When you join a new club you should review your current staff and check to see whether there are any better, cheaper alternatives available. Explained below are the various considerations you should make when signing staff, along with details of how to negotiate staff contracts.
The Staff Roles guides discussed what staff attributes and other qualities you should look for in each type of staff member. However, as well as these, you should consider the wages demanded by potential new staff along with any compensation fees payable, their age, experience and qualifications, and the board’s staff limits.
Staff Wages
Your club’s Boardroom Overview screen shows the total current spending on wages and the wage budget. The current spending only includes player wages, and so excludes wages paid to your staff, and likewise the wage budget is for player wages only. Therefore, the amount you spend on staff wages will not affect the amount you can spend on player wages.
However, the wage budget does affect the maximum wage that the board will allow you to offer new staff members. The bigger the budget, the higher the wages you will be able to offer during negotiations.
Staff with higher reputations are likely to demand higher wages, and therefore you may need to find staff with lower reputations so that you can meet their demands.
Compensation Fees
When signing a new staff member who is already employed by another club you may need to pay compensation to that club for the early termination of his contract. This fee, if applicable, can be seen at the bottom of the Contract Offer screen. Therefore, you can choose to end negotiations if you want to avoid the fee.
Any compensation will be paid out of the transfer budget, and so should be avoided if a similar quality staff member can be signed without a compensation fee or if the fee will use up a large part of the budget. If the fee is greater than the budget at the point when the contract is agreed then the signing will be cancelled.
Age, Experience and Qualifications
When signing new staff you should also take into account their age and experience. At a high reputation club you will need a backroom team made up mainly of older, more experienced staff with higher reputations. At lower reputation clubs such staff will be unobtainable and you will have to settle for lower reputation personnel. Therefore, it can be useful to employ younger staff members as their attributes and reputation will improve with age and experience.
Even at higher reputation clubs however, it can be useful to employ some younger, developing staff members on lower wages as they can be used to support your higher quality staff, can help reduce your spending and will hopefully improve and develop good relationships with you and your players over time.
If you are considering signing a foreign member of staff then you should take into account whether he has any previous experience working in your club’s nation by checking his History screen, and also whether he can speak the language by checking the Information section of his Overview screen. If not, then a good Adaptability attribute would be beneficial.
You should also check a potential new staff member’s familiarity in the staff role you want him to fill, as shown in the Staff Roles panel on his profile. He may not be as willing to sign in a role that he is not very familiar with, although his familiarity will improve over time as he gains experience in the role.
When looking to sign new coaches you should consider an individual’s coaching qualifications, as shown on his profile and detailed in the Staff Attributes guide. Since coaching courses can improve staff attributes it can be better to sign a coach with lower qualifications, who therefore has more potential to improve, than a similar coach with higher qualifications. However, you will need to convince the board that sending a particular coach on a course is worthwhile, or otherwise wait until the coach himself decides to go on a course.
For potential new scouts you should consider their scouting knowledge, which is discussed in more detail in the Scouting Knowledge guide. This can also be worth considering for potential staff in other roles as the knowledge of all your staff will contribute to the overall knowledge of your scouting network.
Board Staff Limits
The Staff panel on your club’s Boardroom Overview screen shows the current number of staff allowed in each role category. The advised column shows the maximum number of staff that the board will allow you to sign in each category. These limits will be higher the more secure your club’s financial status is and the greater your club’s reputation is.
The role categories are as follows:
- Director of Football
- Head of Youth Development
- Reserves Manager
- Youth Manager
- Assistant Manager
- Reserves Assistant Manager
- Youth Assistant Manager
- Other Club Staff – including coach, fitness coach, goalkeeping coach and physio.
- Other Reserves Staff – including reserves coach, reserves fitness coach, reserves goalkeeping coach and reserves physio.
- Other Youth Staff – including youth coach, youth fitness coach, youth goalkeeping coach and youth physio.
- Scout
You should generally aim to employ as many coaches, scouts and physios as the board will allow by selecting the best personnel possible subject to your financial restrictions.
However, at some clubs, particularly those in low reputation nations and league divisions, you will need to be careful when signing staff. The limits set by the board may be too high and could result in your club suffering significant losses if you maximise staff numbers. You should therefore carefully assess your club’s financial situation and keep a close eye on your finances to ensure that you have enough income to support your staff wages and other expenditure.
Employing more coaches will lighten their workload and so improve the effectiveness of training, as explained in the Assigning Coaches guide.
Employing more scouts will give your scouting network greater knowledge and allow you to scout more geographical areas and competitions at the same time, which in turn will help your scouting network’s knowledge to grow more quickly as new nations are scouted.
In addition, the more physios you employ the more effectively they will be able to reduce the likelihood of injuries occurring, reduce injury times and reduce rehabilitation times.
If the number of your current employed staff in a certain role category is higher than the limit shown, you will not be able to sign a new staff member in that role category without first reducing staff numbers to below the limit, meaning that you will end up with fewer staff in that category. In this situation it can therefore be beneficial to retain poorer staff, for example to lighten your coaches’ workload or to build up scouting knowledge. Generally at a new club however, you will want to replace existing staff with your own higher quality staff.