Less players outside major leagues?

I have three games going (Tottenham, Arsenal, Dortmund), all with different configurations for the database size/number of players to be loaded into the game. Playable leagues are in England and Germany, and Spain and Italy are set to view only.

When I use the standard large database, games are very fast in comparison with previous versions of FM, but scouts practically do not find any worthwhile players outside a few major leagues (the four I have set up, plus maybe Holland, France, Portugal. Brazil), and most teams around the world only have greyed-out, unrecruitable players.

In another game, I used custom database and included for each continent players from major top-division teams. The speed of the game is still very good, but scouts still find no players (not even bad ones; scout reports just stay empty) outside major leagues. If I manually load all players from different countries into my database (even from just a few additional countries), the game becomes reall slow.

Is there any way to better balance game speed against database size? I am very happy with the improved speed of FM 2010, but I have found it far less likely to discover interesting/new/unknown players through scouting - the game world seems much emptier than before. Am I doing anything wrong in setting up my games?