How to Train for Profit - Freekick Economy

lac29 talking to SolidSniper

1) Should I have 11 first team senior players and have every other player at the club just there to train-for-profit and money? Should I rotate players to give them some game time and experience? Does simply being on a team for a long time (with or without playing games) give me a financial advantage when I sell a player?

Answer: You can train your players individually, and it's your choice whether you want to set up a system of buying and selling players to make money. If players are on your team, yes, they train daily if they have played a match or not. If you train well, the players will become worth more, but meanwhile you are paying their wage and a training fee. The best time to sell them is during day or evening for European time.

2) Train-for-profit seems like age doesn't matter as long as they aren't at the point where skills drop rapidly. Does a 17 y.o. train as fast as a 25 y.o.? Also is 27 the age where skill drops?

Answer: A youngster (U21) trains at 3/4 speed of a senior (older than 21). He also increases his potentials by about 12 points per player year. When a player turns 21, he will not have any more potential raises. 27 is the age when skills start to drop, but certain skills start dropping at different age. CO starts dropping at 27 for instance, but GP only at 30, etc. Training-for-profit requires different ways of management if you are dealing with a 16 year old than if you are dealing with a 25 year old.

3) I haven't had much luck buying players from the transfer market. What advice can you give to me in terms of what type of players to buy with my 20,000 budget for train-for-profit players? Do I aim for players in their 30 weak level range to train/raise them to 40 decent level range? Should I go for older or younger players?

Answer: I wouldn't advise you to try to buy players to train-for-profit. As mentioned before, the currents/potentials system makes it very hard for newer managers to estimate the value of players. My advice would be to define the weak points of your team and then buy players to cover those areas up, preferably with cheap, old, experienced players. Then you can start thinking about profit and future plans.

Butlee talking

As a general guide, I suppose 15 yrs, 21yrs and 24-26 yrs are the best ages to sell. With 15 years olds, people pay for the potential abilities of the player, at 21 yrs, managers will pick him up as a useful senior player (especially if the purchasing team is from a weaker division), and 24-26 year olds means a manager will pay top dollar for a senior starter, who they can use for 2-5 seasons, and they still have a couple of seasons before their skills drop.

I'm not the best person on the transfer list, but here is what I would do with 20,000:

Two types of players:

Type 1: 15 year olds with a 2-3 of potential skills at good or decent. Try and find a combination of PA/BC and CO, or SC/OP/BC or CO/DP/TA where they have good potential in all skills, or 45+ potential in all three. Also, try to avoid buying players with below 20 poor current skills in any position.

In a couple of seasons you'll have the option to sell guys who are dec/dec/dec at age 19 for some cash, or you can keep them until they are 21 and they'd be good/good/dec or something, and some teams might pick them up because they have a few complimentary skills. The most important thing is to pick out the right combination of skills with the suggestions above.

Type 2: 21 year olds with 1-2 potentials of excellent and some of the others decent. Current skills should be around decent on the excellent-skilled potentials and 30+ on the decent potential skills. You can find these especially at the start of a new season or the end of a season when teams sell off players who are no longer eligible youth players. With players like this, you can get the 1 skill up to excellent and have 2-4 skills supporting that decent skill. At aged 23-25, that is not a bad player.

Try avoid spending over 1,000 for a player. You can snap up some guys for $1 if you look hard. It's really tricky to find bargains and it's hard to win bids in low auctions. But it does get easier to find the right players. Also, I think it's more profitable to have the right players (and having less selection of players) then it is to snap up 30 or 40 $1 players who don't amount to much and constantly lose their skills because of their age.

Ollea talking

Buying old, cheap players is an excellent way to get fast results and you won't lose much in the long run either if you buy them cheap. For good long term results, I would recommend creating a decent team of old experienced cheap players (don't spent more than a few thousands per player maximum) first so you can learn about the game and the match engine. When you get that knowledge, you should begin spending more to get good players for the future. If you spend money too ambitiously from the start, without getting the player material to experiment in tactics and formations, you will probably not get very good transfer market bargains.