Are players retained when leagues are removed

I started a game with a large database and all South American leagues loaded. My plan is to move to Asia once I have won the Copa Libertadores so I will remove the South American leagues and add all Asian leagues. I will continue to do this over every continent before settling on a game with a fallen team in England.

When I started the game I had 30,00 players but adding Asia will add more players. Does the game retain all the players from South America even if the leagues are removed?

If so this could be a problem because as I move across the continents by the time I settle in England I could end up with 100,000 players or more.

nice plan you got there to go to other continents i like the idea, thats what i have been wondering myself about removing leagues it would be nice if the players were kept but i have a feeling they would vanish

I believe that the players are purged from the game when you remove the league.

The point od this new feature is that when you remove a league you free up space to add a new one without slowing the game up. Therefore, they will be removed.

In my experience it's a bit of both. Let's say you have 10% of players in a league. If you make that league active you get all the players. When it's then deactivated it seems like about 50% of them are retained.

My initial DB was 100000 players. After adding and removing about 12 leagues (for job hunting purposes) I've now got 200000 players.