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The IAFA or International Amateur Free Agents system is a way for organizations to sign generated international prospects to their organization. Every year a pool of players will be created and announced to teams via an email/mail announcement. Every organization will be given a period of time to look over the players before signings commence at a later date. These players will usually have high potential but will also be very raw in current talent making them potentially high prospects for organizations.
International Scouting and Budget Trading
Before signing begins users can have their scouting directors invite and scout players they deem interesting. These invitational practices can be accessed by going to the scouting tab and then navigating to the Scouting>International sub-section.
On this page, you can use your practices to run invitees through to learn more about their abilities and gain loyalty with them. You can invite 10 players at one time and you can run the practices monthly. If you do not run the practices manually your scouting director will automatically invite players and run practices. The relationship or loyalty you earn with players will make them more likely to sign with your organization even if they’ve received a similar offer from another team. However, be aware that other organizations will be building relationships with players as well.
IAFA Budget Trading
In addition to scouting and inviting players to camp organizations will also be able to trade IAFA budget space. They can trade for or trade away budget space with other organizations. To trade away or trade for IAFA budget space you will need to add those as a line item in the Initiate Trade screen with another organization.
The cap trading rules in OOTP are the same as in real life;
An MLB club can trade up to 100% of its ISBP (international signing bonus pool), and a club can acquire up to 60% of its assigned ISBP via trade or trades. While up to 100% of a club's originally-assigned ISBP (plus up to an additional 60% of the club's originally-assigned ISBP that might be acquired in a trade or trades) can be traded, there are some restrictions:
A club's ISBP (or a portion of it) can only be traded during the International Signing Period (ISP) to which the ISBP was assigned. In real life this is January 15th through December 15th, but in OOTP this is from the signing period start until the next IAFA reveal.
A club can trade ISBP space only in increments of $250K (including multiples of $250K) unless the club was trading all of its remaining ISBP in one transaction. If one of these rules isn't met, the trade button will be greyed out.
IAFA Event
Once the IAFA signing date is met all organizations will begin offering contracts to players in the pool. Contract negotiations will commence and teams will fight to secure the players they want to add to their squads. You will need to use your budgeted IAFA money wisely to make sure you get the players you want.
In order to prevent teams from acquiring all of the top tier talent the IAFA has two types of spending caps. The first cap is a hard cap which is the default setting. Teams are allotted a certain budget cap for IAFA players and when that cap is met they are not allowed to go beyond that for the signing period.
The second cap is a soft cap set by turning off the check box that reads Use hard Intl. Amateur FA Cap in the League Settings>Players Tab. If that checkbox is deselected teams will be able to go over the set IAFA signing cap but will incur penalties if they do so. The penalties for spending above the cap are: