How does teh database size work once existing players retire?

[Highsis]

TLDR: I want to play England clubs for 15 years, then manage an unknown national team from Asia(which is available from the start). Do I need to select an Asian league for that, or would that national team available at the start still be available after 15 years even if I don't choose that particular league?

My plan is to start in England's 6th division and move up all the way to the Premier league, win all competitions, become a manager of a weak national team from Asia, win World Cup, and retire.

The problem is, if I start with a small database to speed up my plan, only handful of strong European nations are available to choose from. I want national teams around the world to continuously receive new players even if their league is not selected, so that I can choose that national team and also get a fair amount of competition against other Asian teams.

Large database does enable many national teams even if I only select England as a starting nation, but I'm wondering if that database size is kept consistent in number and distribution. Let's say I had 15000 players in my starting database, 12000 players in England, and 3000 players around the world. After 10 years when most of those players had retired, how does the number and distribution of the database change? In particular, I would like to know answers to these questions:

1. If one nation is selected, does the 'small' database differ from the 'large' database in size and distribution of player nationality once every player in the original database retire? I will probably try to manage an Asian national team after 10~15 years. In earlier versions of FM, whichever country that was selected received good players and kept winning World Cup after like 10 years because other nations started being filled with grey-named players. I would like to know if Asian national teams will receive new players without selecting their leagues. (not grey-name-tagged)

2. Does choosing a league affect influx of new players in number and quality? Say, if I want to manage Korean national team 15 years later, should I choose Korean league even if I don't intend to manage any of their teams, or would selecting the large database with only England selected which enables Korean national team at the start do?

3. If an unknown national team is available at the start, will it be available after 15 years to manage?

4. Is the gamespeed more affected by number of players or number of leagues?

Thanks in advance. Mostly I'm conflicted if I have go with England with large database(15k players) or choose more Asian leagues(around 11k players) for my plan. I don't know what's faster, and I don't know the number, quality, and nationality of new players I will have after 15 years.

I really hope I could get an answer to these questions. It's been bugging me for years since I didn't want to start a game, play for 150 hours, to realize "oh, I can't play that national team that was available at season 1 anymore." and start over. Thanks in advance!

[Dave O'Leary]

Hi, good question.

1) The larger database you choose the more players will be selected in order of reputation. So if you start with just England loaded with a large database, you'll see more overseas players than you would with a small database but they're more likely to be from big European and American leagues than Asian ones, purely because the reputations of the leagues, clubs and players are larger in those places. Likewise the overseas regens that eventually replace the retired players in the original database will be those with the highest reputations so most likely from European and American clubs

2) Absolutely, it affects the number of regens from that nation in the database as all of the players and regens from the leagues that you've chosen in that nation will be visible. It doesn't affect quality. Using your example, definitely select the nation that you want to manage when starting the game as you'll want as big a pool of those national players as possible

3) Not necessarily, national teams are only available if a big enough pool of players of that nationality are loaded in the database, so if you can load the nation into the game, definitely do it as it'll certainly help and should pretty much guarantee you'll be able to play as that national side

4) Absolutely, that's why there's a 3 nation limit on FMT, although you can take this off if you're on PC, Mac or Linux

So as you can see there's no guaranteed way of making it so that an obscure national side is available after 15 years, but these points should help