Why are there way less players in youth intake?

[TEday36]

I'm in 2026 and I always check the youth intake tab to check all the newgens coming up in different nations. After the last big update, every nation that is not among playable or view-only nations only produces like 2 newgens per team. I'm talking about clubs from nations like Serbia, Croatia, Columbia, etc  that usually produce great newgens and were recruiting like 10 youngsters every year. But now, only 1 or 2. Anyone know why? Thanks.

[turnip]

The game more or less tries to balance the number of players from each country in the save.

Things get pretty borked at times, but generally speaking at the start of a save, what you're seeing happens - teams in these countries get a good number of regens.

Over time, what I've observed is that Youth Recruitment in bigger leagues improves to the point where a lot of the Croatian/Serbian/etc players get generated in other nations instead. Where usually depends on the leagues you have loaded. 

 

This most notable if you look at African countries. I've seen entire calendar years go by without clubs in Cameroon generating a single youth player because the clubs' reps are a lot lower than even crap-tier French teams. Clubs like ASEC still - just - have the rep to turn out a few players, but the better ones tend to pop up in Europe instead. 

[TEday36]

3 hours ago, turnip said:

The game more or less tries to balance the number of players from each country in the save.

Things get pretty borked at times, but generally speaking at the start of a save, what you're seeing happens - teams in these countries get a good number of regens.

Over time, what I've observed is that Youth Recruitment in bigger leagues improves to the point where a lot of the Croatian/Serbian/etc players get generated in other nations instead. Where usually depends on the leagues you have loaded. 

 

This most notable if you look at African countries. I've seen entire calendar years go by without clubs in Cameroon generating a single youth player because the clubs' reps are a lot lower than even crap-tier French teams. Clubs like ASEC still - just - have the rep to turn out a few players, but the better ones tend to pop up in Europe instead. 

Yeah, but this time it was too sudden, after the update. For 4 years during the save, every one of those clubs got around 10 newgens, then the update comes and it's only one or two. The update definitely tweaked that. And I've had 30 years saves in previous versions of FM and never seen this happening.

[Prepper_Jack]

Perhaps their youth team is rather full, and they don't feel the need to gamble on the 1.5 star talent, and instead take the elite and top prospect talents only? Probably a good thing, so that the database doesn't overflow with terrible players with no future clogging up the free agent pool.

[gunner86]

According to the change list for the latest update, they have:

“Improved distribution of newgens in inactive nations”

I’d wager that’s the reason