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What I'm going to try now is that when I have extra money in the budget for the year, I will front-load contracts so I pay much more the 1st year (about 2.7x the average annual salary is about the maximum allowed), then the minimum for the 2nd and 3rd year (about 0.3x of the average annual salary is the minimum allowed).
And for additional years after that, I can put the maximum for the final year of the contract, in order to reduce the cost in the preceding years. And since the salary is so high for the final year, I can make a it a player option, even though the player would surely accept it, so it's like a normal non-optional year. But the player may like having the option and be willing to offer a discount on the contract because of it.
So paying the high salary the 1st year is a good deal since I don't need the extra budget room anyway. Then having low salaries each year followed by a high final year salary allows me to extract as much value from the player as possible (high performance for low cost). His value in terms performance per the salary starts to decrease the closer you get to the final year (if you look at his remaining years together as an average annual cost) so that when I do trade him, the other teams are getting less value per the cost. So instead of saying "I should get rid of this guy in case his ratings drop and I'm stuck holding the bag without getting a valuable trade in return," I can say, "I should get rid of this guy because even his high current ratings barely warrant his remaining salary because I already gained most of the low-salary benefits."
Whereas with a more flat salary structure, the player may be a good value over the whole contract, up until his ratings decline semi-randomly. So trading him before his decline is still a pretty good value for the team that is getting him. That's not ideal. Like some 70/80 player could have annual salary of 15m over 4 years (60m total). But with my method, he could be earning 4.5m the 1st and 2nd year, 10.5 in the 3rd year, with a 40.5m final year, so in the 2nd-to-last year, his average remaining salary is 25.5m, or in the 3rd-to-last year, it's 18.5m. You get the 4.5 mil price each year you keep him, and the other team gets saddled with a higher average salary costs the longer you wait.
Sure, you may get a lot less for your player when you trade him, or maybe even need to sweeten the deal with something to get teams to trade, but you'll have a lot more money to work with, which can let you take whatever free agents you want. And raising the salary cost of the other team could make them cough up more good value free agents, and make them unable to compete in the FA market. This could present an interesting play style where money and free agents are more important, different from the more common strategy of using those trades to acquire high potential prospects and keeping costs low that way.
Also with the front-loaded salary, I should have lower salary costs in the 2nd year, which would allow me to front-load other players in that 2nd year, and so on, constantly using budget surpluses to reduce costs for subsequent years, basically passing surpluses along instead of squandering them on marginally better free agents or whatever. I should have a lot of budget wiggle room each new season to use as I see fit.
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