Team pools still do not work when trying to select teams using them.

[sporadicsmiles]

I had this problem in FM20 and it also never was resolved (it was not an issue on release in FM20, it got broke by an update somewhere along the line). 

I am setting up the Coupe de France with the regional rounds separated to go with my new expanded database for France. This is split up regionally, and involves teams up to and including the Division National (3rd tier). Now there is no problem for the National 3, and Regional 1 and lower, since these leagues are already regionalised and you can just make the assumption that teams in these leagues compete through that region's CdF pathway (it is not really true, but there is no point to overcomplicate this). So there I can just select all teams from the division. 

The problem comes with National and National 2. These leagues are not fully regionalised to the degree that you can take all teams from a league. National 2 is partially regionalised but not fully, and National not at all. So my original way to pick teams from these leagues would be to ask for the best regional teams, specify the region, and then use a a team pool consisting of all teams in the National and National 2 so that it only gets those teams. 

So my team selection looks like this:

And the selection rules for the National 1 and 2 sides looks like this:

What actually happens is that the best teams in a region are selected, ignoring the teams I have selected in the team pool. So you end up with teams from Ligue 1 and Ligue 2. At no point have I ever even specified that Ligue 1 and 2 teams need to be included here. And since it selects teams within the correct region, I figure it is the "get bets local region teams" that is not working properly. And thus it can only be ignoring the team pool rules. The problem is this also does not happen consistently. Sometimes the rules for National 1 and 2 are entirely ignored and the game just takes all the teams from the league below Regional 1 which I use as a placeholder for the moment for all lower divisions. So it is impossible to work out what is going on, team selection seems to be an utter mess in general for this. 

[sporadicsmiles]

I did a little more digging while I was writing this thread (I wanted to make sure what I was saying was true), and I found actually it is a little bit more complicated than this.

The behaviour I describe only seems to occur when the rule with the team pool is first in the list of teams to be selected. Otherwise it seems to be ignored altogether and no teams get selected at all from this rule set. 

This is what I get when the Get best teams in local region with team pool is set first:

And this is what I get when it is set to be third:

The "New Stage" I have highlighted here is the one that should pick teams from the team pools. As you can see, it selects 109 teams, which includes teams from Ligue 1 all the way down to Regional 2. So it is completely ignoring the team pools and just selecting all the teams in a region. And you will notice when this is third in the list (second picture) no teams at all are selected using these rules, and the remainder of the places are filled with lower league sides. This makes zero sense to me.

And this is working well, actually. It is correctly selecting the teams from the region (Grand Est in this example), but it is not using the team pools. 

To summarize for you guys.

1. Team pools is not working when you try to select best regional teams.

2. Best regional teams only selects teams at all when it is first in the "teams" list, otherwise it gets ignored entirely. 

3. This was working properly on release for FM20, so there is working code for this somewhere.

I get that this is probably not going to be a huge priority for you guys right now (I realise it is a pretty obscure bug that probably affects only me) but I would appreciate any help you can give me. Even if it is just a work around to get this working or an alternative way of selecting teams that will work.