The limitation of 22 players per team makes it difficult to raise the new players that come from the youth academy. (In my case i've been using 20% of my income to youth academy, and actually have 8 young players inside there.).
The solution of this could be cessions or branch teams. (i don't know if these are the correct english terms...)
Cessions:
Lending players to other teams so that they'll get experience and can come back to their original team when they have a higher skill.
Cession structure:
* Any player could be "ceded" (uhm that's most certainly not the english term) to any other team.
* The original team of the player has to pay his wage, and re-negotiate his contract before it expires as usual.
* The destination team could ask for money in concept of "formation expenses", if player skill is lower than the avg. skill of team players in that position (amount proportional (exponentially?) to difference).
* Cession clauses like "player must play at least X matches each season" could cost an extra amount of money (proportional to X) to be paid to destination team.
* Destination team could reject the cession if they have too many players in the position of the player or if they don't need the extra formation income.
* All cession expenses (if any) should be paid weekly.
* Cessions and returning of players can only occur before the transfer deadline.
Branch teams:
Some teams have branch teams for the young players to get experience (example: Barcelona and Barcelona B). In the game it could be made possible to buy another team and call it a "branch".
Then cessions of players could be made to them but no extra payments for formation or clauses should be paid to them. And no team management is needed.
Actually branch teams can be "simulated" by adding a new user to the game, but then transfers take 1 week to complete and you have to manage the whole branch team.
Oh, and usually a team and his branch team can't compete in the same league division at the same time (to avoid match rigging), this limitation isn't actually implemented in the game.
Lastly i think the actual money balance makes the game too easy. In mid-season 8 i have 42 millions, a stadium with 105k capacity, and a 1.2 millions/week sponsor. Last bi-weekly balance shows a gain of 2.9 millions, and worst of all is there's nowhere i can waste all that money
My suggestions to fix this:
- Stadium capacity increases should cost more than it does for big stadiums.
- Player wages and values for the best players should be increased too. My best player only has a wage 13 times higher than the cheapest young player out of academy, and his value is only 10 times higher. That's quite unrealistic.
- Cessions would create additional costs.
Watcha think?