[Youth Intake Broken Just Like Beta]

I got curious about older FMs, so I reinstalled FM18 and opened a save. The year is 2103. The database has the big 5 leagues playable (plus their respective second divisions) and some minor leagues (nothing on view-only). I can't say how many players there were at the start, but I can fairly certainly say that the database was Big and with no custom options.

In 2103 there are 40430 players.

In 2019, 3538 newgens were generated. In 2102, 3288 newgens were generated.

I viewed some mid-table clubs youth teams, and I found that there are some greyed out players. It depends on the club really, Serie A clubs have almost no greyed out players, LaLiga teams have almost no "real" players. English clubs are more or less in the middle.

[Youth Intake Broken Just Like Beta]

I believe view-only teams not hiring new managers has been present since old FM, never thought it was a bug, just clubs not being that active.

I made a test with some custom obscure leagues, mostly from caribbean countries (1 active, the rest view only). 15k thousand players. My player count just went up in around 200 players (Jan 2020- Jan 2023). Almost all of those countries got a (tiny) youth intake in those years: 728 players in 2021, 324 players in 2022 (counting all countries except the active league).