortunately they fail at this. Instead they feel like a mini game where you have to make an educated guess to gain a favorable result. While there is many other things i would like to see developed. This remains the only game breaking issue for me and is by far the number one thing i would like to see improved.

EGG!

Situations like that with or without release clauses I just promise the player I will sell them if I get a bid of Xx million pounds, then set their value to 500 pounds and set it to auto reject all offers and move on with my save. Never had any issues with dynamics.

A great example of “breaking the game so it’s more fun/realistic” is when I bought the in-game editor to remove the tycoon owner from the club I went to to rebuild them. I felt like I wanted a grind and the money would make it too easy.

Eggcelent video Zealegg.

Hi Im Ben and I use the editor to remove player unhappiness when I think they have a stupid reason. It feels good to finally say it

Reputation is MASSIVELY important in FM and the latest version it seems to be harder to improve reputation than older versions. In my game I've taken a Conference North team (Darlington) to L1. We are in our 3rd season in L1 and pushing for the play offs. Yet our reputation is still Conference/Conference North standard, and much lower than Bury or Macclesfield who are cast adrift in none league.

Tip: if a player wants release clause when you sign him, you can increase it after they accept. When they accept the offer, before you confirm, increase the release clause with a few million and offer it again. 90% chance they will accept. And you can keep doing this until you hit the max amount.

Reputation building has been AWFUL as far back as the cm days and has never improved. I took Sandhausen, a 2nd division team in Germany and finished 6th, 8th, 3rd, 4th, 2nd in my first 5 seasons in the Bundesliga and still midtable clubs are intersted in my players. It makes zero sense that 10th placed Freiburg think they can get my starting keeper when I finished 2nd. It's ALL cause sigames are horrible at improving reputation of clubs that came from lower divisions. I've made it to the quarters in the CL but it's worth nothing as the club was in the 3rd tier 15 years ago. Illogical...

That's exactly how I used to save my wonderkids when starting from the lowest level of England because the chairman was way too happy to let them go for a few mil...

EGG !!!!

Another thing you can do is use installments to get a better price for the player and if they dont want to pay it then thats also good.

Holy oversell, Batman!

dynamos fc and highlanders fc were the top of Zimbabwean football back inthe day

Props to Z for repping a shirt from my very own castle lager premiership, much love from Zim. FYI I'm a CAPS and Highlanders fan

I've been doing the first one since 2005 brother hahaha. Edit: now that I think about it, I'm deffo BETTER than my home team's last 20 managers because of the simulation experience I have with fm

amazing video as always zealand! also... egg

A lot of this would be improved if the club rep had a more dynamic fluctuation. Whether this positive or negative, I think FM should increase this a bit. Since rep is such an important metric in how players react to transfers it should reflect the clubs trajectory (positively or negatively).

In CM97/98 - I still play it😂. If you take a smaller club and have a player with a big club release clause. This clause is often the bain of any managers existence in the lower leagues. The way around it was it list the player for loan. Once you do that, the only bids you get is for loans which are easily refused.

What I do is set their asking price lower than the release clause and have the response to be ‘reject all transfer offers’. Teams will only bid how much the asking price is and never more

egg.

I do get what everyone in thsi comment section is saying but you're leaving very important details out. Ngl, realeases in do exist and they are indeed respected irl but you got to remember that release clauses are not only for the buying team to decide. It also comes to the player intended to be signed if he leaves or not. Having said this, there are key points forcing Z to do this: 1. Having qualified for Europa and having such a great run in the league, the club's rep should have gone up, whicj didn't happen. As a real life example, look at Leao in Milan. The club has had greag seasons and he's a key player. Instead of moving, he decided to stay. So, Zealand should have the wigfle room to convince both Bulow and Kiss that he views them as essential for the season and convince them to wait. It might be an exploit and, fair enough, the grind is looking for players to develop but that comes at the cost of stagnating yojr progress and even worse, going backwards. Not all players which to leave their clubs, even if they have a release clause so each should not be mandatory for them to do so. Bulow is Geeman and he would much rather prefer Germany. His current team is finishing pretry well in standings and he could easily receive a better payment within said team. Why would he want to leave if not for Bayern?

The worst is when the board accepts a bid for you

Eggcelent video!

A tip I've had success with for players that won't negotiate a new contract with you. Accept a transfer offer, go forward one day, talk to their agent and they'll normally be willing to negotiate a new contract, agree to a contract and then reject the offer.

Todd Boehly really is playing FM in real life - maybe not well, but he's playing

Wait, Zealand did the voice of the turtle in finding nemo?

Egg!

Well, this is new to me. I usually will let the player go if it is 100millions pounds offer and then partially invest the transfer to get under 20 million pounds wonderkid 😅

the not-so-subliminal message at 3:34 😅

Have you ever tried contract extension clause? When I manage Hong Kong Under 23s, the board always accept bid for my star players and I can't reject the bid. The only option to stop the conversation from the buying club and player is by triggering contract extension clause. I haven't try it on release clause yet, but I suspect it might work the same.

egg?

Nice one that works as well is when they lock in a release clause, but you can still make it higher, then you just make sure the first offer gets rejected and then you lock in the release clause and suggest a higher one, they accept it and you increase it again untill however high you want.

Hi zealand!

Hello, Zealand! I have a question for you - can you please give me the playlist with all the cool music you were using while streaming your Dorfs save?

I don't think that it's something I'd do myself, but I agree with everyone should do what makes the game fun for them. Now as a real-life fan of Borussia Dortmund I can attest that it sucks when young and talented players use your club as a stepping stone towards the big money, but I also understand that this possibility is why they come to us in the first place. There's no way we could have gotten players like Haaland, Bellingham or Sancho if not for them knowing that they can get actual game-time on a very high level with us and thereby develop to be directly used with the elite clubs. So losing talented players to higher-level clubs is the (unluckily) reality and I'm fine with the same happening in my simulation. Though with my newly started save with Kuopio PS (Finland), I'll probably not have to fear Real and City knocking on my door for the next few years anyways ;)

Free Zeeland's team!!! EGG

If you pay attention closely when a player signs a deal they will show no interest in leaving and teams know not to make an offer cause the player has signed "new deal". This lasts for around 6 months. If you are quick you can offer a new contract before teams are interested and most of the time either remove release clause or raise it.

I do my contracts like this 4 year or 3 with 1 year that i can trigger...i also never had a player not wanting to sign but ya ..i really got to make a vid of my save

What you don't know his family already moved to Germany and are waiting for his arrival but he's a loyal company man so he won't push for his exit

I also think a flat no to transfer bids helps quite often too? instead of negotiating? not everytime obviously...

What's that opening with taking control of PSG? What is it trying to achieve in FM? How do you bid for your own player? I'm confused.

6.45 zealand just turned into disneys kronk. 😅

More recently I’ve just let them go - always a cheaper player that may be able to fill the roll. As long as I have 1 or 2 stars that can get me to the champions league I’ll be okay.

Eggcellent

I'm on fm22 3 seasons in with Chelsea. 3 Ballon Dor for Lukaku

Save before big matches? Nah Save before all matches? Now you’re talking!

Hi Z,could you do video about Polish team Polonia Warsaw? They just have been promoted 3 times in a row

I just won the Bundesliga twice in the last 3 years and won a championsleauge as Mainz. My reputation is 4th highest in the world and still my main striker wants to leave for Bayern cause they have a "better squad". Thanks for the advice on how to keep him because how often do you see Barcelona's Star player leave for Real Madrid it just makes absolutely no sense

I am using a different approach with release clauses to keep wonderkids at my team (Kaiserslautern). In their contracts I put insanely high release clauses -I raise their weekly wage a bit and they are always fine with that. If any team comes in with an offer I can promise my complaining wonderkid that they're allowed to leave if a club meets the release clause. They always accept this as a fair response and I win either way: if a club pays the ridiculous release clause I'm OK with that (I can buy 10 new wonderkids) but usually the player will stay (happy) at my club. Did anyone else try this? Any tips on how to finetune it?

This option of setting the asking price below the agreed price youd sell the player at then rejecting all the lower than agreed prices has been in the game for at least 4-5 years. Its "gamey" BS that FM need to fix if they want to keep the game being realistic 😅

Zealand could you send the link to the Micronesia cup nations that are selling their shirt designs to help pay for the Costs. I remember you talking about it but I can’t find the link to it. Thanks !

Delicious Bird Eggy Weggy

Doing this to keep Bowen at West Ham

I just let em go and then use the in-game editor to bring them back to me...*evil laugh*

it took me about 6 seasons to make Brighton the highest reputation team in the world..

EGGGGGGGGG🎉!

Wow, That looks like an Egg!!

Suggesting people should play FM the way they enjoy it?! what madness is this? (I actually agree though lol)

What I do is i just stop talking to them when the only options are promises. You literally dont have to talk to them once that happens

Won the UCL as massive underdogs with N.E.C beating city in the final. They then stole my two world class players who I couldn't budge release clauses for, did get £180m. Couldn't replace them with anything near without breaking wage structure Result lost 7-1 on aggregate to Roma in round of 16 next year. So annoyed I didn't know the later technique to try keep one 🤣

I recently did the first tactic because the game itself did something I thought was gamey. A team met the release clause of my best player so I offered him a new contract with a higher release clause and a raise. He signed it so I thought that was the end. Then they met his new release clause. That seemed ridiculous so I reloaded and deployed tactic 1.

EGG!!!!!

Egg…just simply Egg

I always save my game after getting knocked out in champions league cause I would hate for the game to crash and I end up advancing

Good video, would be better with an egg

Does anyone know how to convince a player who is on his last year of contract to stay? The game doesnt let me talk to him although he does want to go

I remember i was playing Fm20 or 21.......signed Adebayor on a free transfer at the start of a save with Celtic.....got offered £50million before the start of August 🤨😂 I accepted and the transfer was complete , i thought the game was broken then but it never happened again

Zealand ! Sorry for spent time under a stone but why don’t you use your newgen faces in FM23 ?

Hey Zealand, my laptop can't run FM23 so I'm planning on playing FM17 but does your FM for Beginners series work for that game?