Managing a Bankrupt Team

[Whyme]

I've currently just taken over Perugia in 2004 and the club is 24 million pound in debt, yet I just tried to sign a player and the Board will allow wages up to 25,000 pound per week and they're even allowing a signing on fee of 375k... That's fucking ridiculous!!

Is this a fault with the game or is just a bug with Perugia?

[JLa]

What's even more ridiculous is that you can just keep on going, act like nothing has ever happened. Your board will eventually be replaced, your debt will be cleared and you will probably even get a decent transfer kitty.

While your status is "bankrupt", I don't think you can reject incoming transfer bids, though. Correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't been in charge of a bankrupt club for ages.

[Zeberto1874]

£24m in debt, bloody hell and I though my new save with Hearts in Scotland with £4m debt was going to be a challenge?

[ilovesanmarino]

With interest payments, debts can spiral to insane figures, this actually applies more at small clubs than big ones. Although in italy and spain a club can fall out of the top league with an eye-watering wage bill and fine its income cut to near zero and make stupid losses, they are reasonably easy to recover. Sell a few star players and/or get promoted and it's all fixed! A tiny club however will never be able to do that, and even running at a small loss can snowball into a mountain of debt, furthermore the owner will not inject cash to help you as he is probably rated 1/1 for richness and worst of all, club rescues are weighted by reputation.


Actually being in debt though has the following consequences:-

No longer able to turn down reasonable offers
This means next to nothing, hardly anyone bids for nontransfer listed players anyway, when trying to buy such players it seems a reasonable offer is double the players value, unless they are of very low value, or an important player for the club...

Players may get unsetled
Again almost no effect, there is a chance a player may get unhappy but its hardly likely

Shrinking stadium
Argh! This one is a curse, within a few years of the game every club in spain d2 and italy serie b is playing in front of 3000 people

[ilovesanmarino]

Continued...

As the game has no memory of the stadium, the shrinking is permanent, it would be lovely if it was undone when the club gets bailed out, but there's no chance of that, you need to save up to expand the normal way, only now of course you earn much less


Seeing as pretty much everybody seems to play by only signing players on frees anyway the whole financial side seems like it can be ignored anyway!


Personally at the end of each season i try to use the editor to transfer list every player at a bankrupt club and correct the stadium sizes, but there are so many clubs in spain and italy that are bankrupt i soon get bored and give up, and thats only the top two divisions each

[ilovesanmarino]

Oh, as for your original question, it all depends on the board and your reputation,

[faz44]

On my external HD, I have a game where I left the game running on holiday mode for 25 years. In that time, Stoke City got in financial trouble and weren't bailed out so the Britannia Stadium shrunk to just 3,500. For a laugh, I took over and the club were 80m in debt. I was running a profit of around 1m per year, signing whichever cheap players would sign for me, but drowned in debt due to interest payments. I managed to get promoted from Div 3 to the Premier Division, in which time all of my best players were sold from under me and the ground had shrunk to 2,600. Promotion to the Premier Division forced the stadium to be expanded to 10,000 but, once again, the council started shutting the stadium. I managed to sign one player for £14,000 in the entire time and lots of players wouldn't sign due to the debt. I even managed to win the Premier Division and get into the Champions League but no takeover. In the end, a bailout came but only when the club were £450m in the hole. Last time I played it, I was trying to rebuild the stadium.

[Dermotron]

Class. Love games like that. Had a save with Mordovia in Russia and they were 9.1m in debt but once they went over 10m they got bailed out. So I started over from the last save point and made a game of trying to get them profitable but without any bailout. If there was one I had to start game. After 4 restarts, if took 11 seasons to get back in the black. Most of the Russian clubs were in debt (before we sorted the wages) so trying to generate profit when all the clubs around you could spend around 50-200k max took a bit of effort. And pain. Selling your best players for almost nothing and trying to find something and anything to replace them was tough. Thoroughly enjoyable though.

[Redknapp69]

Fascinating stuff here guys - loving the tales!

[Whyme]

Going by these stories it's possible to turn a bankrupt club around then. The board have got tremendous faith in me considering I've got an unknown reputation in the game so I'm going to try to repay them by avoiding a bail out! And before the stadium shrinks hopefully.

This challenge is exciting tbh, the wage bill at Perugia is over 1 million pound a month so that will be the first thing to fix - even the clubs scouts and physios are on ridiculous wages lol. Any decent player I want to sign wants a massive wage, same goes for extending current players contracts. Not to mention half the players are unhappy with the clubs financial plight, I even just had a player hand in a transfer request because he felt that the clubs financial plight meant that he would have to move to fulfill his ambitions.

Also playing non wibwob so that'll add to the challenge, can't wait

[Whyme]

Just realised that the previous manager was obviously trying to sabotage the club. He didn't sell a single player in his tenure, but he let 8 players go on a Bosman. He also signed a heap of players on long contracts, including 6 goalkeepers and 4 of them are on over 4k a week!

Then again the board sanctioned his signings so maybe they're trying to sabotage the club too. Maybe that's why they hired me, in the hope that I'll ruin the club once and for all!

[Whyme]

AND also noticed the previous Perugia manger didn't even get sacked, he had to resign as he got hired by the Italian national team... Crazy shit happening in Italy!!

[merkezekrem]

How is the training grounds? Go local, go for the youth players from academy.

[faz44]

The craziest thing was the crowd. The min crowd I had at Stoke was something like 12,000 so the stadium was always full. I can;t remember what happened to the stadium once we got money and it's a 3.9.65 game so I can't play it on my laptop.

[Whyme]

How is the training grounds? Go local, go for the youth players from academy.

The training ground needs investment, so not much chance of regens coming through I woulda thought. First thing I did was send all my scouts looking for youth players, it's nearly August though so most of the regens may have already been snapped up.

The stadium capacity is 18,000 which is 10,000 down on the start of the game so it's a race against time to save the stadium...

[faz44]

When I've managed clubs in severe debt, I tried to run the club on what comes in the gate on a matchday. My budget would be to work out the average ticket price paid last season and then multiply it by the number of home games and the expected average attendance.

Then season tickets, TV money and player sales slowly erode the debt. The problem comes when the interest payments exceed this.

Edit: average matchday price would be gate receipts / number of home games / average home crowd.

[Kingsley]

Has your ingame board secretly been the real board at Rangers ?

[ilovesanmarino]

I managed to clear £1m of debt at a northern irish club with very little of the income from europe (one single game against a decent club, even if you lose 8-0 can get you more income than the rest of the season combined) it did get to nearly £3m first though


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[Whyme]

When I've managed clubs in severe debt, I tried to run the club on what comes in the gate on a matchday. My budget would be to work out the average ticket price paid last season and then multiply it by the number of home games and the expected average attendance.

Then season tickets, TV money and player sales slowly erode the debt. The problem comes when the interest payments exceed this.

Edit: average matchday price would be gate receipts / number of home games / average home crowd.

Problem is the wage bill at Perugia last season was £18,000,000 which completely dwarfed the total income!

I'm trying to sell players but because barely any clubs in Italy have any money they only become interested when I set a players value to £0. Also nearly all the players feel they've been treated unfairly when I transfer list them. They all complain about the clubs financial position, yet when I go to renew their contract they want about £30,000 per week, then they have the nerve to throw a tantrum when I put them on the market!

Fuckers, they're all going... except for Muslimovic, he's desperate to leave but he's gunna help drag us out of this mess like it or not

[Whyme]

What's even more ridiculous is that you can just keep on going, act like nothing has ever happened. Your board will eventually be replaced, your debt will be cleared and you will probably even get a decent transfer kitty.

While your status is "bankrupt", I don't think you can reject incoming transfer bids, though. Correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't been in charge of a bankrupt club for ages.

That's partly correct. Seems I can't reject or negotiate a bid if the bid is equal or above to the players auto value. I can't set a players value above the auto value either

[faz44]

Problem is the wage bill at Perugia last season was £18,000,000 which completely dwarfed the total income!

I'm trying to sell players but because barely any clubs in Italy have any money they only become interested when I set a players value to £0. Also nearly all the players feel they've been treated unfairly when I transfer list them. They all complain about the clubs financial position, yet when I go to renew their contract they want about £30,000 per week, then they have the nerve to throw a tantrum when I put them on the market!

Fuckers, they're all going... except for Muslimovic, he's desperate to leave but he's gunna help drag us out of this mess like it or not

Get them off the wage bill, batten down the hatches and ride out the storm. To be honest, I've started up a game with Portsmouth out of pure nostalgia.

[Whyme]

I take it Portsmouth are in financial trouble in one of the updates... just checked the ODB and their finances are fine.

I'm going overseas for a while so won't be getting Perugia out of the mire for a while yet

[faz44]

In the last two updates, they're 5m in the hole. However, with a tiny wage bill and 16,000 regular crowd, they seem to sit in an insecure state, despite me projecting a £250k loss for the season.

[ilovesanmarino]

Being from Portsmouth it's somewhat hilarious they are ok in odb and ok in the latest update, and the bit in the middle is all forgotten about


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[faz44]

I actually changed the debt to 149m in an old patch, being a masochist.