Are the nation transfer preferences broken?

[zZzZzZzZzZzZzZz]

With no work permit rules stopping them the Premier League clubs pretty much hoover up every single half-talented young player in South America to park them in their reserves and destroy their careers, as that is neither realistic nor fun I've been trying to find a way to prevent it from happening.

In previous years I've always used the nation transfer preferences to limit unrealistic AI transfer behaviour, but this year they don't seem to do anything. I've tried setting both national and continental limits on transfers to England yet by the end of January 2022 Facundo Farias always finds himself in an English reserve team, regardless of me having set the transfer activity to "none".

Also open to suggestions on alternative measures to stop them from behaving that way. Giving all the Premier League clubs transfer bans works, but given how drastically that changes the game-world I'd like to avoid it if I can.

[Wolf_pd]

Can you show me your settings? 

[Yuko]

Also noted that this is fairly weak. 
 

The thing that also does not work at all is the career plans. The "wants to play" never really worked that much, but the "does not want to play" usually did the trick and kept players at specific countries and away from some else. Now it's as if it's not even a thing. I've added players with career paths that said they don't want to play in Spain, England and France respectively and they typically ended up in those countries. In particular it was Berardi, Bernardeschi, Belotti and Insigne. Berardi and Bernardeschi usually end up at Arsenal and/or Tottenham, Insigne was signed by a Spanish team and Belotti could end up anywhere, usually Man City. 

In previous versions this worked. I tried to limit nation preferences but it didn't do much. I usually use these two in combination but FM22 Editor is the weakest version I've seen, filled with a disproportionate amount of bugs and it's actually tiresome to pull off nation preferences as the game treats you as a Whack A Mole joker when there are multiple data entries! 

 

Also, I'm using my own set of custom database files that add foreigners limits to all countries, starting from 10-14 depending on the league and dropping to 6 within 5 seasons. The game picks up on this by not signing an extravagant amount of foreigners that will end up being ineligible, but adding nation preferences to buy domestically doesn't do the trick, so by 2026 half the teams from the big leagues end up with barely 15 first team players rather than buy domestic players.