How To Loan Players Out For Profit

A Football Manager Secret

How To Loan Players Out For Profit

I’m not sure if this counts as “cheating” or not.

Back when I started getting serious about Football Manager a few years ago, I wondered if there wasn’t a way to earn extra money by sticking a bunch of players out on loan. I had heard rumors from YouTube videos to that effect, and thought I’d look into it.

After some searching, I came across a Reddit thread that offered some helpful advice. You can find the thread here, or just read the screenshot below (in case the original poster deletes it):

The math here is pretty simple when you think about it.

This has to do with a theory about how Football Manager’s AI assigns value to players. In older (pre-FM22) versions of the game, players were generally assigned a specific value. These days the value comes as a range.

If you understand how the AI looks at player value, you can offer players out on loan for around the amount that the AI is willing to spend. It doesn’t work for every single case, but it works more often than not on aggregate. It also serves as a nice counter to all of the 0% wage / $0 offers you’ll get if you just offer the player out for loan blindly.

In my experience, the math works just as well today as it did then.

It’s also pretty simple.

Take the player’s value, or the lowest figure in his value range for more modern games. Divide that number by 12.

Next, take that number and divide it by 4. This will give you his value per month.

Take a look next at the player’s salary. If you are civilized like me, you look at the salary per week, not per year. Take that number and multiply it by 4 to get the wage per month (there are 4 weeks in a month on average).

If the player’s monthly salary is lower than the value per month you just calculated, you can loan the player out for his full wages. The amount that is left over can then become the amount you charge per month for the loan.

If the player’s salary is larger than the value per month, just ask for the percentage of his wage that is closest to that value per month.

Once you see it in action, you’ll realize how easy this is.

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Example

Let’s look at an example.

The post above cites a player worth $6 million (sorry about the currency — you get the idea) and making $25,000 per week.

• 6 million divided by 12 is 500,000.

• 500,000 divided by 4 is 125,000.

• Now, take the 25,000 per week and multiply it by 4. You get 100,000.

• 125,000 is larger than 100,000. You can loan this player out for 100% of his wages.

• 125,000-100,000=25,000. You can also charge a 25,000 fee per month, both for playing and non-playing.

That shows us what happens when you’ve got a player who is making less than his value. Let’s see what happens if your player is making more than his value.

Say that his value is $3 million, and he is making $25,000 per week.

• 3 million divided by 12 is 250,000.

• 250,000 divided by 4 is 62,500.

• His 25,000 per week salary times 4 is 100,000.

• 62,500 is smaller than 100,000. In fact, it is 62.5% of 100,000.

Football Manager only allows you to ask for wages in percentile multiples of 10. I recommend always chosing one lower than the number you get, unless, of course, the number is exactly 60% or whatever.

In this case, round down to 60% and ask for that. There is no additional monthly fee.

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More Explanations

If you don’t like that writeup, you can always check out my Reddit post on the subject:

You’ll notice that I take a shortcut to make the math easier. Instead of dividing by 12, dividing again by 4, and then multiplying the wage by 4, I convert directly to value per week.

For the $6,000,000 valued player making $25,000 per week, it works out like this:

• 6,000,000 divided by 192 gets you 31,250.

• 31,250 is larger than 25,000.

• The difference is 6,250.

• 6,250 times 4 is 25,000.

• Therefore, the player can be loaned out for 100% of his wages, plus an additional 25,000 per month.

If you do this a bunch of times (200 or so), you’ll get really good at it. In fact, you’ll start to be able to eyeball it without doing the math.

If you want more information, I also created a YouTube video a few months ago on the subject:

Hope this helps!