Tutorial - How to Create Ethnic/Expatriate Teams in FM

[Sambamtime]

If you've ever wanted to create a team that generates players of dual-nationality, you've come to the right place!

In this tutorial, I will create a team made up of Chinese-Americans located in Boston (MA). More specifically, southern Boston.

Here is the team looks like in-game before going to the pre-game editor:

Notice the complete lack of generated Chinese players and names.

What I'd like to do is change the nationality of players generated by the team from purely American to Chinese-American.

Pre-tutorial: If you don’t want all generated players from the city the club is located in to be of dual nationality, please start at this step. Otherwise, start the Tutorial step.

Let’s start → On the left-hand side of the editor, click ‘Database’, then 'Cities'. Finally, click ‘Add’ on the bottom right.

Fill out what is marked in red (in the picture below). Make sure to name the new city and set it to the nation your team is located. In this case, I have set it to the USA since this will be an American based club. DO NOT fill out ‘Languages’ and ‘Local Region’. The sections marked in blue are optional to fill out as they are for realism. I have filled them out for that reason

The reasoning for this is that I do not want all players from the city of Boston (MA) to be Chinese. So I instead create a new city called South Boston (MA) so that it will generate Chinese players.

Note that not putting in a Latitude and Longitude for the city will make it difficult for the team to have friendlies with other clubs as geographically, they would be located in the ocean.

Tutorial: On the left-hand side, click on ‘Database’, then go down to ‘Local Regions’ and click on it. Click on ‘Add Condition’, then click on ‘Nation’.

Now, when searching for a region to use, preferably use one of a non-FIFA country (i.e. Zanzibar, Micronesia, etc.), a minor footballing nation (i.e. Sudan, Anguilla, etc.), or one with sparsely populated areas (i.e. Russia, etc.) as to avoid any potential problems of messing with Important nations.

For this example, I will use Mongolia. So, type in Mongolia into the text bar. A multitude of regions will appear. Click on any of them.

This is an example of a screen you might see:

If you see any language(s) under ‘Languages’. Select all of them and click ‘Remove’. Now, rename the region whatever you want. The name doesn’t matter, but preferably, name it something that relates to the country of origin of the club (I will name this “Little Beijing”). Click on the arrow under ‘Nation’ and select the country that your ethnic team is from (I will choose China as I want a Chinese ethnic team). Finally, add the languages of the country from which the club is based, and the ones where the expats are from.

For me, this means I will add the languages of China and of the USA. This is so the players will generate knowing the languages of both countries. When you’ve completed that, click ‘Cities’ (marked in blue).

When you click on ‘Cities’, you may see a list of cities in the region appear. If any cities appear, select all of them and click ‘Remove’.

In the bottom right, click ‘Add’. Then click ‘Add Condition’ → ‘Name’, then type in the name of the city you’re using. When you find it, click on it then click ‘Ok’

Now access your club through the arrows on the left hand side, or go to ‘Database’ → ‘Clubs’ and search for your club.

When you’re there, click on the arrow under ‘City’, then search for the city that you’ve been using. Note that if you’ve done this correctly so far, ‘Local Region’ should show the name of your edited region (in blue)

When starting a new game with the editor file, your team should be producing dual-national players!

As seen below, there is now a significant increase in the amount of Chinese-American players on the team (circled in red). Of course, not every generated player is Chinese-American (circled in blue):

Here are two expat players on the team. Note that my players are from the city I used during the tutorial (South Boston (MA)) and are from the country I placed my region in (I placed the ‘Little Beijing’ region in China) :

If you have any questions, feel free to ask!

Additional Notes:

• This works in FM19, FM20, and FM21. I have tested files with this feature in those games. I do not have FM22, but I can only assume that it works there as well since it has worked for the past 3 titles. Anything before FM19 though, I’m not sure.
• I found out about this after curiously looking through @racingsquirrel's FM19 Hong Kong database in the editor. I must give him some credit for this as it was his database that included this hidden feature. 
• Also, I find it kind of comical that just a few days earlier, I asked a question about this exact topic: 

[Wolf_pd]

Added to this, you don't have to reuse a local region, but can add one for yourself too.

[FM21_Scout]

It seems like there's a little more to it.

I tried adding Scotland as the local region for a bunch of US states/cities and then for South Africa and Zimbabwe.

I saw very little success with South Africa and Zimbabwe while it worked great for the USA.

[themodelcitizen]

Different countries seem to have more malleability. Given the amount of countries in Southern and Eastern Africa I could see them having a hardcoded name and ethnicity set that overrides your changes in certain ways. The US might rely more on "cities" or local regions to get that variation in Latino and non-Latino names in ways I can't quite place

[FM21_Scout]

So here's an interesting development.

If you change Jamaica's local region, the players appearance will change, their names will change and they will have a dual nationality.

If you change Costa Rica's local region, the players appearance will change, their names will not change and they will not have dual nationality.

Changing Nigeria's local region does nothing, just like South Africa, Tunisia, Ivory Coast and Zimbabwe (though I'd say like 5% of the appearances maybe changed).

Changing France's region will change the player's appearance, names and will add dual nationality.

If you change Cambodia's local region, you will see appearances and names change along with players getting dual nationality.

If you change Iran's local region, you will see appearances and names change along with players getting dual nationality.

It seems like there's a near total lock on Africa for any kind of editing of that nature.

Edited February 12, 2023 by FM21_Scout

[themodelcitizen]

Fascinating, thanks for sharing. My current theory is that some countries have a namepool/newgen pool that's locked to draw from a certain region, possibly even different cities in the same country, or drawn randomly from special pools (the "nations" SEA Chinese, Malay Indian etc may fulfill these roles in Southeast Asia). This was likely deemed expedient at one point due to countries sharing enough characteristics to have a shared name or newgen pool - might be consistent with Costa Rica drawing from a generic Central American pool, and there's a Southern African pool, etc. Meanwhile, Iran and Cambodia would have such unique names that they need their own name pools, which might be more malleable to editing.

[Wolf_pd]

To add to this, I did a test in FM20 where I removed all people from the database. Then I tested each continent with ‘pick all people from nation’, That was to ensure that the game would create newgens for those nations. Some got generic names from their language, some got NO newgens and some got a very specific serie of names (pointing at a specific name base).
Then I changed all languages to Dutch (I am Dutch so easiest for me to recognise if a name is based on it). I changed the Dutch language for the Netherlands to Nepalese (just to see if it would change. Several nations then got Dutch names all of sudden. Maybe I need to repeat that test.

Almost forgot, I also did a different test where I changed the language for each nation (again to Dutch) but did NOT delete the people in the database. The game needed a minimum of about 250 people in the database to ignore the language I set. Which is very interesting as I can use it to play around with namebases and ethnicity.

Anyway, I think I am going to repeat the test and add it to an excel and upload the excel here (file if it it is not be big will be uploaded as well).

[FM21_Scout]

On 10/02/2023 at 15:07, FM21_Scout said:

So here's an interesting development.

If you change Jamaica's local region, the players appearance will change, their names will change and they will have a dual nationality.

If you change Costa Rica's local region, the players appearance will change, their names will not change and they will not have dual nationality.

Changing Nigeria's local region does nothing, just like South Africa, Tunisia, Ivory Coast and Zimbabwe (though I'd say like 5% of the appearances maybe changed).

Changing France's region will change the player's appearance, names and will add dual nationality.

If you change Cambodia's local region, you will see appearances and names change along with players getting dual nationality.

If you change Iran's local region, you will see appearances and names change along with players getting dual nationality.

It seems like there's a near total lock on Africa for any kind of editing of that nature.

I tried changing Turkey and there were no name or appearance changes, but everyone got dual nationality.

I tried changing St Kitts and Nevis. The players appearance and name both changed with the players getting dual nationality.

Edited February 12, 2023 by FM21_Scout

[Wolf_pd]

There are several nations that have their local regions create their own nationality newgens. Turkey is one of those examples and I have noticed Germany does have some local regions that do that too. Some of the East German local regions that I noticed (I was building East Germany at the time and it was maddening not to know why I was getting East/West German newgens.

[Fredrik]

On 11/02/2023 at 06:35, themodelcitizen said:

Fascinating, thanks for sharing. My current theory is that some countries have a namepool/newgen pool that's locked to draw from a certain region, possibly even different cities in the same country, or drawn randomly from special pools (the "nations" SEA Chinese, Malay Indian etc may fulfill these roles in Southeast Asia). This was likely deemed expedient at one point due to countries sharing enough characteristics to have a shared name or newgen pool - might be consistent with Costa Rica drawing from a generic Central American pool, and there's a Southern African pool, etc. Meanwhile, Iran and Cambodia would have such unique names that they need their own name pools, which might be more malleable to editing.

I'm reasonably confident African countries are treated differently to make sure dual nationals in Europe always get the African characteristics.

The French/Malian regens should be named Traoré instead of Leclerc regardless of birthplace or if he's French/Malian or Malian/French etc. 

Turkey should be similar for the same reason. 

Edited February 13, 2023 by Fredrik

[Wolf_pd]

11 hours ago, Fredrik said:

I'm reasonably confident African countries are treated differently to make sure dual nationals in Europe always get the African characteristics.

The French/Malian regens should be named Traoré instead of Leclerc regardless of birthplace or if he's French/Malian or Malian/French etc. 

Turkey should be similar for the same reason. 

I think (emphasize on think as I have never seen SI comment on this subject) the newgens are setup in a way where certain nations create certain combinations of nationalities (this one I am pretty sure of, although there are some odd combinations).

It looks like the non-European nationality, which is almost always the second means the namebase of the second nationality is used for the naming. I don't think it is a general African thing, but the newgen name settings cause this. It might be that SI can set for each newgen nation/second nation combination what the namesetting is.

[jastinluan]

magic

[FM21_Scout]

On 13/02/2023 at 15:51, Fredrik said:

I'm reasonably confident African countries are treated differently to make sure dual nationals in Europe always get the African characteristics.

The French/Malian regens should be named Traoré instead of Leclerc regardless of birthplace or if he's French/Malian or Malian/French etc. 

Turkey should be similar for the same reason. 

I ended up doing another test to see if it was just Europe and Africa where the players all get African characteristics. If you take local regions in Africa and make them local regions of New Zealand, most get dual citizenships but maybe at most like 5% of players have their look and name change.

Edited May 24, 2023 by FM21_Scout