There is so much talent in world football, and the same is reflected in football management simulation games such as FM.
As a manager in FM23, you will only be able to sign a very tiny fraction of the talent available to you, no matter how much you want the best player in every position.
This is mostly because every team has a limit on how much you can spend in the transfer market, and you have to stay within these limits every season. This applies even to the clubs with the biggest transfer budgets in FM23.
In this guide, I’ll discuss how to increase your transfer budget in FM23, with a few extra tips for maximizing what the board makes available to you for spending on new players.
Make Budget Adjustment
Transfer budgets and wage budgets go hand-in-hand in Football Manager, so you can often decrease the budget for one to make room for increments in the other.
This means that you can increase your FM23 transfer budget by reducing your wage allocation, and vice versa.
One important thing to note is the need to make sure that your wage budget is higher than what the club is currently spending on wages. If not, it’s easy to go into the red when you make a new signing.
Make A Board Request
Making a board request for an increase in the transfer budget in FM23 could go either way. If the club owners are the “sugar daddy” type, you’re more likely to have your request granted. However, if they’re not rich, or if they’re the frugal type, your request will be rejected more times than otherwise.
If your request for an increase in the transfer budget is rejected, you can still request an increase in the payroll budget. If that request is granted, wait for a bit and then reallocate that extra wage budget to transfers.
If the request for a payroll budget increase is also rejected, there is one last thing you can do.
First, you need to make sure that you’ve truly run out of money in the bank for transfers. Then, make a bid for a player, offer him a contract, and wait for the confirmation email in your inbox.
If the transfer is considered to be potentially important for the club, you’ll get a chance to convince the board to sign the player for you despite the lack of transfer funds.
In my case, I’d spent the entire transfer budget, and my wage budget was in the red. But I still wanted Sergei Milinkovic Savic for my Liverpool team.
When the time came to confirm his signing and there was no money to do so, I was given the option to convince the board to make the signing for me, and they agreed.
This method doesn’t always work out positively, but it’s nice when it does.
Sell Players
This is the most obvious method of increasing your transfer budget in FM23. I had James Milner sitting on £120k per week in Liverpool and didn’t think twice before offering him to clubs to free up some money in the wage budget.
When you sell players, the money earned from the transfer is added to your budget so you can reinvest. There are a couple of things to note, though.
One, make sure that you fully understand the terms of the transfer before you accept the bid. If the buying club makes a bid that involves a lot of clauses and/or installment payments, be prepared to only get a fraction of the full transfer fee immediately.
You can renegotiate these types of offers if you want the full money up front, as that would be the only way to get the lump sum added to your transfer budget immediately.
Secondly, some club boards do not remit the full 100% transfer fee received to you on a deal-by-deal basis. Usually, you would be notified when the board cuts the percentage of transfer revenue available for reinvesting, but it’s easy to miss that email.
However, if it does happen, you can speak to the board about it and try to convince them to give you 100% of all transfer fees. If you’re lucky, they’ll give in.
How to Maximize Your Transfer Budget
These tips are not for increasing your transfer budget directly. They simply offer ideas for you to make the most of what you’re working with.
Installment Payments
I mentioned earlier how some clubs might make offers for your players that involve installment payments. It’s a trick that you can also adopt when trying to sign a player to give you more leverage with smaller budgets.
For instance, if your scouts submit a player report that pegs the player’s transfer value at £15m, you can spread payments instead of paying the bulk sum at once. You can make an offer of £5m up front, and the remaining £10m in three installment payments over the course of 12 months.
This way, the entire £15m is not immediately taken out of your transfer budget. However, note that the extra fees will come out of subsequent transfer budgets over the course of the period of time that your offer stipulated.
Transfer Clauses
Similar to installment payments, using clauses is a great way to sweeten the deal if you can’t afford to pay the full fee for a player up front.
Using the same example of a player worth £15m, you can offer a fraction of that fee upfront, and then add clauses such as a sell-on clause, percentage profit from the next sale of that player, payment after league appearances, etc.
These clauses help to mitigate the effect of the lower upfront payment, giving you a better chance of having your offer accepted by the selling club.
Bargain Signings and Bosman Transfers
It’s very tempting to splash the bulk of your transfer budget on a single high-profile signing, but frugality is key when you’re working with a limited transfer budget in FM23.
More often than not, you’re better off putting your scouts to good use and looking for cheap, bargain signings. But I assure you that some of the best cheap signings in FM23 offer a lot more quality than their transfer values suggest.
Bosman transfers are players that have decided to run down their contracts and can be picked up on free transfers at the end of those contracts.
There are a good number of great potential Bosman transfers in FM23 right from the start of a new game, so keep an eye out for those too.
Final Words
While you’re putting these tips to use, make sure that you don’t stretch the club’s finances too thin, especially when it comes to using transfer clauses and installment payments.
Those tricks in particular offer great value in the short term, but they can also be fatal for the long-term financial future of the club if you overdo it.
If you’re thinking long-term, then it makes more sense to adopt a more sensible approach to managing your club’s finances in a way that you can still get good players without causing a heavy drag on its financial future.
You’ll find tips that can help you achieve this among these FM23 beginner tips, so be sure to check that out next.
Anyone with experience playing Football Manager knows that poor financial management is playing with fire and begging to get sacked by the board. Be smart and best of luck!