Promoting National Teams

I'm in 2023 in my save and i'm controlling the Portuguese nation.

Unfortunately all the players suck so i would like to know what could be done to get the team better?

Had the same problem with Portugal in 2027. The players that had just gained Portuguese citizenship helped a lot [Lorenzo De Silvestri for example]

You could take over a portuguese club and bring in players at 15/16 and hope they want to play for portugal when they gain nationality?

It takes at least five years of getting no caps for their home nation (u21 or full caps) to be eligible for a nation, so basically, you'll only get crap that way. If I'm right about how it works, I could be wrong, but I know there's a 5-year wait.

So basically, no, nothing much you can do, if your players suck, they suck, you're stuck with them, unless you can help nurture portugese players at club-level.

Actually i control the most powerful club at Portugal too. I've been keeping my eye on any Portuguese players and try to catch them all to evolve them myself. No luck cause there's not much players with potential. About the buying players and get them to naturalize, yes there's a 5 year waiting witch means that if i want to do it i need to buy european players at 15-16 years to hope on getting them to choose my nation. (And i can't use them in my main team cause that means an international call for their main nation)

I've noticed that some of the players i already get to choose my nation only choose when i've tried to call them to go to a major competition. (like World Cup or European Cup) As anyone confirmed this?

Correct me if i'm wrong, but I thought I saw a thread once that said something along the lines of regen quality is linked in some way to you're world ranking as a nation. So if you can play the teams around you in the rankings and beat them and gradually increase your world ranking then the quality of regens for you're nation should gradually improve. Its a long term process that you have to build on over many years.

I may have made this up, can anyone confirm or deny if world rankings has any affect on the quality of regens?

I dont know either if reputation affects newgen quality, but it shouldn't imo because it seems to me that if you get a good generation of players the next lot are usually crap. How many nations have retained the world cup?

e.g France won in '98, went out in the group stage 4 years later, same with Italy this time.

Correct me if i'm wrong, but I thought I saw a thread once that said something along the lines of regen quality is linked in some way to you're world ranking as a nation. So if you can play the teams around you in the rankings and beat them and gradually increase your world ranking then the quality of regens for you're nation should gradually improve. Its a long term process that you have to build on over many years.

I may have made this up, can anyone confirm or deny if world rankings has any affect on the quality of regens?

I can confirm that the world ranking as nothing to do with the youths since i'm the nº 1 for many years and i still get crappy kids from my nation.

I believe world rankings dictate whether a nation creates regens or not. The quality and type of regens is set in loose parameters beforehand I believe.

I think that in non-active leagues the world ranking (along with that nation's league reputation) determines how many players a nation produces, but not the quality. In active leagues you'll always get more players, not sure how you increase the quality of them though!

Best thing i can say to do, i look through teams, and get a feeder team with "excellent" youth facilites. They will then normally produce 1 or 2 good players, and top class every now and again.