Contracts may seem difficult, but they can be easy as long as you know what you are doing and you take your time doing them. It is just a simple three-step process to go through and secure that elusive final player for your roster or a replacement for a long-term injury. This guide will walk you through the process of signing free agents to your team when you need them, either before training camp or during the season. The process is the same each time and are processed at the next sim in the schedule unlike during the draft (no first come, first served here)...

Handy Tip: Piece of good advice. Always try to get your free agent contracts sorted out before a midweek sim is processed during the season. This will ensure you have the new player(s) on your roster before the game and can make those important depth chart changes you want, as you won't get that chance when the game sim begins. Also, PLEASE make sure that you have 53 players on your roster (60 in the preseason) before the game sim starts, otherwise, the AI will cut as many players as required from your roster to make it legal for the game, meaning you could end up with a lot of unnecessary dead cap space. You can still make your own player cuts if you are over those roster limits prior to a gameweek as those cuts will process and make your team legal at gametime. Ensure that if you don't have a vacant spot on your 53-man roster (or 60-man during preseason) and you are offering a contract to a free agent, you will also need to cut someone to balance your roster.

This is only a guide to signing free agents. When talking about renegotiating a contract with a player already on your roster, that will be later around Season 2 when initial contracts are going to expire. This guide is also only for player contracts, coach contracts are not involved here in this guide. You can sign free agents at any point during the season, just know that during the draft, those free agents will not be processed until the first stage of Late Free Agency, so you will be waiting a while.

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Step 1 - Find the Player
That’s the simple part. Go through the normal process of searching for players as you would during the draft process and look for that player you want to sign. You can use the "View Free Agents" tab under Players/Coaches which will show every single free agent in the system for our league, or if you want to drill a little deeper early on, you can use the "Player Search" tab also under Players/Coaches to search.

Handy Tip: If you are using the Player Search feature, make sure that you select "Free Agents" in the team drop-down menu, otherwise you will search for every single player on every team and the free agents.

Once you have found the player you want and you click on them, it should bring up their player profile box showing all the ratings you are viewing for that position they hold currently. Being Free Agents, they should only have two little red boxes underneath their player name and position, that being “View” and “Contract”. You will want to click on “Contract”. That will bring up the contract screen.



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Step 2 - Offer the Contract
The first thing is when you see the contract screen, the AI is going to automatically give you a suggested contract for the player. This is generally in excess of what is truly needed for the player and if you just offer that, you are going to run out of cap space very quickly and be in line for a large amount of dead cap space really soon. The only time you really want to be offering such a contract like the suggested one is if you know you are going to or are competing against many other teams for the one player and you want to have a better chance of getting the player on your roster.

The contract screen may seem daunting but it is not really. The bar at the top of the screen shows you your entire salary cap for that season. It is broken up into several segments, which are colour-coded as well.

Current Contracts (Green): this is the amount of money you are currently spending on contracts for the players you already have on your roster.
Current Bonuses (Yellow): this is the amount of bonus money those contracts have.
Pending Contracts (Blue): this is how much money from your salary cap you are currently spending on the pending contracts you have. It will update automatically as you build the contract for each free agent.
Dead Cap (Red): this will show when you cut a player who has a bonus attached to his contract and is the money that you can't use in your salary cap until next season.
Min for Remaining Players (Orange): this is actually not counting against your salary cap, but is there to help you budget and not run out of cap room.
Remaining Cap Room (Black): this is the amount of salary cap space that you have remaining that can be used. Like the Pending Contracts bar, this will get larger and smaller and change dynamically as you alter contracts to free agents.

The first slider is the player's first-year salary you want to give them. You can slide that left or right and the figures at the bottom (as well as the Pending Contracts bar at the top) will update automatically as you move the slider. You then have a drop-down menu for the number of years you want the contract to be for, followed by another slider for how much of a bonus you want to add to the contract (expressed as a percentage).

NOTE: the number of years on a contract does matter. Be mindful in offering 1-year contracts as once a player signs that contract, you can not renegotiate with that player until the following season when they go back to free agency. Best use of a 1-year contract is when you need to replace a player on your roster who has a long-term injury or you need someone for a few weeks to cover a lack of depth in their position. You can use longer contracts to spread bonuses out across multiple years.

Handy Tip: Offering a 6-year deal to a 10-year veteran player might seem like a good deal, but if they retire after 1-year, you are on the hook next season for the remaining 5 years of bonuses that their contract had and that will go into your dead cap. On the flip side to that, offering a 1-year deal to a player might come with no bonus, but if they accept that deal; you can't renegotiate with them until they go back to free agency at the end of the season, so you need to be careful when choosing how many years you want to add onto a contract. Take their experience, among other things, into account.

If you don't want to use the sliders, you can use the manual overrides at the bottom. The Total Bonus box is the total bonus for the whole contract, and the game will automatically divide that number by the number of years your contract offer will have to spread that total bonus across the whole contract. You can also manually override and change the base salary of each year in the contract Make sure that if you do decide to manually change the yearly salary of the contract that you:-

1. Ensure the first year's salary is at least at the league minimum salary. For the first season, this is set at $120,000 and will increase by 5% each season.
2. That you provide at minimum a 5% increase to each year's base salary. This can not be backdated to future years, it must be every year by at least 5%.

Underneath the manual overrides, it will show what the total contract offer will be (so salary and bonus combined) and the amount of years you have set for the contract. Once you are happy with the contract, then click on “Submit Offer”. It will go to the player. You will then be sent to the player search screen you were on. Your pending contract will appear in the "Pending Contracts tab under My Team. Just repeat the process again for the free agents you want to offer contracts to.

The system will tell you with a notification if your current contract offer is not valid, and how to fix it. It might be something as small as needing to boost the bonus (it will tell you what the minimum bonus amount is for that length of contract for the player), or that you haven't factored in the 5% base salary increase each year. Just clear the notification, make the changes and submit the offer again.

Once finished, either go through the process again for another free agent or if you want; check all the pending contract offers you have at the moment in the "Pending Contracts" tab in the My Team tab. This is the screen you will see (I've blanked out the names as I've put contracts in for particular players I'm looking at, the contract offers you see are just dummy offers to show the populated table)



Step 3 - Wait…
Now, we wait. Any contract you offer to players will be pending until the next sim stage, after which time, the player may choose to take your contract, another contract if other teams have offered them a deal, or wait for another round to choose an offer. Until that next sim stage is processed, the offer you have given to the player is blind, meaning you are the only one who can see it. You can't see at the moment if anybody else has put an offer in for that player. When the sim processes, the player has three outcomes:-

1. They accept your contract.
2. They accept another contract.
3. They wait for another sim cycle.

If they accept your contract; then great! The player will appear on your roster in italics and you can then assign them to your depth chart and change their position and/or number and get them involved in your team. They will be part of your team with the contract you gave them.

If they reject your offer and take another, you don't get a message or notification to say this, you need to do a bit of looking (but it's easy). Just go to Team Home Page in the My Team tab and click on Transactions. This will show you all the transactions your team has made, the player should be at or near the top of that tab with something like (Rejected contract offer from [Your team name]) followed by the total contract offer that you offered them. To find out where they have gone, click on their name and go to "Details", then you can find which team got them and what their full contract looks like.

Handy Tip: Don't get defeated if you miss out on a free agent and they decide to go to another team. There are different factors that go into it, it is not just taking the contract with the most money. Take a bit of time to look at the contract they have with their new team and compare it against the one you offered them and build on that for the next time you go looking for a free agent.

Sometimes, a player may choose not to sign with any team at a free agency sim, and may wait another cycle before signing. In this case, the player will still appear in the "Pending Contracts" tab, but this time (shown above), the "Top Offer" column will be populated to show the best offer the player has currently. You can't view the year-by-year details of the contract, or any others that the player has pending, but you can see what the overall monetary figure is for that contract.

To see how many offers the player has currently, click on the player and when their player profile box appears, go to the "Details" tab at the bottom of that box, which will show each team and the overall monetary figure for the contract offer they have with the player. You can then go into the contract from Step 1 and make alterations to increase or withdraw the offer, and then just follow Step 2 and Step 3 again.

NOTE: If you are going to withdraw an offer, return to the contract screen through the player profile box as you did in Step 1 and select the checkbox marked "Check to Withdraw Offer", then click submit offer. The offer will then be withdrawn from the player and they will disappear from your pending contracts screen.

WAIVER WIRE CONTRACTS

The waiver wire is where recently cut players end up for one cycle of the season schedule (so midweek sim to midweek sim) and are available to any team in the league. There are a few slight differences to a waiver wire than there is when it comes to free agents. On the waiver wire, you are bidding against every other team in the league, but the key difference is that the player already comes with a contract, so there is no need to negotiate with the player about a contract. This means, if you get the player off the waiver wire, you have their current contract. The other difference is that waiver wire claims are only processed during a midweek stage or end of season stage, so you can still put in a claim for a player, but it won't process until the next midweek stage.

If, after a midweek stage sim, a player on the waiver wire has not been claimed by another team, they will be made a free agent and are available for any team again, however, this time, you will have the negotiate their new contract.

Step 1: Putting in a waiver wire claim
There are two locations to see the players on the waiver wire. The first location is on the league standings page, where you will see the top 10 list of players currently on the waiver wire, or you can click on "View All" and it will bring up a list of every single player who is on the wire. You can then go through the list and see what players might be useful to your team, as well as any players you have recently cut.

Handy Tip: the top 10 list is based on your weights, so it could be different to what you see above or what other players might see.

Once you find the player you are interested in, click on their name to bring up their player profile box, and click on "Claim off Waivers". This will bring you to the contract screen, however, this time it is a little different. This time, the contract is already filled out. The player will have the contract they had with their old team, that is what you are taking on. They won't have any bonuses attached to the contract (as their old team is paying that as part of their dead cap space), so all you will be paying is their base salary for as long as you have them on your team.

You can then review that contract, and if you are ready to put in a claim for the player, click on "Make Waiver Claim" and the system will then notify you if the claim has been put in. The waiver wire claim will then appear on your "Pending Contracts" page.



If you are no longer interested in the player that you made a claim for, head to your "Pending Contracts" page and click on the player, it will bring up the same contract screen from before. Just click the box that says "Check to Withdraw Claim Request" and then click "Make Waiver Claim" again, and your claim will be withdrawn.

NOTE: remember that you can only have up to 53 players on your roster during the regular season (60 during the preseason) so make sure that if you are successful in claiming a player from the waiver wire that you make a corresponding cut or trade of a player before the gameweek stage to ensure you are at or under the roster limit.

Step 2: Wait... again
Time to wait now until the next midweek stage of the season schedule. When that comes around, the claim will be processed. Unlike free agent contracts where you might have to wait for another stage to see about getting the player, this one goes straight through. Since there may be multiple teams putting a claim in on the same player, there is an order in which these are processed. From the forums, this is what has been said about the waiver wire:-

Source: https://electrosports.myfootballnow.com/community/3/6212?page=1#38128

So, if you put a claim in for multiple players, you may get them all or you may only get one of them. It all depends on how many other teams also put in claims for a player. Once the claims are processed, any players you were successful in getting will now be part of your roster and you can then get them sorted out into your depth chart and game plans for the upcoming game.

NOTE: sometimes there might be a waiver wire player that should not have been cut by a team, this can happen from time to time. If this happens, normally other owners will question the cut and there may be the need for the owner to have the player returned to them. If this happens, a notice will be put in one of the Electrosports #sportsball channels on the Discord server that no claims should be put in for that player, except the previous owner. Respect this decision and if you have put a claim in for the aforementioned player, please withdraw it before the next midweek stage sim.