Asunto: High Bids on UFA1 (29 Year Old Free Agents)

I've noticed that someone has been placing really really high bids on my players that become UFA1s (29 year old free agents). For example, the highest offer came in at $77,777,777 for Mitch Grayson who is a LW with an overall rating of only 2583 and CL of only 1.

Since there is no compensation on UFA1s, your left scrambling to try to match the offer.

I am suspecting that it is someone within my own division (Canada 1.1), and I have my suspicion about which manager it is. Has anyone else noticed irregularly high offers on their UFA1s, and is there anything that can be done to stop this?

Niven
Surrey Lions

Yup. Welcome to our club. Pay your stalker back, if you want. But it only builds paranoia...

All the same, I don't think anyone in our community is that dumb to offer that for Grayson. I have noticed wealthy Russian interests in similar situations. I bet it's Russian money...

But I agree with you. Someone is stalking in our division.

Yes, I agree someone is targeting our division as well. No idea who, but I've been getting large bids on players over the last while too.

Hey guys thanks for looking into it. I didn't match the offer on Grayson, and was curious to see who it might be. I thought for sure it was someone in our division, but it turns out that it was a team from Czech Republic 2.4 (JAMAICA SHOOTERS). This offer and all the offers I've had over the past 2 years on my UFA1s have been really puzzling and really frustrating.

Grayson was not the only UFA1, as Patrick Peluso and Alden Christie were on the market as UFA1s, all within 5 days. I had to match those 2 offers, but it meant I some really tough decisions to sort through and had to sell my best player plus 2 other key players.

Oh well the damage has been done. I don't think my team will be in playoff contention in the near future. Too many players I've had to sell, and I still have facility and stadium upgrades that sat in the lurch for the past 10 seasons while I tried to build back up to a playoff caliber team. Seems like the last 12-15 season were a waste.

What i have noticed is that, once the facilities are built, we still need to build sufficient reserves before we can realisticaly expect to field a long term competitive team. I have been focusing on that for a few seasons now and had eventually built up a reserve of 1.1 billion. That was the 100th richest team in the game. The ammount of money overflow is staggering in this game. So 77M for a 29 year old player at almost 2600 is high, but not that much.

26 year olds require insane overpayments to win because the other player only needs to pay a fraction of the offer (66%?). 29 years old are easier because the team needs to pay the whole thing. You get a nice 3 seasons contract out of it, which is much better than you would get with those 32+ players. It is nearly useless to bid on 32+ UFAs unless you have a ton of treasury to keep paying for the player year after year.

I understand that the UFA system is frustrating, but at the same time it is the only system in the game that actually reduces the amount of money that exists in the game. Forcing players to pay up on their players is the only way to change the balance of power.

That being said, when i go to that market, i usually try to stay away from canadian teams, because we already are a small market and shouldnt make ourselves weaker when the sharks are already circling us. There are plenty of other good options anyway on the market.

Thanks SamuelCarrier, I agree with your sentiments. I guess you are right in saying that forcing players to pay up on their players is the only way to change the balance of power. It was just really frustrating for me, as I waited a long time in developing my players only to see my roster get decimated just when I was on the cusp of getting competitive again.

In looking back to the last 10-15 seasons, my decision to rebuild my roster was premature as I needed to spend another 600 million or so to build up facilities to adequately maintain a solid team. My team is at a crossroads right now - do I continue to compete, or break it up and spend the proceeds on facilities? In the here and now, I want to compete, but I'm probably better served to complete those construction projects. Can't afford to keep dishing out money on mediocre players that become free agents at the expense of construction. Time to suck again.

That's definitely something to consider. Yardware Snakes almost left the game a while back because her team she had spent a lot of time building up got decimated by UFAs (it wasn't only that, but still). It was after that that I decided I needed to start accumulating wealth before trying to be competitive again.

I am not even that competitive now, but keeping my good young players through their 26 and/or 29 yo contracts still cost me around 300M in the last 2-3 seasons. At this point I hover around 850M which is good enough for now, but not enough that I can spend too much of it on the market, because the next round of UFAs will hit again and I need to keep flexibility.

Yardware snakes is gone now unfortunately.

In handball, I saved up over a billion while my players were all under 26. Then within a few seasons it was all gone to free agent fees. I had a 300 mil offer on my goalie when he hit 26.

850M? Oh.

I must have missed Melissa leaving completely. I'm sorry about that. She was a huge contributor to NTs and a very pleasant person. Oh well. It is the state of the game now.

And about money, yeah it can go quickly. For the very best young players, offers in the 200 or 300M range have to be expected because of how much money is in the game now.

For comparaison's sake, I sit at 862M at the moment. That makes me the 5th richest team in Canada hockey, yet my team is at #152 worldwide. When i was at 1.1B, I was only 50 spots higher. Try to imagine how much money the top 10 has. I have no idea, but it had to be an absurd number.