Creating Financials

[Eomi]

I've been experimenting with creating my own financials, but I can't seem to find a good balance. Usually within two or three seasons players start signing for twice the "Superstar Quality typical salary." In my last attempt salaries/incomes were lined up thus:

Coach - 75,000
Min - 100,000
Poor - 125,000
Fair - 200,000
B. Avg - 300,000
Avg - 450,000
A. Avg - 750,000
Good - 1,200,000
Star - 2,000,000
S. Star - 3,000,000

Cash Max - 6,000,000
Avg Media - 5,300,000
Avg. Attend - 20,000 at $5.00 and 20% away gate

Also, no salary cap, media based on market size, entire revenue available, and no revenue sharing. The league has 10 teams.

The main problem that I'm having is that as soon as a solid star player - but hardly one of the top in the league - hits the market, he gets a $5,000,000+ per year contract. Granted, the league is in its early seasons still (and it's more an experiment than anything), but it seems teams are making too much money from the get go.

Perhaps related is the spread in payrolls/budgets:

1) 24.2 mil / 23.0 mil
2) 23.7 mil / 25.9 mil
3) 22.9 mil / 21.4 mil
4) 20.2 mil / 24.4 mil
5) 18.0 mil / 19.5 mil
6) 17.5 mil / 15.8 mil
7) 17.1 mil / 20.5 mil
8) 14.9 mil / 18.1 mil
9) 14.1 mil / 21.5 mil
10) 12.4 mil / 14.7 mil

As you can see, some teams are overspending their bugets by quite a bit (though they do mostly have the whole $6 mil in cash left over from previous seasons), while other teams are underspending by as much as $7 million. Perhaps I ought to not allow full revenue for signings? Also, I'm considering a salary cap, but I don't know where I should set it with the above mentioned salaries.

I should add, I'm looking for a fairly balanced league, but with definite smaller and larger markets. I would prefer if salaries stay near the above listed values for the appropriate level of player, and I want especially smaller market teams to have to work not to overspend. Any suggestions/ideas?

[Khrog]

You have a few options...I would either sim 10-20 seasons w/o taking over a team and see if the finances sort themselves out or have the game assign contracts to all of the players when I started the game. The new fictional contracts would probably "fix" your issue.