Speaking of the overloaded server, the completely wipe-off of the retired players with low-salary might be a solution.
I could still see the profiles of all my dismissed players over the 5-season period. Now that we have the free player picking criteria, why not delete these worthless data and show nothing but "The player has retired" or other strings instead of his details, which occupy a lot more memory.
This might decrease the overhead of the whole system.