Strategies for selling players.

Getting the best possible price for your players is important in Xpert Eleven and the following are some tips on the best way to maximise profit.

Can't see/bid

If you attempt to sell a player the same season you bought them then a lot of managers won't even be able to see the player, nevermind bid. This was put in to stop players being sold round in circles, gaining mini-CRs while never agering. When lising players of this type you always need to ask the minimum you will accept because there may only be 1 bidder.

Best time to sell

Player sale times are staggered now to attempt to make it a fair market for people who aren't around to snipe at 00.00 X11 time. Still it does seem that more players are listed at this time and it's probably still the best time to list players to maximise profit. An hour each side can work well too, especially an hour after where your player can get bids from those who missed out on their first choice.

Best price to list players

Listing players above the estimated value will sometimes yield benefits, especially for players with unusual SQ combinations, but often people just don't evaluate these players. People like bargains and in my experience the best strategy seems to be to list players around 75% of their estimate value. People see a slight bargain, several people are likely to evaluate and so you often get a bit of a bidding war. The advantage is the price is something sensible so no risk of getting a really horrible sale like you can if you list the player for the minimum value.

Recommendations?

One thing I've noticed is I can list a player 3-4 times without a bite and then next time I get a bidding war - and it usually starts very soon after the player is listed. My guess is that several people get recommended the player and got their bids in early. A great example is this guy:

I listed him several times before without any interest. As it was half way through the season and he was on good form I decided 1 last try at a higher price - because he is guaranteed a bar next season barring disaster. 

2 bids within 12 hours and significantly above his estimated value. For the record it's highly unlikely he would be an undereval, but he will be high in his band.

Now that you can remove a player off the transfer list a valid strategy might be to list a player each evening and if there are no bids by the following evening remove him and relist until the right people get a recommendation email. 

Youngsters & Relisting

Sometimes you aren't really fissed if you sell a player or not. Under the age of 28 there is only a very minimal risk that players will refuse to leave your club. Therefore you can just list players for the maximum amount (usually 1.5x the estimated value) and not care if they don't sell, just relist them after and if somebody pays big then happy days.

Oldies & refusing to Leave

From 29 upwards there is always a risk players won't leave the club. One way I manage this in private leagues is offer players via direct xfer at maybe 70% of the estimated value. Somebody gets a bargain and at least I get some value for the player.

Another way to boost the chance is sell the player after a few games - they are more likely to leave if they have good match experience that season. 

Mini-CR

If you sell a player mid-season he will get a mini-CR which can potentially cause him to lose or gain a bar - under or over eval. Selling a player late season without any games and with very low DV risks the player being overeval, anybody evaluating him will see this and you will likely get a poor price.

Selling a player with 10+ DV will give something into a mini-CR and the player could potentially be an undereval and you can often get better than expected prices for players like this.

The moral is it's always worth giving a player some games unless you sell them right at the start of the season, this includes players from the youth academy. 

Q&A June 2014

Here are some general tips and common questions answered:

Best players to double jump?

XpertEleven uses something called even rounding. That is to say numbers are rounded to the nearest integer except if the float part is 0.5, in which case they are rounded to the even number. EG

3.5 rounds to 4
4.5 rounds to 4       4.6 rounds to 5
5.5 rounds to 6

In X11 that means skillbands are skewed:

Skill	From	To
3	2.6	3.4
4	3.5	4.5
5	4.6	5.4
6	5.5	6.5

Notice odd skill levels cover a range of 9 points and even skill levels cover a range of 11 points. Because of this a player with an odd skill level is easier to single jump (as 0.9 will guarantee a single bar) but harder to double jump (as 1.9 may only result in a single bar).

Conversely players with an even skill level are harder to single jump (potentially needing a 1.1 increase to gain a visible bar) but they are easier to double jump (a 1.0 increase may give them a double jump).

Mini-CR

When players are sold they undergo a "mini CR". This is based on the DV upto that stage of the season and can result in the player on the transfer market being higher or lower skilled the player in your team when they get evaluated - underevals and overevals.

If you sell a player and he's an undereval then it's possible a bidding war can develop and you can get a much higher price than his valuation. If you know your player is high in his skillband then selling him late in the season with high DV gives him a good chance to be an undereval and can be a good strategy for maximising profit.

Player performance ratings

Players can normally perform upto 5 bars higher than their skill level, so for example a 9 skill player could perform to 14 skill bars.

Occasionally a player will perform 6 bars above his skill. This is due to a combination of XpertEleven using something called "even rounding" but will only happen if a player is at the very top of his skill band and has an even skill level.  If he's under 26 then he's a great candidate to double jump.

1 keeper per team

A lot of top teams run with just 1 keeper - no reserve. There are definite advantages and there are risks to this strategy:

Advantages:

• You save the cost and training costs of a 2nd keeper
• You always get to play your best keeper, every game.

Disadvantages:

• There is the risk of injury or suspension

While a player might get injured for a key game, I would suggest it's worth having only 1 keeper if you aren't challenging for the league title or a cup. If your only keeper does get injured there's always scope to buy a stopgap quickly off the transfer market, or even play an allounder in goal. Playing a little more cautious can let you survive the problem and over time the money saved will strengthen your team overall.

Perma training players

Ever look around and notice that your players don't quite develop as well as somebody else.  you maybe get a double jump from your players in their early years - the other guy gets 2 , on most players. Your players get to 14/15 skill, his get to 17/18.

Way back preemptive training used to be the bees knees but now things have moved on and the way to develop players to their full potential is keeping them in training permanently. With the removal of overtraining this is even more effective.

Perma training?

What this means is you train the player every 5 days - regardless of what their form is on. 20 form - still train them. It guarantees you can catch them as soon as their form stars to drop and 18/19 AF at the end of the season isn't overly rare. Obviously it works better with hard trainer players but the removal of overtraining benefit non-HT players the most.

Costs

This strategy is more suited to private leagues rather than the official league, and especially quicker leagues with shorter seasons, generally leagues with 6-8 teams per division. The costs don't seem massive on the face of it, potentially maybe 2 extra training sessions per season per player, but that can add up to an extra 5m/season in training costs. Obviously you can choose to be selective and only use it on your very best players, or you can include farm players in your squad to help meet the costs. I guess on final approach is selling select players on, and achieving 2 DJs in 4-5 seasons can really inflate player values.

Results

nowadays I only buy hard trainers, which does help. Using this approach pretty much all of my players have managed a 2nd double jump by the age of 26

1 chance, 1 goal - that always happens

It always seems to be the case, you have 4-1 chances and lose 1-0, and the opposition ALWAYS scores from their only chance. I checked through approx 700 matches and charted how many chances equated how many goals.

I restricted the data to matches between teams playing 451, 442, 541 & 352 so it's more mainstream formations and with just 1 or 2 forwards. Here's the raw data for goals/chances for the home side:

	Chances ->	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Goals
0		56	53	27	18	2	3	4			1
1		22	41	37	37	29	23	14	1
2			5	25	31	19	28	19	18	5	5
3				1	16	20	20	16	16	10	13
4						3	6	13	6	8	3
5									4	2	7
6									2	1	1
7											1
Tot Games		78	99	90	102	73	80	66	47	26	31

The chart shows how many games with a given number of chances resulted in a specified number of goals. EG for games with 4 chances 18 ended with 0 goals, 37 games ended with 1 goal scored etc.

Reworking the table to see the percentage of games ending in any given result it looks like the following:

	Chances	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Goals
0		72%	54%	30%	18%	3%	4%	6%			3%
1		28%	41%	41%	36%	40%	29%	21%	2%
2			5%	28%	30%	26%	35%	29%	38%	19%	16%
3				1%	16%	27%	25%	24%	34%	38%	42%
4						4%	8%	20%	13%	31%	10%
5									9%	8%	23%
6									4%	4%	3%

One last chart - what about goal conversion, are they more likely to score from the only chance?

	Chances	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Tot Goals		22	51	90	147	139	163	152	141	88	109
Conversion		28%	26%	33%	36%	38%	34%	33%	38%	38%	35%

The reality is no, when teams have fewer chances they convert less - I guess this is related to teams with fewer chances usually having weaker players.

I guess the reality is most of the time a team has 1 chance they score no goals, it just seems really lucky when they do.

451 "without forwards"

There are a number of experimental team doing the rounds at the moment which are achieving a degree of success - here I look at one of them.

451 with weak forwards

This works on the premise that a strong defence/midfield is the most important part of the team and exploits the 2WAA rule and forward farming to keep the mid/defence stronger than the opposition.

The basic premise is a normal squad designed for 451 but all forward players are farms - 17/4, 16/3 or similar. 

The first advantage of this is 2-3 farm players can generate millions each season which can be used to invest in higher skilled players in other areas. Example an extra 5m from farming each season means you are buying a 17/5 instead of a 17/4 - or a 30/16 instead of a 30/14. 

The second advantage of this approach is that you significantly reduce the age of the attacking part of your team. This lets you play some older players in midfield which can be more skillful and cheaper to buy than youngsters, or just have your midfield performing better because their average age is under 29 rather than over.

Does it work?

Several managers play in this way and have had a degree of success at the highest level. Jesus1983 was previously ranked #1 in the world and played with a 17/4 forward in the XCL final and has adapted his side to this way of playing. Freddy9adu won the major league and the cup and reached the XCL semi final playing predominantly with 16/3 forwards. I reached the XCL QF playing this way after winning the Hattrick cup and have had success in several private leagues including the prestigious Club24.

In Xpert chances are split roughly in a ratio of 1:2:4 between defence, midfield and attack, With a 451 formation your forward will get around 20% of a teams chances (including set pieces), and conversion of those chances will probably be about half. Having a stronger mid will likely give you more than 10% more chances and reduce opposition chances.

I've been playing this way for around 3 years and I think the best thing it gives is scope to maintain the team constantly without having to do rebuilds every few seasons. I much prefer a team that is always challenging rather than one that is occasionally on hiatus in the lower divisions.