How to Increase Your Transfer Budget in Football Manager 2024

Football Manager 2024 is one of the most popular sports titles of all time – in no small part thanks to its in-depth realism and the ability for many to live out the ability to manage a football team in the virtual world.

The game allows you to tackle all aspects of management – and that includes the financial element of the sport. This means you must keep a firm eye on your club’s money – as you can run into significant problems if you fail to manage your money effectively. Sometimes this forces you to make tough decisions, in order to keep your club in a financially healthy state. This may force you to sell key players to raise the necessary funds.

If your club is in a good financial state though, you may have plenty of money in the coffers that could be of good use to your transfer budget, which you can therefore use to strengthen your squad. There are a number of ways to do this, and we have listed the best ways to do so below.

Selling Players

This is the obvious one, so we’ll get it out of the way quickly. A good way to quickly build up some funds in your transfer budget is to clear out some ‘deadwood’ from your squad. How much money you are likely to get for these players is dependent on the club you are managing and the quality of your team, but if you are on a tight budget, moving on some of those players you no longer need should enable you to bolster your squad in other areas, and will also come with the added benefit of opening up some space in your wage budget. If you are managing at a lower level, selling one of your better players may not be a bad move, as they could have inflated values for your league, and that sort of money may set you up for years to come, where you can improve not just your squad through your influx of money, but also your facilities, which will help you to develop your squad.

Budget Adjustment

This is a solution that you can use if you have some excess wage budget but not enough transfer budget to bring in your targets. You can move this slider to whichever allocation you’d prefer, whether you’d like more transfer budget or more wage budget. To do this, go to your finances section, and then press ‘make budget adjustment’, where you can make this change. Make sure that you’re happy with your change before you press confirm though, as your board will lock in your changes for a brief period once you’ve confirmed your changes, and you’ll be locked in to that allocation until your board accepts changes again. If you try to make a signing with a slightly insufficient transfer budget but plenty in reserve in your wage budget, the game will offer you the chance to shift your allocation automatically – so don’t worry if you are uncomfortable with making this change.

Sell Clauses

This method is only likely to earn you minor additions to your transfer budget – but that could be crucial to you if you are desperate for money or in a lower-league save. You can see this by going to your transfers tab, and then pressing on clauses at the top of that page. You’ll then see a list of clauses that either you or the club, have negotiated previously to your arrival. Those that you can sell are denoted by your currency in bold yellow. As you can see from this screenshot, Manchester City’s board has negotiated to sell their 20% profit clause for the sale of Gavin Bazunu to Southampton for £3.4m – a fee that doesn’t do much to add to the club’s riches but could be crucial money for a less financially secure club if you have a similar clause. Selling these clauses will add money to your budget immediately, so this is a very good way of making some quick money if you need it.

Board Requests

This method is very unlikely to work unless you are a few years into a job, and have had some success, but it’s a good method of getting some extra cash if you have done so. The reason for this is that your board will simply refuse to give you any extra money if you ask too soon – as you have not done enough to justify them giving you that extra financial help. If you have gotten far enough, and been successful enough to meet your board’s expectations, then well done, firstly, and secondly, you may ‘unlock’ this help from your board. It’s dependent on your financial state as to how much extra budget they will give you – but it will be plenty of help regardless. You just need to earn the trust of your bosses first. You can do the same with your wage budget too – but again, you’ll have to have earned the trust of your board first.

In-Game Editor

This method requires you to have the in-game editor installed – which you can install from Steam – although this will cost you an additional price of £6. Once you have this installed, you can make lots of different changes to your game, not just to your team but to other teams, competitions and players to edit your save to how you see fit. Using the in-game editor, you can give yourself as much money as you want without having to compromise yourself elsewhere or beg your board for money. Some might see this as cheating, but if you feel the need to give yourself a small financial boost, there is no easier way of doing so. Beware though, giving yourself too much money and spending it all may leave you in trouble with Financial Fair Play (FFP), so there may be some sporting penalties for your use of this tip. In order to access this, see the small pencil icon at the top of your screen, (once you have purchased the in-game editor) and then press ‘edit club details’. From there you should see the above screen, where you can press the finances tab to make the changes you’d like. You can even do this to other clubs, if you’d like to take some money away from your rivals.

Installments

Not necessarily a way of increasing your transfer budget, but instead a way of maintaining it is to make transfer signings using installments, rather than paying for a transfer entirely upfront. As you can see in this screenshot, the entire deal here for Savinho is worth £25m, but would only cost £15m in the current season, which would allow you to strengthen other areas in your squad if you have other business to do in the window. This money will come out of your club for the next seasons – and doing this too often can cause your club to rack up some debt – especially with larger transfer fees – but depending on the club you are managing, you can offset this expense with some domestic and continental success. In order to do this, go to a player’s profile that you are interested in signing, hover over the ‘transfer’ tab and press make an offer. Here you can try to sign the player, and you will find installments in the tab under ‘additional fees’. Be careful when doing this, however, as AI teams on the game can be wise to this and demand a far higher combined transfer fee than they would require if you paid for the deal up front, so be careful not to be scammed by the game.

Cheating

Now, we would never encourage you to cheat – but we also believe that you should be free to play the game however you would like to. Another way of quickly increasing your transfer budget is to add a new manager at a different in order to pay highly inflated fees for your players. The best way of doing this is to pick one of the richest clubs on the planet so that the club can afford to pay enormous fees for your players, and then buy one of your real club’s weaker players for a huge fee. This will allow you to move on a player you no longer need, and give you a huge boost to your transfer budget, as well as completely stripping one of your rivals of their entire budget. All you need to do is stick around with the other club until the deal is confirmed, and you can then retire as their manager as if nothing ever happened. You can then build your squad with a far higher transfer budget than you had before. It is cheating, we know, but if it’s how you would like to play then feel free to use this trick as many times as you would like. To add a new manager, go to the FM menu at the top of your page, and then scroll down to ‘add new manager’ and go from there.