Surviving the new Transfer Market changes

In January the privalt league transfer markets were merged into one and also the minimum evaluation fee was reduced to 5000 econ. This seems to be causing significant problems for many of the top players.

What's happening?

I've just had 3 teams hit silly season within a week so I'm feeling the full force of the changes and they are significant. It seems like all players are experiencing a degree of inflation, young and old alike.

Highly sought after players such as 17/4s with a SQ or youngsters with Hard Trainer are drawing in ridiculous bids. This has been happening to a degree since evaluations were reduced to 35,000 econ but now it's going wild.

Typical prices at the time of writing:

16/3  with HT (no other SQs)                                                       4m+
17/4 with HT (no other SQs)                                                        6m+
16/3 with HT and good SQs (eg heading an quick, or FK)         12m
16/2 with HT (no other SQs)                                                      1-2m

The strange thing is the inflation seems to be hitting players that would previously have been overlooked. Few managers would buy invest in 16/2 until recently, even with Hard trainer, yet now the prices and competition are significant.

Another growing trend seems to be people adjusting to the staggered transfer market times. 0000 X11 time is still the most popular time to list and buy players but players seem to be getting sniped at the most unusual times.

Competing with multiple teams

A big gripe right now is conflict in the TM when you have multiple teams competing for similar players. I'm having this problem now and it can be awkward, but you need to plan ahead a little and change your strategy.

I started off evaluating players as they came on the list - it is certainly cheaper doing that with many players costing 5-10k to evaluate the first day. When more of my teams had their CR I was finding I couldn't evaluate players because I'd already checked them with another team and this was more annoying when a team found a good player, got outbid but a richer team of mine would have liked that player.

The best plan seems to be planning ahead and only checking players you might actually want. I evaluate the higher quality players with the team with most money first until I find one I'm genuinely interested in. I then stop evaluating with that team and start looking for potential targets with my other teams, all the while restricting my searches to players I would definitely buy whereas in the past i have checked out lots of "maybe" players.