What's a good database set-up for a long-term journeyman career?

I only realised tonight (when none of my scouts could find any players from Germany or France) that in my haste to start my first FM12 career I carelessly only loaded a small database with no other players (so about 5,000 players in total). Clearly this means the hard work I'd done in rising from the depths of the Italian lower leagues is worthless now and I'll need to start afresh.

So what would be a good database setting for a long-term journeyman save?

you can add more leagues rather than start a new game.-->preferences-->add/remove leagues

it depends on your pc really. i'd say minimum set up for me is:

england to div2,

germany 1+2

spain 1+2

italy to serie b

but i have most of europe loaded with large database.

Well the problem I have is that under the database options I don't have any players loaded from anywhere (e.g. I have no African/North American/Asian players loaded) - so the only way I could get around that is to have an additional leagues made playable (and that still wouldn't help with the lack of African players). And I'm guessing having an additional 10-15 countries loaded and playable will be a lot slower than just, say, 5 countries plus additional players via the database options.

So unless I want a game without Africans I'm stuffed, right?

I planning on starting a Journeyman career but not sure how to start. Is it pretty much SundayLeague/SemiPro reputation start unemployed start applying for jobs? Then go from there?

Yep, exactly that - to properly start as Sunday League rep you need to pick a country with a very low level and start there - so England, Italy, Germany (if you use the Oberliga database which brings the regional divisions in to play) etc. You're also usually going to start your management career in a relegation dogfight, too, part-way through the season. Can make for a very fun and challenging first few months in-game!

But, as I am encountering, unless you make the right database choices at the beginning, you'll find your pool of players is very limited - hence the question in the OP - I'm trying to understand the balance of what makes a good database for a long-term save.

yeah im thinking the same. Thing is my laptop is quite old and not very high spec so to play a proper journeyman career would take me an age. might give it a go setting one up and see how things go. I was thinking something like

England,Spain,France,Italy,Germany,Portugal,Brazil, Sweeden, Scandinvia. Something like that put most of them on as low league as possible. Just unsure about what league to start on.

I never load any African leagues and I have absolutely no shortage of African players kicking around (no pun intended). You might miss out an a few younger gems, but most decent/good Afican players are already in the Euro leagues and available to you. Personally, I tend to avoid the top quality players when I can because I get frustrated with their absences due to the African Cup.

I agree with the African players bit. If your at a big club and quality players you sign leave for a month every year which really isnt helpful. Other than that I never usually bother