His biggest problem is going to be finding a roster for 2-3 seasons from now. The breakdown of his roster by age:

31: 4 players
30: 2
29: 3
28: 3
27: 0
26: 2
25: 2
24: 1
23: 1

That's a lot of old players. Old, high salary players tend to go fairly cheaply on the transfer market, so maybe he can afford to replace guys as they retire. It will be interesting to see how he's doing 3 seasons from now. This might just be crazy enough to work -- until other people see it working and start driving up the cost for those old players.

I see Galactica is also looking to add another RB on the transfer market with a weekly salary of $70,235. That along with the LB he was bidding on today would push his payroll to $1,428,506 which would be the #9 overall payroll in North America. I'm sure that owner is reading this thread and smiling with all the talk of the strategy they are going with.

I see this buying big wages strategy started only about a month ago. I assume then the early strategy was build seats and control costs. I would estimate they spent about 3 million adding these players on the transfer market and are now also paying a large wage bill. I still think cash becomes an issue before this team climbs into the top 2 or 3 divisions.

I'm just curious enough to run some numbers.

He has 6 more home league games this season. Let's figure he's going to average at least 51K (His attendance will increase, but some of that will be balanced by lower early attendance. I'm going to be conservative here). If he's maxed out his VIP and Exec seats, he'll make $1,458,730 per game. That's $13,128,570 for the season.

I don't know if the sponsors give less money in the lower divisions. I'm making a little over $72K per game in the scheme that favors winning teams (lower per game guarantee but higher per win). If he's getting $70K, that would be $1,260,000 for the season. If he gets $18K per win and wins out, which is incredibly likely with that roster in D5, he'd get $324,000 in league win sponsor money. Gameday sponsors for 36 games (league and friendly) would be another $162,000.

I'll make a rough guess at friendly income since I don't track mine. It looks like I probably got about $140K this week (hard to tell with the cup game included). That would be $2,520,000 over 18 games.

He's pretty much guaranteed to get $329,000 for winning his division.

Total income without any cup games: $17,723,570

At his current salaries, he'll pay $22,920,426 over the season.

So he's short about $5 million before we look at cup games. He's going to get at least 3 of them. At $600K each (rough guess based on my week this week) attendance, $13,500 for gameday sponsors and $24K per win (let's only count 2), that would be around $1.9 million. That would put him about $3 million in the hole for the season.

Looks like he seriously started buying players last month. He spent $5.4 million and change.

Worst case, he's short around $8.4 million for the season. He's been here since the end of May 2015 and never won a trophy, so he probably has some money saved. He can absorb that loss for a couple of seasons at least.

If he goes deeper in the cup, his numbers would look much better. I figure each cup win would be worth close to $650K. Cup prize money is small enough to be a rounding error in these calculations unless you go very deep, so I'm not even including them.

But..............if he were to win the cup and go to the AFLC, that would be his trump card, because that would even him out. Also, he may have a decent bank account that could sustain some losses for perhaps 5 or 6 seasons. I guess we'll all see, but it is an interesting strategy. I'm curious if he does indeed have no coaches? That would really be maximizing his strategy.

Well, we are about 24 hours away from our cup match. Feels weird as a division II team feeling like an underdog to a division V team. Here is the payroll review as we head toward the game. Galactica (division V) has the #7 highest payroll in North America at $1,557,156. Clayton Bears (division II) has the #19 highest payroll in North America at $1,115,176. Clayton Bears should have an advantage in team chemistry but that $450,000 in payroll looks large.