I was thinking about setting some ground rules to make the game more difficult for myself, and wondered if anyone had any suggestions. I feel it's a bit too easy to build a great team from the ground up.
I've taken Fleetwood to the Premiership in 4 seasons, and have a multitude of developing world star players in the academy, and a 4 star team. I've not even spent that much money, it just seems that even cheap scouts find great players and free agents are far too good to genuinely be free agents. An 18 year old CM OVR 68? He must have slept with the manager's wife or something.
A few ideas were:
1) Increasing the minimum age of free agent transfers by 1 each year, starting at 17-18 and stopping at 22, to avoid the regens.
2) Each season the wage cap for a player is a 50% increase on the current maximum you pay out. This stops windfalls of cash from over-the-top sales being used to bring players who are far too good into the team. It seems like the board can always match your wage budget season-on-season, so there's no problem with spending to the limit all the time.
Any others?
I agree. It is a bit too easy. So I suppose the question is, why is that so?
From my perspective, the two key things are that player growth is too fast, and it's too easy to pack your squad with high potential free agents/youth players and sell them on for massive profits.
Regarding player growth, I'm not sure how much you can do about it. I'm playing on World Class right now but I think in my next Career I'll try playing on Legendary, for the increased challenge and the hopes that maybe losing more games and having poorer player performances might result in slower growth. I'm not sure this will slow down player growth though like I'd like it to.
You could also stay away from high potential players. I've developed the nasty habit of sometimes checking the various online databases to check on player potentials, which is basically cheating the game, making things a little less challenging, and if I'm being honest with myself it's probably detracting from the overall experience. But I'm weak and when I'm in the market for a new player or players, sometimes I just can't resist the urge!
You might not be doing this, but if you're looking for an increased challenge, you could always do the opposite - use the online databases to ensure that you're not signing high potential players, so that the progress of your squad is slower. From my experience, it's a bit too easy to start out with the lowest rated squad in a league only by the end of the season to have one of the highest rated squads. Maybe choosing to play with players that have little growth potential is a good way to up the challenge and make things a bit more realistic.
Regarding free agents and youth academy players, all that can be done is to make things harder for yourself by not using them at all. (Which, if you're anything like me, is easier said than done. Like I said, I'm weak.) You might just limit yourself to real players. Personally, I try to stay away from any player with a black silhouette, but some of the youth players and regens can be hard to pass up. Especially when you're in the lower leagues and broke.
Finally, the simplest solution might be to just increase the challenge of gameplay, either by playing on a higher difficulty setting or through the use of sliders. You say you already find gameplay challenging but if you're progressing up through the leagues so quickly, it ultimately means that you're winning a lot of games. You can always return to your previous settings if it's no fun, but experimenting with finding ways to make gameplay more difficult could be part of the solution to making CM more challenging.
but good on you, if you are enjoying it, then great. It never even crossed my mind to do it, it is a great advert for Fifa though if you are enjoying it.