Just found my first medium sized gripe with FM06, and it's another one of those that's been in the series for an eon...
I got promoted to the EPL with Leicester, and was looking at the cheap end of the market to strengthen my squad for the next season, not expecting a massive transfer budget.
So the budget gets announced... £1.9m!!! With £20m in the bank... I couldn't buy Peter Crouch's standing leg for that! This came with a message that the intial TV money is taken into account, so I'm guessing I won't even get the August boost in funds as per FM2005 (which I'm glad appears to have been fixed, but this figure is what I would have expected in FM05 at this time, with another £5-6m in August - I'm wondering if it will actually be the same in FM06?)
Wage budget went up from £70k a week to £120k a week, which is OK - I can cope with that: keep it tight 1st year in case of relegation...
On the 1st of July suddenly my wage budget is £300k a week
I'd signed a young back up GK who should become 1st choice in a year or two, and three 32 year olds (2 quality players IRL, the other I've never heard of tbh but he looks the business), for £1m combined. All are on low wages for the PL, so I'm not even up to £100k a week. And I probably won't go much over the £120k in case it goes tits up and we do go down: I can then keep the bulk of the squad together. If we stay up, I'll start paying decent salaries.
But what irks me is that I'll be spending a minimum of £150k a week less than the board will allow me to (maybe one more player and a loan signing or two), £7.5m less than the budget over the year. IRL if I went into the boardroom and said, 'I'll keep wages £7.5m less than you allow me, but give me a few million more transfer funds for one or two extra players' (which I need), as the money is in the bank, I'm positive they'd agree.
FM does not take this into account, and it pisses me off
Marc, I suggested this a number of times before: could there not be a combined wages & transfer budget pool? So in the above example, Leicester have £20m in the bank, and are happy to spend £15m on wages, and £1.9m on transfers: i.e. £16.9m total over the year.
At the minute I'm spending £5m in wages, and have spent £1m on transfers, so in theory I've got nearly £11m to play with which I either can't/won't spend at the moment. Surely I should be able to pay £5m for a player in this instance, pay him £20k a week, which would still be £5m less overall than the club are happy for me to spend.
As the wage budget has only just been upped to £300k, I've missed all the Bosman players who deserve high wages (I could only offer £7k a week up to mid June, and £11k a week up to 1st July), and I'm not giving new deals to existing players until I know we're safe...
So the board have set unrealistic budgets: if I spend another £200k a week in this scenario I deserve the sack, and any player I am likely to find for £900k (my remaining transfer budget) will not eat up much of the spare wages allowance. Yet we will make a huge profit this year, at the risk of potentially being relegated - which will again skew the financial model...
By scrapping arbitrary wages and transfer limits, would it not work better if you were told you could spend £15m a year, for example, but if you have committed £12m a year in wages, you only get £3m more to spend?