Player Options, how do players decide?

[Timofmars]

I've never really offered player options to players because I can't be sure they will take the option, and I don't want to be stuck losing the player without getting anything in return by trading him early.

What determines whether they will take the option or not?

Will they take the option as long as their morale isn't low? I could at least predict that and work to keep them happy in that case.

Or will they do some kind of assessment of what they should be worth in free agency? In that case, I could structure the contract to give them more money when they have the option, assuming I really want to keep them and thing the overall value of the contract is good.

What has been your experiences with player options?

[NoOne]

persnality related.. desire for winner etc.. sometimes they don't like or like the coach.

mostly it's about money.. if they are underpaid they most likely will decline and go to FA. loyalty and desire for winner may offset this to some extent... but if the gap in money is large i doubt it, because it's not something you see in RL very often and never for a difference of any large sum of money. no one is leaving ~10m/year on the table.. maybe as low as 5m too? that demarcation would be set by personality in game to vary per player.

you can easily avoid them, and i'd strongly recommend avoiding player options even if it costs a little more per year.. rarely does it amount to much. i don't even use team options. only a select few finish out a contract or extension with me, anyway.. rest are destined to be traded near endof prime and before any aging concerns.

e.g. if you can normally slice ~2m off an offer of that scale, you may want to try ~1.5m off instead and no option year.

avoiding the uncertainty alone is worth it, imo.

[Timofmars]

What I'm going to try now is that when I have extra money in the budget for the year, I will front-load contracts so I pay much more the 1st year (about 2.7x the average annual salary is about the maximum allowed), then the minimum for the 2nd and 3rd year (about 0.3x of the average annual salary is the minimum allowed).

And for additional years after that, I can put the maximum for the final year of the contract, in order to reduce the cost in the preceding years. And since the salary is so high for the final year, I can make a it a player option, even though the player would surely accept it, so it's like a normal non-optional year. But the player may like having the option and be willing to offer a discount on the contract because of it.

So paying the high salary the 1st year is a good deal since I don't need the extra budget room anyway. Then having low salaries each year followed by a high final year salary allows me to extract as much value from the player as possible (high performance for low cost). His value in terms performance per the salary starts to decrease the closer you get to the final year (if you look at his remaining years together as an average annual cost) so that when I do trade him, the other teams are getting less value per the cost. So instead of saying "I should get rid of this guy in case his ratings drop and I'm stuck holding the bag without getting a valuable trade in return," I can say, "I should get rid of this guy because even his high current ratings barely warrant his remaining salary because I already gained most of the low-salary benefits."

Whereas with a more flat salary structure, the player may be a good value over the whole contract, up until his ratings decline semi-randomly. So trading him before his decline is still a pretty good value for the team that is getting him. That's not ideal. Like some 70/80 player could have annual salary of 15m over 4 years (60m total). But with my method, he could be earning 4.5m the 1st and 2nd year, 10.5 in the 3rd year, with a 40.5m final year, so in the 2nd-to-last year, his average remaining salary is 25.5m, or in the 3rd-to-last year, it's 18.5m. You get the 4.5 mil price each year you keep him, and the other team gets saddled with a higher average salary costs the longer you wait.

Sure, you may get a lot less for your player when you trade him, or maybe even need to sweeten the deal with something to get teams to trade, but you'll have a lot more money to work with, which can let you take whatever free agents you want. And raising the salary cost of the other team could make them cough up more good value free agents, and make them unable to compete in the FA market. This could present an interesting play style where money and free agents are more important, different from the more common strategy of using those trades to acquire high potential prospects and keeping costs low that way.

Also with the front-loaded salary, I should have lower salary costs in the 2nd year, which would allow me to front-load other players in that 2nd year, and so on, constantly using budget surpluses to reduce costs for subsequent years, basically passing surpluses along instead of squandering them on marginally better free agents or whatever. I should have a lot of budget wiggle room each new season to use as I see fit.

[NoOne]

yeah, definitely... i never backload a contract... i even them out or frontload.

you can do the math and know when somoene has to be gone if you want to extend another guy... don't wait until that year to do it.

front office -> Salaries or is it called "payroll" tab.. you can see when things are coming due and how much room you have each year. shows 10 years