[NoOne]

the game wil work on supply and demand.

if salaries are higher than you like to see, reduce revenue --- one way or another.

national media contract, local media contract, ticket price baseline, mechandise baseline... baseline attendance... missing anything?

note the different ramifcations of each... some effect all in the same way, like national media contract, while others are weighted by success to some extent. so dropping those will hurt currently successful teams a bit more than currently unsuccessful teams.

if you have inflation on, it is inevitable that it all rises higher than you like to see... turn that off, if so, or let it ride.

on the finances settings page there should be some estimates. expect about ~35M to be spent on non-player costs and 10-15M in profit. subtract that from estimated revenue and that's your average payroll... if ~125-135 or so, your max salaries in league won't go much over ~30M in any given year, and some years won't go that high. just to give you some form of baseline to work with. creep up even a bit more to 135-140 range and a 30+M salary will almost always exist in league and so on...maybe even a rare ~40M at that point? really depends on some other factors too -- like market sizes and if you customized them from default... default or ~similar market distribution will work like i predict.

so, ~125-135 average payroll will likely have a ~180M average total revenue.

this is based on experience from previous ootp releases... new release may have new dynamics, but it won't shift too far.

also, expect some oddities at the beginning of a league. give it time before drawing a conclusion.. and if you change any of these settings, use a restored backup to test it out... zoom out at least as long as the longest contract you allow -- default 10 years. this way, every contract at start is guarnateed to be "new" at that point. i'd actualyl zome out ~15 to assess such a thing. the contracts in first few years can be different financial contexts than how it will be in perpetuity after that.

Also -- if one team is extremely rich, that will cause initial demands of players to be high... you'll likely have to wait for demands to drop more often than normal. if it's your team, then nearly all extensions will be overpriced. you are better off letting them hit FA nearly every single time -- still offer and see initial demand of course. then when other franchises can't afford their silly demands on FA market, it will drop over time until it reaches a normal range for the other "29" teams. if oyu bid early, you lock yourself out of a better price and make the player angry... this is all about timing in this context... (this will happen in a normal and default league too, but not as often as what i described for one insanely rich team in a defualt league, otherwise.)