Partly because of the squad rules, and also due to the current financial climate that’s affecting most of the Western world and football too, many clubs spent their transfer budgets for the season in the first window, or didn’t have any to start off with!
If you talk to anyone inside the football world, they’ll tell you how tight the money is at the moment, with Premier league clubs who would normally have £15m to spend in a window having £4m to spend including wages and associated fees.
And partly because of this, we’ve seen a relatively new phenomena in the Premier League this season as mentioned above, which is the “loan to buy” deal. These have been regularly part of football for years on the continent, but have made up a tiny percentage of the deals in England over the last decade until this summer. Around 20 per cent of transfers in to the Premier league this year are season long loans, with options to buy.
The transfer system in Football Manager 2011 reflects this current state of the world. It means that in the first season, it’s pretty hard to sell players, as clubs don’t have much money, and their squads are full, so you’ll see even more loan to buy deals than normal in this first season.
However, because of the better financial management of clubs in FM compared to real life (clubs have no option but to pay tax bills in FM!), it does mean that the transfer market becomes more vibrant in the future – and hopefully shows that the new “financial fair play” rules that are coming in will work out well for football in the future.
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http://www.mirrorfootball.co.uk/opinion/blogs/football-manager-2010/Exclusive-Football-Manager-2011-blog-with-Miles-Jacobson-day-15-Manchester-United-s-Wayne-Rooney-25-man-squads-and-new-transfer-features-explained-article603933.html