Inflation Of The Youth Wages

As we all know, inflation has struck our merry little Miller Game World. For those of you with no basic grasp of economics, inflation is a rise in the general level of prices of goods and services in an economy over a period of time.

When the general price level rises, each unit of the functional currency buys fewer goods and services; consequently, inflation is a decline in the real value of money—a loss of purchasing power in the internal medium of exchange which is also the monetary unit of account in an economy.

Translated into FM Live terms, players are becoming more expensive, in both wages and transfer sums. You have to pay more money in wage auctions and more money in transfer auctions to acquire decent players, which means less transfers are taking place.

In a post on the Developer Blog, Rob Cooper stated the inflation levels for every Game World. Miller and Coppell are on an average of 39.78%, which isn't that bad considering the fact that we've started out with 1.2 and the stadiums, which brings extra costs from the very start.

Anyway, I'm trying to look at the cause of this inflation. I think it's generally caused by people who don't know how the transfer market functions or people who are desperate to have a certain player (generally a top real-life player, someone who plays for their real-life club or a highly rated youth). They bid excessive amounts to persuade the player to transfer or the contracting club to sell.

Naturally, this causes some inbalances, as some of the wages have gone insane. The senior wages have pretty much stabilised, but the youth wages are a disaster-area. Every four star or more Potential Ability newgen that has appeared over the last month, is now earning at least 10k a day, if not more.

People fail to realise how much money this is costing them in the long run. 10k a day means 70k a week, 280k a season... For a 15 or 16 year old player, whose future is highly uncertain, as you need to nurture and develop this youngster. He won't be ready for regular first team football before he hits the age 20, so you're paying 1,12 to 1,4 million for this youth.

And let's not forget we're still not sure if the youngster can actually live up the high expectations. You're taking a huge, huge gamble when you pay wages like that to such young players, which is, in my eyes anyway, one of the main reasons for the current inflation.

I refuse to shell out these kind of excessive wages for every player, my top youths earn around 8k a day, but he's already playing regular first team football and he's developing quite nicely, with a Market Value of around 850k at the moment.

The one exception in my team is a Brazilian newgen, but his stats are so good that I don't consider him a youth player anymore, even though he is only 18 years old. He has proven that too, by getting 6.9 averages in the senior games he has played so far, in which case 14k isn't an excessive amount to pay.

Is there any way to curb this inflation of the youth wages? Can we stop this madness? Unfortunately, I don't see any way how to achieve this goal. I have actually thought this through (for a change...) and this is what I came up with.

Wage caps initially sounded like a good idea. Restrict the maximum bids. But these salary caps would be unfair, as it would be a matter who gets the maximum bid in first. Even with a more random distribution of youths time-wise, this would not work.

SI tried to hide the number of bids in the 3337 build of the Beta, but this didn't really help as people just bid high anyway to ensure they get the player. In a way, this measure was even restricting some teams. If you don't have a lot of cash, it's useful to be able to see how many bidders there are so as to decide where to spend your pennies, so in that sense it's not very friendly to weaker/poorer teams.

I considered removing all money from youth competitions, but I quickly realised most teams are not in the youth business for the prize money, since this is generally very very low and hardly worth the effort.

Most teams seem to be in it for the development of players and the chance to sell on their talents for huge fees. I have to admit that this is a lucrative business, as I have recently sold two youths for a combined value of 1,4 million quid. Since their combined wages were a mere 7k, they are cheaper than any of the newer newgens, which probably drove the price up.

Many other managers fail to realise this and they think these players only went for such excessive fees because of their superb Potential Ability. They therefore assume that signing top PA youngsters will guarantee them a lot of money in the future, when in reality it's the combination of superb PA, decent stats, chance of development and normal/fair wages that makes transfer sums sky-rocket at times.