PowerPlay Magazine

There are many struggles in life. While we each have our own, one of my main struggles in PPM is keeping a roster size down. This is especially true in hockey and soccer where I have well-established teams and rely on a larger roster for depth to compete in many competitions while not burning out my top lineup. However, I came to realize that having a larger roster size is incredibly expensive and keeping a 15 6/6 turned 16 5/6 until they are 19 5/6 is rarely every economically viable.

I have had many discussions with my closest soccer rival, alexfrantz, on this very subject and, while I was in agreement with his arguments, I never really executed them fully. In hockey this excess player fee occurs when you are in excess of 40 players, in soccer this is 30 players. In handball and basketball it gets further complicated as carrying more players will require more staff which is even more costly but I won’t touch on that in this article.

So, today as I man my email to answer questions in advance of my students’ midterm tomorrow I thought “what the heck, let’s quantize this and publish a PPM Mag article!” Well, that was that and here we are. I’ve long debated publishing this article because, you see, smart management is the best way to catch up to teams ahead of you and gain on teams chasing you. By publishing this I will be helping some of my closest competitors but, it is my hope, that as a whole it will make PPM more competitive and thus more fun across all leagues and league levels.

-----

Let’s focus on hockey. In hockey you are allowed 40 players. If you carry more than that you pay 5% of the total salary of all players per extra player. Hence, 41 players you pay 5% of the total salary as a fee and 42 players you pay 10% of their total salary as a fee. The fee is small if you’re close to 40 players but once you start getting into the mid-40s and above it quickly becomes rather expensive, especially if you have a good team with expensive players. Here are the specs on my current roster:

Daily player salary expenses: $1.89M
Number of players: 48
Daily fee: $755k

That doesn’t seem all too bad. $755k/day isn’t that much when I make 40M/week from sponsors. However, that $755k per day works out to $85M/season or 12.5% of my sponsor income. If one were to maintain this level for 4 seasons that is $338M and easily buys an elite player or even a complete I.1-ready line of 5 players.

Now, let’s say I have a good draft and get four 4* players and want to keep them all and develop them and sell them if their C/L drops. Adding those 4 players would cost me nearly 400k/day more translating to 42M/season or 170M if I wanted to develop and sell at age 18. At that point it becomes a question of “will these players bring in 42.5M each in 4 years?” Often the answer is no. (I might add by adding these 4 prospects, in four seasons my total fees paid will be in excess of $0.5B (it only goes up as players salaries go up!).

Now consider my recent attempts to sell Dobrica Indic to make room for a complete youth movement. He is a great player, given his ~250 Exp, and comes with a modest price tag of ~68k/day. I spent 45M to get him and was hoping to get that much out of him. He didn’t sell first try, so, should I lower the price? Well, selling him now will save me $7.6M in salary from him alone over the course of the season. Additionally, that drop from 48 players to 47 and the reduction of his salary from the total decreases my excess player fee by $13.2M/season. Thus, from moving him *now* and not waiting it’ll save me over $20M between today and the start of the next hockey season.

I wanted to further illustrate the point with at least one graphic. Consider my current roster. Then continually add prospects making 1k/day. The plot below quickly shows the expenses spiraling out of control. I have normalized the excessive player fee cost to a percentage of my general and media sponsor contributions (so you can see what percentage of yearly or weekly money is consumed). Keep in mind the effect seen here is a result of essentially the excess player fee entirely. I have only added 24k to the daily salary total by going from 48 to 72 players with 24 new prospects arriving, but my yearly fee increased from 85M/season to 342M/season or from roughly half to nearly double my sponsor value.

In summary, be very mindful of carrying players in excess of the roster limit. Obviously there are reasons to do this (depth to help increase performance in multiple competitions) and you can still turn a profit on players you are carrying with solely the intention to sell even if you’re over the roster cap. The point is, be mindful of how much it is actually costing you and be realistic whether or not the player is going to make you any money X years from now when you plan on selling. There are many teams carrying a large roster waiting for that payday when they bring in many millions in player sales. If this is a strategy you wish to employ, I urge caution and to consider the day-to-day ramifications and not simply the potential pot of gold at the end of the line.

That's all for now. Hope you found this informative and can consider it as a strategy to sneak up on your opponents in terms of team development.
-Scott 

Addition: Consider the comments from a hockey rival of mine who states carrying 70 players is worth it because he'll sell 30 players for 30M a piece. Let's assume that is true, he'll get 30M/each on average. Lets also assume his player salaries are equal to mine (they'll in fact be higher since he has more players and better players). At 70 players a conservative estimate for his fee is 3M/day (150% of 2M/day). Expand that out over a full season and you have 336M per season. Assuming developing for an average of 3 seasons *and* no players get a raise in salary (again, assuming my team's salary despite the fact their team likely is paying 50% more at least in player salaries), you're looking at roughly $1B in fees. Now, selling 30 players will net you 95% of 30M for the first 10 players and less 2% per player after that. You're not going to get 900M for 30 sales at 30M due to transfer fees. If you do the math, selling 30 players for 30M will net you 729M, still a cool 250M shy of what you'd have in the bank if you didn't carry those players at all. Again, don't focus on the big payday! Run the numbers. If it costs you more to keep them than you project you'll make via sales, sell them now and cut your losses!