Not sack but otherwise might not release to FA but extend and then sell, thus limiting the actual FA market. This way, the rider is made available to all teams to bid on just like if he was an FA, and the selling team gets a compensation for not renewing and selling.

Don't really see the benefit in combining those two system as proposed. Imho you renew or you don't. Having managers place a second bid on certain riders seems to be a side track and represents a more restricted version of transfers (taking the liberty of negotiation away).

So the overall benefit of Abhishek's idea would be more transfers (under a different name). But I have an example where this idea is probably too generous: Fuglsang. He's dropped to AVG 74.4, but he'd still make a nice super domestique for another year for his new min wage. But since he comes off a high wage, he'll ask too much from me and I have to sack him. With this proposal I might get a bit of money out of him and if nobody is interested I should get to keep him for his min wage - he didn't score enough to demand more, but the problem of the old wage vanished. Maybe a rare example, I don't know.

As for steal compensation, it would at least require a new column in the db... seems easier just to get rid of them, especially since a few managers are strongly against them. Having said that, I'm still ambivalent. It is an extra step, an extra bit of depth to the game. For a "stealer" it does limit the problem jandal talked about, it's sort of an extra FA round. Had I not been able to steal Majka the first FA round would have been a nightmare. Ok, now I have an "established" WT team and don't need to do anything drastic and so I can join the other side of the argument and say get rid of steals. But maybe that's being a bit unfair. In any case, it's that "extra round" which makes steals interesting to me and if we can find a different solution to the "jandal problem" then we can really bury them.

I'll also comment on knockout's idea 2b, though first: Come on, knockout, please return to the fold! You have a great team and in the past have written great comments in the teams thread, etc. As for the idea, it is really radical. Everybody starts from scratch every season. No more super domestiques on the min wage, anybody who's at least good enough for a CT leadership will earn a captain's wage. Even with a loyalty discount for the former team's "buy-back option" it can get very expensive. Plus it will be next to impossible to plan financially, you just never know how high the bids will go. Definitely very exciting, probably heart breaking. But I can also see it just keeping the established order at the point it's introduced, the teams with the biggest budgets will always have the best squads. In the current system there is a complacency factor (and when a croatia14 comes around he can upend it all).

On another side, what speaks clearly against steals: The FA market will be huge this season with several teams surely disbanding and cash is already taken out of his existing teams by (probably?) tougher negotiations. So maybe there is really no need for steals to begin with when guys like Herklotz, Kittel and Sagan are available on the market.

Well I like you but seeing how two guys pulled off the same strategy that season and both failed so hard they needed to be bailed out by bikex, it's hard to argue that the strategy wasn't anything but wrong

Sagan is on the market???

With many managers already putting up riders for sale, everyone knows the early options available on the market, and might be more inclined to let one of their stars or super-doms go to try to get one of the available riders in the restricted FA. This round should basically replace steals, so it's the first thing that happens, even before renewals.

I had already said before that the transfers as they are now should also stay, to allow negotiations.


Well, not exactly what I had in mind.

The idea is that the rider, once transferred to a new team, will still have a contract negotiation, but if there is no bid, there will be a contract negotiation with the old team as well, so you don't exactly get to keep the rider for min wage. The situation without a bid would be the same as if you never put up the rider for sale at all in restricted FA.

You're right I guess in regards to my situation with the two leaders in 2018, fair hit However I still think it's right when you talk about other situations even if that particular one was my fault, but now others have argued for that system I appreciate there are still strategies with more nuance that work fine, and it's whoever's fault for not adapting to the system more than the system's fault

True.

it's so funny to have Herklotz compared to Kittel and Sagan as top class riders

One more thought on dynamism (think that is the word we want) - I understand people want to be able to protect riders they develop. But if you make that too strong there is no risk in that strategy - long term success becomes about signing as many good young riders as you can and waiting (Except for disbanding, but not sure relying on that for dynamism is great).

So maybe there needs to be risk in development - you could have a "professionalism" rating and if the rider fails a test you get less/no development that year.

Could work with my rider personalities idea which introduces dynamism both within teams and between teams with riders acting differently, so long as it is at least somewhat a known quantity for each rider. Again it's probably a lot of work to implement and get right but could help give that "dynamism" we so long for.

Isn't it enough already that we don't know the full potential of riders? It is much less predictable already than the Man Game in this regard where one formula fits all, I don't understand why we should put additional hurdles into rider development.

Minor changes is what we had all the years before but it didn't really fix the real flaws of the system but only countered some of the effects. So, I think a new system is needed at some point that is thought through and has no features that (rightfully) anger a handful of managers, because they deem them unfair.

However, I think it's probably too late to implement something completely new this season, so the best way to have it this year is probably to keep the old system but remove steals. The demanded wages will be calculated by a new formula that rates captains and good talents higher. The min wage for domestiques will be reduced. Also the way free agent negotiations go will be changed a little bit, so that it becomes less likely that someone miss out completely on his targets or signs riders for 20k combined.

We'll see how it works and for long term there have been some great ideas proposed which will be considered. Something like rider personalities could definitely be included. Maybe also something some more things that can be negotiated during transfers like role in team, some specific agreements about race planning, ...



The web app is made with react and hosted in google firebase. For getting some old results I have a web crawler written in python and some scripts to process the data.

Hey guys, long time no see

I have only skim-read through most of the suggestions so far, but I'll leave a couple of opinions here.

I think steals should stay, but each team should be limited to a maximum amount of steal attempts per season (I'm thinking 2 as a maximum). Riders who are retained as part of this system cannot be transferred. Compensation for stolen riders is a good idea though, maybe the ICL awards the team who loses a rider some extra money, part of which is paid by the successful stealing team. (e.g. old team receives 500 extra budget, the new team loses 250 from their budget).

Loyalty bonuses are a good thing and I don't think teams should be punished for having a rider for more than 3 seasons (I might be a bit biased here, for obvious reasons). The leadership/role idea is interesting though, so perhaps if a rider is under-performing or only the third strongest sprinter/GC rider in their team they may want to move elsewhere for more opportunity.

One possible idea: let's have transfers finish before renewals are complete. This means that teams can still make deals to secure a rider from another team, but managers won't "hoard" riders and renew them just to get a transfer fee. Final renewals and FA signings will take place after the end of transfer season, and any rider who is not renewed will be available in the FA rounds.

FA - the old system worked well and this season's one was ok too. The big problem as some people mentioned is that teams would get into debt by getting more riders than they intended to. I think that if a team goes over budget (either into debt or with less than enough money to complete their squad) they should be able to retract their offer to one of the riders they signed in the FA round. This is could be a bit complex to understand, so I'll give an example in the spoiler.



Either way, glad to see ICL is going as strong as ever and I'll gladly be back for the 2020 season!

Don't forgot to sign up for the new season, OZ!

Your idea about transfers sound similar to what Abhishek proposed. But if you do transfers before renewals, nobody would have to sack a good rider to stay inside their budget (or have budget room for new FAs). Also, what will the wage demand be? Don't you have to have renewals before transfers?

Yeah, looking back my idea is fairly similar to Abhishek's.

The way how it would work is you have an initial round of steals, which works similar to the current first round of renewals. Only those riders who have a steal offer are included, you don't have to renew any other riders yet which means teams still have budget space. If a team pays too much to keep their leaders or to steal another team's leader, they will not have much money left afterwards and they will likely have to lose some of their other valuable riders.

The other option which I am leaning towards is that you can also renew riders in this first round as well, but any riders renewed are not allowed to be sold/swapped later.

Next, there are transfers, which work as they have in the past. Riders who move teams will have their new wages based on what they requested at renewals, but may be slightly higher (if they previously had a loyalty discount) or lower (if they wanted to leave their original team). At the end of transfers, these riders go through renewals along with the other contracted riders who haven't been signed yet. If a new contract cannot be agreed, they go to FA.


I don't think I explained that well, but hopefully it made some sense

(Slightly off-topic - I'm trying to relate ICL transfers to some of the fairer-seeming rules which I've seen in professional sport. The best systems would allow player movement but not result in the same few teams always being at the top.)

Before starting the renewals I still want to get some opinions on the new min wages. I came up with a formula that would result in these new min wages:

AVG	Old	New
70	100	100
70,5	100	100
71	100	100
71,5	100	100
72	110	100
72,5	140	110
73	160	120
73,5	190	140
74	220	160
74,5	250	190
75	280	220
75,5	310	260
76	350	300
76,5	380	350
77	420	390
77,5	460	440
78	500	500
78,5	540	560
79	580	620
79,5	620	680
80	670	750
80,5	710	820
81	750	900
81,5	800	970
82	840	1050

Do you think it is good or have any other suggestions?

seems this isn't a regular hyperbolic curve, why sometimes the increasing of wage at high AVGs is lesser than lower AVGs?
anyway new formula looks better

That's probably due to rounding the result of the formula to the next increment of 10