Continental competition drawing clubs from created national competition

[Toronto Blizzard]

I am trying to edit the morass that is Canada/CONCACAF.  I created a two-tier league structure in Canada.  The second division is a re-used competition that's in the original database.  Because FM considers Canada's MLS clubs to be American with a nation of Canada, the Canadian Championship is considered a continental competition.  In my continental file, the competition should pull for the second division in the early rounds.

The continental file is based on the default database (i.e., I've made no changes to the database).  When I try to verify the rules, I get the competition "needs to find x teams, can only find y" error.  I assume this is because there are no clubs in that competition in the default database.  This wasn't a problem in FM20 -  I was able to create and verify the continental file, even though the competitions in the default database didn't have the correct number of/any teams.

I tried replicating the database I used for my custom Canada rules, removing the nation rules and adding continental rules.  Then the file verifies, but when I try to load both files in the game I get an error that there are too many teams in one Canadian division and too few in the other.

Is there another way to approach this?

[rusty217]

Put them together? If you use the advanced, rather than basic, editor then you could create both the nation, continental and competition files all in the same database. Then if they're reliant on each other it shouldn't be an issue.

[Toronto Blizzard]

My understanding is that you can only combine nation and continental rules in the same file by merging XML files (if anyone has a tutorial on how to do that…).