A couple words of advice for newer owners:

0: DO NOT USE THE CONTRACT RENEGOTATION WIZARD! Do not! Don't! It's faulty, makes illogical decisions, and can quite literally completely ruin your team. The game may try to link you to the wizard when it gives you prompts about contract extensions, so be careful.

1: There is no rush on extending contracts at the start of the year. In fact, you should wait until at least the season starts before putting virtual ink to virtual paper: one of the most regrettable feelings in MFN is giving someone a new contract and then trading or cutting them in the same year.

2: But don't ignore contract extensions completely! The end of the year is a hard deadline, and you want to leave yourself time to account for any mishaps. That could be a lot of heartbreak if you neglect it!

3: MFN has a weird quirk where free agents from your team (players whose contract expired at the end of the 2022 season) will still show up in your roster. I think it's to allow you to still find them, plan around them, and keep track of them, while you decide whether to bring them back. However, despite appearing on your roster, they are not officially on your team; they're fair game for anyone else to try to sign, and will have dropped off your roster before preseason play starts. Once the offseason starts, if I recall correctly, there will be a [Players Not On Contract] option added to the [Player Details] dropdown above your roster on your team homepage to view these 'phantom' players only.

Alright, here it is, Accounting 101, how to extend the contracts of your players. By the end of this tutorial, you'll be a (QuickBooks) Pro, just you wait. Let us begin with...

Lesson One: How Players Are Paid
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So, let's start this with an important caveat: Everything you are about to learn is for extending your current players only. I'll put in a bit of discussion later on for free agents, but this guide is for players already on your team whose services you wish to retain.

The amount you pay a player each year is made up of two values: Their salary and their bonus. The salary is what you pay them for being part of the team; every game, the amount of salary you still owe them that year declines, and if you cut the player, that salary owed goes bye-bye.

Meanwhile, the bonus is what you pay them for signing the contract as a big lump sum. However, this is where accounting magic comes in: The bonus is amortized across the length of a contract, so if you pay a $6 million bonus on a 6-year deal, it counts for ($6M/6yr) $1 million per year against your salary cap.

The problem is that bonus money is money already paid out, unlike salary money that's paid each game, and you're only able to spread the cost out because that player is an asset to your organization. If you lose that asset--cutting them, trading them, seeing them retire--then the bonus money you still need to account for comes due: the player's current-year bonus still counts against your current-year salary cap, and the remainder of the bonus counts in its entirety against next year's salary cap. To use our $6M-for-6yrs player from before, if you cut them on year 3, their bonus still counts for $1M against the Year 3 cap, and for $3M against Year 4 (the combined cost of Years 4-6).

This game also has an annual inflation of 5% built into the system. In addition to your salary cap and other things, player salary must increase by 5% every year. The game calculates this for you; when you make a contract, you're choosing the salary of the first year and it builds the increase into the table at the bottom. However, since bonuses are paid at time of contract signing, the hit to your cap each year remains constant.

Lesson Two: Player Desires and League Rules
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So, we've established that a player gets paid a bonus and a salary, and their contract guarantees that to them over a given number of years, with at least a 5% raise included, and while they no longer get paid a salary once they leave the team for any reason, they get to always keep that signing bonus.

With so many variables involved, it might make sense that what a player expects out of a contract extension is fairly complicated... except this is MFN: Most things make a little sense, but nothing makes complete sense.

To sign an extension with your team, all a player expects out of you is that you meet their demands for their signing bonus. They don't care about contract length, they don't care about salary, they don't care about how good or bad your team is or if your coach is a jerk or if they spend all their time in the infirmary or on the bench. So long as the briefcase you slide across the table has enough money in it, they're sold.

Keep in mind that the signing bonus demanded varies greatly across the range of players you'll encounter, being determined by default-weight future rating, position the player's best at, and the player's age. A star QB is going to demand tens of millions of dollars; an older backup fullback might not even want a single percent of that.

The league, however, has rules of its own that you must comply with. Contracts can be as short as 1 year and as long as 6, with the first of those years starting immediately when the contract is signed, rather than getting tacked on to the end of the existing deal. Players can only sign one contract per year without getting cut first, meaning that if you sign a guy on a one-year deal, you have no chance to extend them if you decide to keep them, and cutting a player means they won't be too fond of you anymore.

The league also requires you to pay a minimum salary per year, which increases by 5% each year. Finally, no more than 75% of a player's total pay can be bonus money, at least a quarter of what they earn must be salary.

Lesson Three: How The Deal Is Done
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So, yes, the player's have their demanded bonus, and the rules set out some requirements. The nice thing about this is that so long as you make a valid offer to a player, it's more or less an automatic acceptance. There's an occasional quirk that might make them stubborn, and if the player has a lousy opinion of you for past slights they may refuse your deal on principle. But overall, follow the rules, meet their demand, and the deal is sealed.

This becomes even more important when you consider that there is no reason to pay a player even a penny more than they wish for; there's no opinion boost, no chance of putting off retirement, nothing of the sort.

What this all means together is that, yes, we can totally optimize the stuffing out of this with hardly any effort. I present to you The Formula:



Walking through this real quickly:
- [First Year Base + Bonus] is the value you control with the top slider on the Renegotiate Contract panel, where you offer the player a new deal.
- [Demanded Bonus] is the signing bonus the player demands.
- "6" is the length of the contract, 6 years. And in at least 95% of cases, it's going to be 6, regardless of pretty much any factor. Why? We'll explain that later.
- Dividing the bonus by the number of years of the deal gives us the annual value of the bonus through the deal's length.
- Multiply that by 1.33333 (Technically 4/3, but it's more fun to do it as a decimal, and as long as you have a few 3's, you're accurate enough) to account for the base salary as well, since the salary must be, at least, one third of the bonus (25% of the total, vs 75% for the bonus).

To put the formula into practice, let's use the General himself, Yuan Shao, as an example. Open the player card and click the Contract button to open the renegotiation screen. Move the first slider to its lowest (left-most) setting and click 'Submit Offer'. You will get an error message with the player's demanded bonus.



It seems like a lot of money! But plug it into the formula and we'll find out...



We'll be paying him only $4.6M per year total, with a modest increase per year after that. That's hardly anything, especially compared to his 'suggested' offer from the game for $10.4M per year! Following this method will save you a ton of money and mean that you should pretty much never ever be at risk of being hindered by your salary cap, outside of some bonkers total-rebuild levels of trading or a huge retirement wave.

So now that we know the answers, let's pull it all together. Everything up to now has just been why this works, here's how it works. This is the only bit you need to really learn.



There are only two situations where you will run into a hitch in this plan. One is that you'll still get the error where the bonus isn't high enough; in this case, just move the slider up another notch, the problem was that you didn't put enough 3's in the calculator and underestimated by a teeny bit. Try more 3's next time. The second problem is when the player wants so little money that you end up going below the league minimum salary. In this case, set Years to 6, Bonus to 0%, move the slider to its lowest (left-most) position, and type their demanded bonus manually in the Total Bonus box. Hit Submit and it will automatically adjust everything to where it needs to be.

Lesson Four: Some Other Considerations
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1 - There's No Rush! Unless you're in a serious cap crisis and there's an opportunity to save money this way, there's no reason to extend a player's contract until they're on the final year of the deal. Even once you get to the final year of the deal, you have until the end of the season (the sim that comes after the Bowl) to have a new deal in place. It's generally best to wait until after the draft, after TC, or even as late as Week 8 of the regular season, to start dishing out contracts; after all, the fastest way to load yourself with dead cap space is to give a huge new contract to someone and then trade them shortly after.

2 - But Don't Procrastinate! Sometimes, the player rejects a contract that it should be accepting. My guess for this is that it calculates the player's skill progression first, and occasionally this is enough to push a player's bonus demand up a little higher. Luckily, through the lazy method above (as opposed to calculating exact amounts), you're generally leaving yourself with a bit of a cushion; I've never had a player turn down a contract with this method, but it can, technically, still happen! And if you're saving your contract offers for the last possible moment, an unexpected refusal could be devastating. So, please make your deals while there's still at least a few sims left.

3 - Really? 6 Years? Yes. Six years. Think about it; the amount of bonus you need to pay the player is a set number, no matter how many years you extend them by. Salary is determined by the bonus, too. You're paying a player approximately just as much to stick around for six years as you would for two years. Where this sounds scary is with a player approaching retirement. But would you rather offer a dude a short extension, only for him to luck through retiremet rolls and need another new deal right away? Or would you offer them a full contract and let them ride it out until they leave or you make them leave?

4 - Contract Length Exceptions There are a few edge cases I can think of where you might at least consider going less than 6. The first is that you plan to trade the player at a certain point in the future and would rather get through the bonus pay now than taking more dead cap on trade-out. But there, you're assuming that your plans won't change and that a buyer paying the right price will exist when you need it. Another instance is when you're completely sure a player is going to retire, or is approaching that point and will start dumping stats hard enough to become worthless to you, and you want to pay now and avoid dead cap later. In both of these situations, you are only doing it to trade higher pay now for deadcap later.

5 - Controlled Dead Cap Is Fine A lot of dead cap, the money burned by paying off the rest of the bonus of a player no longer with the team, can be a bad thing, putting you near your salary cap and constraining draft and contract options. However, a few million here and there won't kill you, and even getting in the $10-20M range or so is a normal course of events, especially while making trade and draft moves to rebuild part of your team. Even a decently-managed roster might only use two-thirds or three-quarters of their salary cap on players, sometimes even less!, and the rest of that money doesn't do you any good. So you've got cap space to take on a reasonable amount of dead cap, think of it as the cost of doing business.

6 - What about free agent contracts, Beans? I'll come back to this after the sim! Aaaaaaaaa the timer! aaaaaaaaaaaa! aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

Or you just watch this fun video I made for you :)

https://youtu.be/idCUjFVFKfo

[placeholder for some words about the renegotiation spreadsheet]

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BblhYuavwbBJaCTNNL8cqED1NC6xsiPEHCA2YFXLBV0/edit

It is best if you download a copy to your computer or your own Google Drive or whatever online cloud/drive service you use.

Yeah.

Oh come on now, be nice to the boy. Envy's bad for the soul, be happy with what you've got.

Stop making up posts by me, Beans.