Financial Issue - Please Read

[Andrew]

Hold off on making any major financial decisions about your team for now, because your situation might change some. I'm doing some further testing and running into some issues. I'll post when I know more.

[Andrew]

So basically the issue here is that budgets are changing drastically depending on how good your team is. Attendance is now a big factor of how merchandising revenue is calculated. The problem is it creates a double whammy effect. If a team has a bad year, they don't make money in gate revenue which in turn means they don't make much in merchandising. So a big part of your budget for the next season is directly tied to how good of a season you had.

Due to the big bang it seems like small market teams are generally more competitive than large market teams. In testing it's causing the current financial situation to flip flop after the first season. Large market teams now have small budgets (some losing more than $50 mil off their budget in 1 year) and small market teams have large budgets.

Possible solutions:
- Increase the average attendance across the league. This means bad teams will still have decent attendance, thus closing the gap between the high and the low for gate and merchandising revenue.

- Increase the average amount of media contracts. Media contracts are entirely "Market" based so the large market teams will get more of a boost if we do this.

Ultimately, i think we're going to have to do a combination of both.

[Andrew]

OK, here are the results of some new settings and a bunch of testing. This is working pretty well, IMO although there are still some downside.

Changes I made:
- Increased average Media Contract from $10,000,000 to $50,000,000. This seems like a drastic change but it's accomplishing two things. A) we lowered it in 2006 so had to bring it back up so teams don't go bankrupt and B) Is determined solely by Market Size so helps to stabilize the budgets and income.

- Increased average attendance from 30,000 to 50,000. This helps close the gap in gate revenue and merchandising, both which are directly affected by attendance. The teams who sell out already don't gain anything here, but the teams who don't will be closer to the pack. The only catch here is that we need to put a cap on ticket prices. With the average well above our actual capacities, good teams could raise tickets however high they wanted and still sell out.

And here are the results of a 3 year test:
deleted images to avoid confusion

[Andrew]

You'll notice that after the first year budgets stabilize fairly well. The only major changes are when a team's market size increases such as Carolina and Maine in season 3, or when a team greatly increases their performance such as Philadelphia in Year 2. They improved from 63 wins to 82 wins, which accounts for the hike in their budget.

The way financials actually work is going to depend much more on performance than in 2006. Teams who are consistently good will slowly see their market size increase and their budget along with it, while teams that are consistently bad will see the opposite.

Please note these results are based on a simulation with the CPU running all the teams so may vary greatly than what actually happens for us. Please don't base your finances off what you see here.

[Andrew]

Here is the new Media Contracts I'll be putting into the game in the next sim.

deleted image to avoid confusion

These are determined solely by your market size, which is listed alongside the contract. I'll be entering these as a 3 year contract for every team.

IMPORTANT!
You'll notice that these numbers are a huge increase from the current contracts. Don't be fooled by this. You'll lose in merchandising revenue what you gain in media contracts. The current budgets and the test data from above is a pretty good guide on what you are able to spend this offseason.

[rubisco43]

so what should be the cap on ticket price? i increased mine to 11.50 or 12.00 for this upcoming season.

[Andrew]

so what should be the cap on ticket price? i increased mine to 11.50 or 12.00 for this upcoming season.

The cap on ticket prices will be $12.00 for now.

[Andrew]

I'd also recommend that people hold off on using their cash to make major stadium modifications until after this season, when the numbers will start to stabilize. Feel free to use your stadium fund money, which will be updated tomorrow.

[SC_Dawg]

Does this mean the average media contract is going to be $42.5 mil?

Also are you going to export a new league file for us to pick-up with the changes being made? If so please import before you export :) I have some changes I want made prior to the next sim.

[Andrew]

Does this mean the average media contract is going to be $42.5 mil?

Also are you going to export a new league file for us to pick-up with the changes being made? If so please import before you export :) I have some changes I want made prior to the next sim.

Yes, the average is $42.5 for now even though I set it to 50 in the game. This is still subject to change though. I still want to do a long term sim tomorrow and test a few more things.

Either way, I'll import before making any changes or posting a new league file.

[robster1225]

So, when is the next sim? lol

Good Stuff Andrew, it seems that his wont be as big a problem as I originally thought.

[Andrew]

The only problem I still see is that the small market budgets are a lot higher than we initially thought. This is going to limit the players available in Free Agency, like it did in 2006. I think I can fix this but not sure if I should.

We basically need to decide if we're going to be a league that:

1) Has a smaller financial gap between teams, less players in FA and no draft pick compensation

or

2) Has a larger financial gap between teams, more players in FA and draft pick compensation

Thoughts. These decisions are going to steer the league over the next few years so I would like to hear from everyone. If not, you forfeit any right to complain when your team goes broke in a couple years. :D

[Squint]

I'm for Option 2.

It reflects the most amount of realism and teams that chose to be in small markets did so with the anticipation of the challenges that we all thought were going to be there in the first place.

Besides, if things ever get that bad for the smaller market teams, they can always submit to move to a larger market.

[Andrew]

Well just to be clear, nobody chose their market size. It was determined by their payroll after the initial draft.

[Sully]

I do prefer #2. How big of a gap are we talking? Does it average out, and stabilize? Or continue to grow?

Honestly, I was starting to get bored with 2006 because of the monotony. No FAs, standings looking the same, similar draft position, etc.