Tough's analysis is pretty good, a few nits I would pick
1. Merchandise comes from four main sources: league standings and performance vs TV/rival games (the Team Sales category), what % of your salary is from home country flagged players with self-drafted counting 2x (the Homegrown & Local category, which is a multiplier of Team Sales), a % of the salaries of your players with top league/division/country/world rankings in the big 5 stats + rating (the Jersey Sales category, which also gets boosts from players having an international cap the prior week and small boosts for all star selections in the second half of the season), and fixed income from the Arena Design upgrade and Merchandise Store. It's expected/described in the manual that the TV & Radio station reduces the impact of losing streaks on your Team Sales component but I haven't really seen data trying to estimate how big or small that effect is.
The big differentiator for merch in most divisions is Jersey Sales (with HG&L being second biggest). One big star that can be the focus of your offense is the easiest way to "hack" Jersey Sales.
Staff wise, you should be able to have solid staff for under 30k. I agree with having a level 4-5 trainer, but would advocate for a level 2 doctor (solely for the massage specialty), a level 1 PR manager or maybe level 2 for a specialty, and a level 4-5 sports psychologist.
The primary reason to go with a higher level doctor would be as insurance - the doctor's level has a larger effect on reducing the length of an injury when it happens, rather than trying to hire a high level doctor after the fact to speed the recovery up. If you're tight on budget, you can run naked and pray to the BB-gods instead.
I've had a very hard time trying to quantify the impact of a PR manager. My assumption is that it has a small impact on your Team Sales merchandise and arena attendance, but both effects are dwarfed in magnitude by your team's performance, especially below division 1.
And yeah, the most important part of contending is training well, and lining up your training cycle with your contention cycle, so that your trainees are getting their big, expensive pops on the season you're promoting (which makes your end of season team +$50k in value compared to salary paid, for free).
Last edited by Azariah at 10/31/2025 9:34:48 PM