AI clubs not intuitive enough re: transfers?

I'm not sure if anybody else has noticed this, or maybe it's my custom DB, but my league has a lot of clubs with greyed-out players. Despite hiring managers (which also takes the lower-division clubs an age to do) the clubs never seem to add any new players in the first season, for whatever reason preferring to wait until the youth products come in before assembling a squad. Has anyone else experienced this?

Seems silly to me - surely the game should read this as a club having no players, and spark some form of urgency in them to bring in talent?

I've got hundreds of clubless players (mostly newgens) but nobody is interested in the vast majority of them despite the league having 100+ clubs in need of talent. Seems strange to me - why create enough players to fill the league's clubs, but not have the clubs chase them?

I considered that, Alex; the bottom tier of my league has a rep pf 1, clubs have a rep of 1... playing with the lowest-possible reputation, I can still persuade a decent level of player to play for me - I've had half the Gibraltar national team in my side, as well as internationals from the likes of St Lucia and the Dominican Republic, and I have access to a few Conference-quality players if I so choose, but the game has also generated several hundred (900 or so) players of my league's nationality - surely some of those players should have been generated with low enough quality/expectations to sign for any of the bottom-tier clubs? It just seems weird that the 20 teams in my bottom league realistically need 400 players between them - they've got around 2,500 to choose from with max DB size loaded - yet they haven't signed a single player between them.

It's not a game-breaker by any stretch of the imagination - by the start of the second season, they've got their mandatory youth intake anyway - but it just seems weird that they wouldn't be actively chasing anybody between them - not a single player.

Will do when I get back from work; thanks Alex