Something I noticed when testing recently was that it was taking an inordinately long time before any regens got into the English national side - an intiial save I ran through to 2030 had something like no caps for anyone up until 2028, and four or five of them total getting caps at all by 2030.
I ran a longer-range test through to 2085, and this doesn't seem to be a regen-specific thing but instead a constant throughout re: young players not getting into senior national teams in active leagues (i.e. any national team where there's any sort of reasonable player pool) . Think there's two big things at play here:
1) Development curve/PA - this is better-tuned than it has in the recent past, but the key here is that CAs are slightly lower than the typical fringe international player we'd be thinking of here (even if we don't consider pure one-cap wonders - for England, there have been 14 such players since 2017, and another 7 with 2 or 3 caps) - think Reece James, Callum Hudson-Odoi, Emile Smithe-Rowe, etc.) and you don't seem to see too much development in general in that sort of 18-21-aged area outside of real outliers. You still get good/playable players, but very very slightly lower CA (and we're literally talking a point or two here) = the AI just ignores them entirely. This is actually the smaller part of it, though, because really it's:
2) Not enough variance in international team selection; I think this is quietly the big issue here. There are 100 players in the base database I started from that have at least 1 England cap; it's just 40 in the 2085 save, and similar for most countries on both ends (albeit on this database most major nations still have small national pools). Furthermore, looking back through England best 11s, you'll find multiple players on any given one with 150+ caps; granted, this was for an England team that's been very strong internationally, and this might be a slightly unlucky pull re: there being basically nobody under 27 (those 100+ cap players tended to debut at 20 or 21), but it still seems an issue (and the 40ish total capped players things is constant across most nations).
I'm guessing that this is because AI managers are extremely strict on their internal criteria for picking players (whether's it's pure CA, reputation, or whatever else added in) and that plus the designed lower injury count in FM means that FM international squads will be more consistent than real-life squads in picking players.
Seems that logic could be made a touch more fuzzy here for friendlies and lower-value competitions in order to make this sync up here.
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