Current International Players

Hey there:

I had a question about what defines "current international players" when choosing which players to retain in a custom database.

How does the FM database pick these players? Is there an option somewhere in the FM editor?

For example, when I load up current international players from North Korea, Jong Tae-Se isn't retained (?), which seems odd considering he's their best player. But other, much lesser-known North Korean players who have played in the most recent friendlies, are retained.

On that note, can someone confirm that these are the right interpretation of the retaining options?

Players based in nation: All players who play for a club in that nation.

Players of nationality: All players who have that nation as one of their nationalities.

Players from top division clubs: All players who play for a first division club in that nation.

Players from top clubs: All players who play for a "top club" (based on reputation?) in that nation.

Players with national/continental reputation: All players with a national/continental reputation who have that nation as one of their nationalities.

It's the last one I'm not so sure about: does "Players with continental reputation: Asia" give me Asian players who have continental reputation, or players who have a continental reputation that play for a team in Asia?

Last one: Park ji-sung? Prolly Tim Cahill.

First one: at a guess maybe the AI is iffy with nations of low rep.

One thing I can say for certain - Players based in nation/nationality includes unattached players too.

Have you tried searching for Jong Tae-Se or just looked at the national squad. He might be left out because he is injured or something.

Jong Tae-Se isn't in the game for me (on a Small or Medium database), probably because he plays for VfL Bochum - a 2.Bundesliga team (in older versions of FM, he wasn't in the game at all because he was playing for Kawasaki Frontale, a J-League team).

To get him in the game, I have to either select a Large database or retain *all* players from North Korea, which isn't something I particularly need. My main aim was to retain all of Asia's national teams, so it's a little annoying when I select the "Current international players" option and a couple of key players are missing (a similar issue occurs with Cha Du-Ri of Celtic when retaining the South Korean national team).

Solved!

As I suspected, the issue is in the retaining options. It turns out that these aren't nearly as intuitive as I thought they were.

For example, choosing:

Current International Players: North Korea

will NOT retain the North Korean national team, as you might expect. Instead, it will retain players who have been capped that are *based in North Korea*.

Since most of the North Korean national team is based domestically, the team will be playable - but the two best players are missing, because they're based in Europe! So, you'd also have to choose:

Current International Players: Europe

Which will retain Jong Tae-Se (Bochum, Germany) and Hong Yong-Jo (Rostov, Russia). Of course, it'll also retain every single player who plays in Europe who's been capped for his national team, which is fairly annoying - but oh well.

This makes me change my interpretation of the last retaining option, "Players with national/continental reputation," which I now realize will retain players who have a national/continental reputation that play for a team in Asia. So again, it's not a useful option for retaining Asian players who are based overseas.

Incredibly non-intuitive, so I hope this helps someone out there.

That's a useful addition to our collective knowledge database. The guys in the Editors' forum might appreciate this if they don't know already.

that is helpful, may as well have everyone in the game who has represented their country.