Mental attributes and lower leagues

Why is it that lower league players have such poor mental attributes? Finding someone with good mental attributes in lower leagues is impossible, yet it seems strange that there exist no creative people, good decisionmakers, highly determined people with good work rate at that level of play. Mental attributes are mostly related to cognitive capacities, which are largely unrelated to physical capabilities and I think it should be reflected this way in-game too.

Obviously players with the right attitude should be more likely to get far in football, so there will always be some difference between lower and higher leagues, but the difference today is far too big.

What do you guys think?

Well,from one stand-point, it makes some sense that higher leagues are ought to have the big difference on the technical part,not the mental.

From another point of view,we can parallel mental stats to experience,especially decisions,teamwork,composure,positioning and off-the-ball(most likely missing 1-2 more). If we go by that view,then the higher leagues are ought to have an advantage on those as well due to much higher level of football.

On those cases I got to say it's quite right.

But for creativity,flair,determination and work rate (and once again I must be missing something),I do agree that players with those stats are a bit scarce and should be tied mostly with the personality and not the league level. (they are,but maybe not enough? debatable)

Agree and disagree. Yes, there could be some geniuses with 2 left feet represented, and there could be a few more clumsy athletes or slow ballerinas or freekick walruses, etc..

However, you could also think about the higher mental attributes as representing the rare synthesis of mental/physical required to "pull off" related abilities. Just as hypothetical ways to consider this: It isn't that Tevez has a higher willingness to work hard than Joe Bloggs from BSN, but he can output more energy and remain concentrated and take no hits to his awareness or other thinking processes while doing so. It isn't that Scholes is more creative than Joe Bloggs, but that he's more able to incorporate the abilities and likely behaviors of the players on the pitch into what he's trying to create than Joe Bloggs. Etc..

I think there could be a bit more variety, but there are also some ways to consider the attributes so that you consider them as mental/physical synthetes rather than truly discrete and isolated "abilities".

I bring this up most years when the demo comes out - you see so many players at conference level and other lower leagues who you couldn't fault for work rate/determination etc, but they never get more than maybe a 12 in FM, which seems pretty ridiculous.