Originally Posted by Viking
This was FM 2000 though, maybe it isn't that easy anylonger...anyway, what I did was selling out all the top players, putting on free transfer those who I could (of course, don't sell all at once); buying in the worst of the worst players that I could find; typically checking the UEFA cup schedules for som really crappy players from the continent. The last step is demolishing the stadium in order to remove most of the income. The AI manager(s) never managed to compensate for this, though modern games probably haver better AI.