Arbitration - Owner Leaves the League

Just finished first year of my league and had an owner let me know today that he’s not going to be returning. How does this affect the upcoming arbitration? Obviously if I fill it before the arb period expires I imagine the owner participates, but if unable to get a person in time, does the league just miss out on one team’s arb decisions?

If I get someone after the arb period expires, has anyone seen a manual application based on an ‘offline’ list (would run it by my league first, but just curious if folks think that’s an option)?

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If you can’t get someone to take over before arbitration ends, you can recruit someone temporarily to handle arbitration.

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When we have an owner leave I ask that they stay until 10/15 and on that day allocate their team’s arb money in full. I then abandon the team, and the new owner has ~ a month to make changes.

We have a league-specific rule created for this scenario: all money for any new owner, regardless of date of takeover, must be paid for the following season within 24 hrs of taking over the team. This way we don’t have someone take over a team in our $100 league, allocate arb, make trades, then leave in January.

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Similar issue here. Just finished first year of my league and most of the owners are MIA. Maybe 4 returning. How do we play next year? How do we handle arbitration?

I would consider starting a new league as it’s going to be a lot easier to find 8 guys interested in joining a first year league than it is 8 guys inheriting what are probably some of the worst teams in the league.

But to answer your question, although it’s kind of a major pain in the butt, you can do arbitration “manually” after arbitration ends. That is, you assign allocations via a Google sheet (which you thoroughly check to make sure it conforms with the rules) and have the commissioner enter them in as manual salary adjustments. I’ve only ever done that for one person, though. It would be kind of annoying to do it for 8 guys and there’s a chance for data entry error, so you have to have someone check your work. But that might be a possibility if you decide to continue but don’t fill out the league before November 15th.

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The first thing to do is to decide if you want to continue in the league. That means choosing between adding replacement managers or just shutting the league down and starting over. If you are going to find replacement managers, start immediately by posting in the Managers Wanted forum and reaching out to people on the Available Owners list. @walt526 is right though, it will be a big lift to add 8 people to a league, and probably easier to start from scratch.

If you find replacement managers, they can do the arbitration. Doing any of the arb manually for a league missing 8 managers is a fool’s errand. So the question isn’t “how to do arb while down X managers?”, it’s “are we going to continue this league by finding X new managers or are we going to quit this league?”

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