WE ARE FOOTBALL 2027: Finances & Wage Budget Guide

How the Two Budgets Work at Season Start

The finances screen shows two spendable pools at the top: the transfer budget and the club budget. The transfer budget combines your club’s allocation with every player sale — the fee lands straight in the budget and the sold player’s wages come off the books.

The club budget pays for construction on the club grounds: youth camps, boarding facilities, office floors. If the pool is empty, nothing gets built, no matter how healthy the club account looks. Growing the club budget is deliberately harder — certain appointments shift money across, and strong income sometimes adds a top-up.

Neither pool holds your wages.

Reserves: your protected war chest

Beside the budgets sit reserves for next season’s transfers and infrastructure. Move money into a reserve and nobody can take it out — it survives windows and seasons until you release it, and two frugal seasons can bank enough for one marquee signing.

Where the Wage Bill Actually Sits

WE ARE FOOTBALL 2027 gives you no capped wage pool. Player wages are running expenses charged to the club account, listed in the season-start calculation next to transfer spending, win bonuses, and projected ticket income. Monthly income lines — sponsors, premiums, members — feed the same account. The booking journal lists every transaction, so a creeping wage bill is visible long before it hurts.

The season-end forecast turns the ledger into the number that matters: projected profit or loss, with taxes applied on top.

Earning Budget Top-Ups

Budgets rise when you beat the plan. The season-start calculation is the club’s own projection, and cup-run prize money or a surprise title push is not in it — overperforming triggers top-ups on your budgets. Selling shares works too: a completed share sale pushes money onto the account and raises the budgets in one stroke. Disciplined selling through the /guides/transfer-market-guide/ hub remains the most reliable budget grower.

October 2026 also added player reports at the seam where these numbers meet the screens that spend them. A locked-budget report — a single budget that froze after the second transfer window and showed only next season’s transfer budget, while departing players left because the board blocked their contracts — is carried in full in the season transition guide. An 8 October forum reply by a user named JustRon adds a same-symptom cousin of the forum’s „Budget Bug“ thread: „Restbudget ist bei 100k. Aber in den Verhandlungen steht -0 und so lehnt der Vorstand jedes Angebot ab“ — the remaining budget sitting at 100,000, but a minus zero in the U19 auto-promotion negotiations, and the board rejecting every offer on that basis.

The family has kept growing since. On 9 October the locked-budget thread gained its first reply — the thread is open, and it stands at one reply as of 11 October 2026 — and it comes in the form of a theory: „Not exactly sure what, and why it triggers, my current theory is when you have less than a certain amount left, say 100k of your budget, they will block any expense regardless of what it is, and how much. I’m unsure if this is true, and if it is, what number it triggers on“, writes Couranny. His workaround stays in his own words, typos included: „My personal workaround is keeping a mill in reserve, that I will withdraw if I need cash for transfer reasons or expansions or salery/hire etc.“ (sic) — a million parked in the reserve and only withdrawn when cash is needed — because leftover money „doesn’t seem like it make a difference on the budget next year if they aren’t in the reserve“ (sic). That is one player’s theory plus one player’s workaround: unverified, with no such threshold documented anywhere in the game. On 10 October the bug collection thread run by MasterJB added a third same-symptom report: „Transferbudget plötzlich bei -0, obwohl bei Finanzen noch Restbudget vorhanden“ — a combined budget suddenly reading minus zero in negotiations although the finances overview still shows remaining budget for the current and the next season — and there, too, „der Vorstand sperrt wegen Budgetüberziehung jegliche Angebotsabgabe“ (the board blocks every offer as a budget overrun). The fourth report comes from video rather than forum: in his F23 episode (10 October) the YouTuber FieldysGG finds that „our budget is showing as zero, and so guys, this is a bug and it’s now affecting our game progress“, and in F24 (11 October) he hopes a budget „always at zero“ „has a reason and isn’t a new bug, because this company unfortunately tends to release a bug fix, then one bug is gone and five new ones are in there“ (quoted from the episodes’ English subtitles). All of these stand as player reports without official response as of 11 October 2026 — and Update 3’s notes, published on 14 October, did not change that: none of their 54 lines names a locked budget, a board blocking offers or a minus-zero negotiation display, and the single budget line they carry, „Fix: Wrong display of next season’s transfer budget on the home screen during the 2nd leg (e.g. after using an option to buy a player)“, is explicitly a display repair on the home screen. Whether it covers the display half of this family is a question only a post-update save can answer; the family itself keeps its open status.

Keeping the Wage Bill Under Control

Because wages flow from the account rather than a cap, discipline lives in the contract structure: base salary is permanent, bonuses are paid only when they trigger, and a modest signing fee usually costs less over three years than a permanently raised base wage. The clause-by-clause mechanics live in our /guides/contract-negotiations/ guide.

Three habits keep the payroll lean:

• Pay for minutes that happen. Rotation players collect appearance fees without triggering win bonuses, so stack bonuses only on regulars and align promises with the rotation plan in our /tactics/best-tactics-formations/ guide.
• Sell the wage deadwood. Fringe players with no minute projections block wages and squad slots; their fees refill the transfer budget.
• Distrust loyalty-heavy extensions for declining profiles. Players past 30 lose level progress, and long loyalty-stuffed deals invite renegotiations.

Sponsors, Boards and TV Money

Sponsors come in three color-coded types. The green type pays a fixed amount every month — take it when you need guaranteed cash. The red type pays mostly bonuses, and the orange type splits the difference. A long contract with a high promotion bonus is a compound machine: every promotion lifts the payout by the agreed percentage, and successive promotions can turn a lower-league deal into a figure that embarrasses top-flight clubs — which is why renewing can beat switching.

Sponsor satisfaction matters as much as the fee: accept invitations, organize a visit when the bar slips, send advertising gifts when it runs high. Stand sponsors pay smaller sums over longer terms, typically with a 30 percent cut on relegation and a 30 percent bonus on promotion. The advertising boards are a separate market: beyond the base set, eight more slots can be sold, each sale needs an appointment (two at season start, one afterwards), and rotating boards lift every board deal by at least 5 percent. TV money arrives as a guaranteed seasonal sum paid in monthly instalments plus a per-final-position bonus paid once at the start of next season. This section is the overview — the sponsor deals guide walks the whole lifecycle screen by screen, from reading the contract cards to winning the negotiation.

Ticket Prices and Matchday Surcharges

A season-start appointment sets the four base admission prices, and the screen projects your sold-out income from them. During the season you can add a per-match surcharge of up to 50 percent: derbies and big travelling support warrant the maximum, a strong opponent perhaps 5 percent. Discounts do not exist — prices only move up — and you can delegate the scheme to a department head with rules such as 10 percent in cup ties, 50 percent internationally. How much extra revenue each stand upgrade and add-on unlocks is laid out in our /guides/stadium-expansion-guide/.

Loans, Fan Bonds and the Tax Man

A negative balance is an expensive overdraft: around 6 percent interest in the tutorial save, with room to climb. Structured loans are cheaper — longer terms carry lower annual rates — and they can be repaid early. Fan bonds cannot be repaid early: you can hold up to three, and they run to the full term no matter what. Fixed deposits generate passive interest, alongside the apartments, kiosks, and restaurants your ground construction adds.

Taxes on profit reward builders: reinvesting a looming surplus into facilities before season end shrinks the bill. The share-sale path needs two years in charge, ongoing profit, and a two-thirds member vote, but selling 5 or 10 percent raises cash and budgets in one move. That vote is not a formality — the member approval ring, the board’s popularity gauge and the seasonal budget request are all documented in /guides/board-expectations-guide/. For your first save, the first-week routine in our /guides/beginner-guide/ shows where finances fit in.