How to make money in ELDT: step-by-step from day one

You’ve just been handed a club in ELDT and you’re not quite sure where to start. This is the step-by-step guide with real numbers for what we’d do from the very first minute to help your club make money and avoid going bust: what to change, in what order, where each option is in the menu, and how much money each decision can bring in.

All the figures in this guide come from real clubs managed by managers who started in the lower divisions. They’re approximate: they change depending on your division, your stadium and your results, but they give you a clear idea of what matters and what doesn’t.

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What your club looks like when you start

A new club in ELDT starts out something like this:

• Cash: about $30M.
• Squad: about 24 players, costing around $300K to $330K a week in total.
• Stadium: around 2.100 standing places, 800 seats and 200 VIP places.
• Fans: between 500 and 1.500, depending on the club.

And this is what moves the money at a club like this, per week:

• Gate receipts: $1,6M to $1,9M per home match.
• Concessions: about $300K per home match.
• Merchandising: about $200K per home match.
• Sponsors: $270K to $310K per week with all 3 stands signed up.
• TV: about $48K per match.
• Prize for winning or drawing: about $72K and $22K.
• Squad wages: −$300K to −$330K per week.
• Stadium maintenance: −$50K per week.

The takeaway: the home match is where the big money comes from, by some distance. A good home match pays the wages on its own. That’s why this guide starts there.

Day 1: the first 30 minutes

Step 1. Check your cash and your upcoming payments

Where: menu → Finances.

What to do:

1. Check your cash: that’s the money you have today.
2. Scroll down to Upcoming payments: that shows everything that will be deducted at Monday’s closing (player wages, staff wages, stadium maintenance).
3. Note down how much you pay per week. That figure is your floor: never let cash drop below 4 or 5 weeks of payments.

Why: if your cash goes below zero, your team performs 20 % worse, and if you go through 2 weekly closings in the red in a row, you lose the club. With $30M in cash and around $400K in weekly payments, you’re comfortable, but one badly handled big signing can take you to zero.

Be careful: if your cash goes above $50M, you pay a wealth tax every Monday, starting at 0,6 % per week and rising the more you hoard. Too much cash sitting there will slowly disappear.

Step 2. Sign sponsors for all 3 stands

Where: menu → Sponsors.

What to do:

1. You’ll see your three stands: Standing, Seats and VIP. Each one has up to 3 offers from different brands.
2. On each stand, compare the offers: how much they pay per week and how many weeks the contract lasts.
3. Before signing, negotiate: put in a figure a little above the offer and send it. You’ve got up to 2 rounds. An 8 % to 12 % bump usually works.
4. Sign an offer in each stand. All three.

How much: in a new club, offers tend to be around $73K per week in Standing, $84K in Seats and $109K in VIP. Negotiate well and you can get about 10 % more. The three together leave you with about $270K to $310K per week, compared with roughly $220K from the basic sponsor you get if you sign nothing.

Why: it’s money coming in every week without you lifting a finger. It’s the easiest money in the game, and yet most new managers don’t do it: out of nearly 500 clubs in the lower divisions, only 35 have signed their stands.

Tips:

• Brands have personalities. The conservative ones pay steadily and for a long time, but they don’t budge much in negotiations. The ambitious ones start high and have room to move. The opportunistic ones start low and with short contracts, but they’re the ones that improve the most if you push them.
• Your manager reputation increases offers. The more famous you are, the more brands pay (up to 40 % more).
• If you go up a division, your contracts automatically rise to the base level of the new division until they expire.
• If you reject an offer, new ones for that stand take 3 days to arrive. Don’t reject for the sake of it.

Step 3. Adjust ticket prices

Where: menu → Stadium → section Sections and prices.

What to do:

1. At the top of the page, check how the last home match was filled, section by section.
2. Look at the price of each section. In a new club, prices are around $530 for Standing, $2.100 for Seats and $8.300 for VIP.
3. For each section that doesn’t fill up, ask yourself: is it not filling because of the price, or because you simply don’t have more fans? Your fans set a cap on how many people can come to the pitch. If you’re already at that cap, lowering the ticket price won’t bring anyone else in.
4. Test it: change one section’s price, play a home match and compare in Finances how much it brought in from tickets, food and shirts. Repeat until you find the price that brings in the most.

How much: a new club brings in $1,6M to $1,9M in gate receipts per home match. With a full stadium at the right price, you can get more than double that.

Why: tickets are the biggest source of income in the game. The right price is not always the one that fills the ground: an empty stand earns nothing, but a ticket given away too cheaply doesn’t help either. The only way to know is to test and measure.

Step 4. Set your XI and training

Where: menu → Line-up and Training.

What to do:

1. In Line-up, put out your best XI and bench for the next match.
2. In Training, choose what your squad trains this week.

Why it matters for money: each win earns a prize (around $72K) and each draw about $22K. Winning brings in more fans, and more fans means more tickets. The Copa ELDT pays from $500K for each round you get through. And at the end of the season, winning your division pays about $2M, plus $1,5M for promotion.

Days 1 to 3: sort out the squad

Step 5. Identify the players you don’t need

Where: menu → Squad.

What to do:

1. Look at each player’s OVR (their overall level), position by position.
2. For each position, keep 2 players (starter and backup), and in goal keep 2 goalkeepers.
3. Mark as "surplus" anyone who doesn’t even make the bench, anyone over 32 who isn’t a starter (they won’t improve any more and they lose value), and anyone you’ve got in excess where you already have 3 or more players in that role.

Why: every player gets paid every week, whether they play or not. Around 22 to 25 players is enough for the league, the cup and friendlies.

Step 6. Sell or loan out the surplus

Where: menu → Squad → buttons SELL or LOAN on each player.

Option A, SELL (auction):

1. Click SELL on the player.
2. Set the starting price. It has to be at least 30 % of their market value. If you set it too low, they can go for cheap.
3. The auction lasts 3 days and the highest bidder gets them.
4. When it closes, you get the price minus a 10 % agents’ commission.

Option B, LOAN:

1. Click LOAN on the player.
2. Choose how much of the wages the other club pays (all of it, 75 % or half of it) and whether you demand minutes each week.
3. Check the minimum fee: it comes pre-filled with a suggested figure based on the player’s value. The maximum fee is 1 % of their value for each week left in the season.
4. Put it up. After 3 days, the best bid takes them.
5. The player stays at the other club until the end of the season and returns to your squad.

Which is better?

• Sell players you’ll never use again: veterans, filler backups.
• Loan out young players who aren’t playing but have a future: they get minutes, train better and come back.

Be careful: a player you’ve just bought cannot be resold for 14 days. And each player can only be loaned out once per season.

Week 1: get everything up and running

Step 7. Hire only the staff that actually pay off

Where: menu → Staff.

What to do:

1. Right at the top, look at the table "What each staff member gives you today".
2. First, the head coach. Without one, your squad trains without a bonus. A level 1 or 2 coach costs between $220K and $500K in bonus and $70K to $170K per week. A level 5 coach adds 40 % more training, but costs about $500K per week.
3. The commercial manager and accountant can wait. The commercial manager adds 1 % to 3 % to gate receipts and concessions. With a club taking around $2M per match, that’s $20K to $60K, and a level 3 commercial manager costs $300K per week: it doesn’t make sense yet. Hire them when you’re bringing in much more.

Why: every staff member has a sign-on bonus and a fixed weekly wage. At a small club, an expensive one costs more than they bring in. Each card shows you whether they’re worth it for your club’s numbers: trust the numbers.

Step 8. Play home friendlies

Where: menu → Friendlies.

What to do:

1. Invite other clubs to play at your ground on free days (you can’t do it in league and cup time slots).
2. When you invite them, choose to play at home.
3. Put out the backups and players returning from injury.

Why: the shop also sells in friendlies, you get minutes for the backups and you can test tactics without risking points. Just remember that friendlies still tire players out (a quarter as much as a league match).

Step 9. Do the missions and check the objectives

Where: menu → My Club.

What to do:

1. Check the daily missions and complete them: they’re quick tasks that give a small reward every day.
2. Check the season objectives: completing them pays money, reputation and fans.
3. Review the "For today" section: it warns you about bids, injured players, suspensions, sponsors expiring and anything else still pending.

Weeks 2 to 4: invest to earn more

Step 10. See how much each home match brings in

Where: menu → Finances.

There you’ll find a table showing what each of your last home matches brought in: tickets, concessions, merchandising, commercial manager and TV. And another one with everything that came in and went out over the last 30 days, broken down by category. That tells you what is worth improving.

Step 11. Invest in the stadium, in this order

Where: menu → Stadium, Concessions and Merchandising.

Before each build, check what the game tells you: how much it adds per match and how many home matches it takes to pay for itself. If it pays back in fewer than 15 or 20 matches, it’s worth it.

Recommended order for a new club:

1. Concessions level 2 ($3M): increases how much each fan spends on food and drink. Takes 2 weeks.
2. Shop level 2 ($2M): more people buy and spend more at each match.
3. Expand the section that always fills up. The cheapest is Standing +1.000 places for $3,5M (3 weeks). Seats +500 costs $5,5M and VIP +100 costs $7M. Only expand what fills up: if a section doesn’t fill, making it bigger adds nothing.
4. Pitch level 2 ($3,5M): it doesn’t bring direct money, but it improves home advantage, and winning at home is money.
5. LED screens ($10M) and parking ($7M): they bring more people into the ground. Leave them until the stadium is already filling up.

Be careful: everything you invest in improvements carries 2 % monthly maintenance, and the stands also have maintenance per seat. Don’t build what you won’t use.

Step 12. Marketing, when you’ve got the fans for it

Where: menu → Marketing.

What to do:

1. Check how many extra people each campaign brings in and how much money that means per match.
2. The cheapest is Local: $1M, 4 weeks, +10 % attendance. After that there’s a Regional one (needs 5.000 fans) and a National one (needs 20.000).
3. Don’t sign it if your stadium is already full: the section tells you when it’s not worth it.

Step 13. Get your academy going

Where: menu → Academy.

What to do:

1. Check your youngsters and their potential.
2. Set their line-up for the Youth Tournament (Thursday and Saturday mornings).
3. When a youngster is old enough and good enough, promote them to the first team: the game warns you in "For today".

Why: a youngster who turns out well is worth far more than what they cost. You either use them or sell them. It’s your long-term money factory.

Your weekly routine

Once everything is up and running, this is what we do every week:

1. Monday: Finances → see how the cash looks after the closing.
2. Tuesday (Cup, 21 hs): check the cup XI.
3. Thursday and Saturday (league, 21 hs): check the XI before the match. My Club → "For today" warns you if there are injured, suspended or tired players in the XI.
4. After every home match: Stadium → adjust prices based on how each section filled up.
5. When a sponsor expires: sign a new one straight away, so the stand doesn’t stay empty.
6. Every two weeks: Squad → sell or loan out what you don’t need.
7. If cash goes above $50M: invest it. Over that figure, you pay tax every week.

The 7 mistakes that send a new club bust

1. Blowing the cash on the first signing without checking wages. A pricey player also comes with a pricey wage, every week.
2. Not signing sponsors. It’s the easiest money in the game and hardly anyone collects it.
3. Having a huge squad. Every extra player is wage money spent on someone who doesn’t play.
4. Cranking ticket prices up blindly. An empty ground doesn’t pay or sell anything.
5. Hiring expensive staff at a small club. A commercial manager on $300K a week doesn’t pay for themselves at a club bringing in $2M per match.
6. Taking a bank loan to sign players. Borrowing always costs more: the bank is for emergencies or for building work.
7. Expanding stands that don’t fill up. You pay for the build and the maintenance, and you don’t gain a penny.

Frequently asked questions

What’s the first thing I should do in ELDT to make money?

Sign the sponsors for all 3 stands and sort out ticket prices. Those are the two steps that bring in the most money for the least effort.

What’s the fastest way to get money?

Sell a player you don’t need through an auction. It brings in money at once and saves you their weekly wage too.

How much money does a new club make per week?

It depends on the stadium and the results, but with one home match a week, signed sponsors and an organised squad, a new club can make around $2M per week after wages.

Can you buy game money with real money?

No. In ELDT, real money does not buy players, points or cash. Supporter gives cosmetic and information features only, never an advantage. We explain it in ELDT is not pay to win.

What do I do if I run out of money?

If cash goes red, you’ve got two options: a special loan to get out of the red (8 weekly instalments) or an emergency sale of players at 40 % of their value. It’s all explained in the finances guide.

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More guides for your club

• Finances, sponsors and loans
• Stadium and staff
• Transfer market
• The academy
• Season objectives
• Weekly calendar

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