Clearing Up Information About Club Reputation

[ktime156]

I know that this topic has been discussed ad nauseum but as with many topics I think that those discussions have lead to unreliable information becoming canon. A few quick searches will lead to many forums that state that the only way to raise a club's status is to win and win some more which is perfectly logical. However, of course FM tends to have a problem with the dynamic reputation system in that a club can go years without winning anything and still maintain it's reputation while a user or other club can consistently win the most reputable trophies without seeing a realistic bump in rep i.e. Leicester City. 

What seems to never get mentioned is signing high profile free agents and possibly even nagging high profile transfers of likely older players and then winning with said players. Perhaps I'm in the wrong, but I've always assumed that consistently signing players from a region and then building a reputation in that region would raise your reputation. So say you manage in Portugal and decide to sign a lot of African and Asian players. Then you consistently do pre-season tours in both regions for a few years. You would gain a large following in both regions which would then raise your reputation. And that seems to be reinforced more than ever with FM17 as they include where a player is popular in the bio. 

I know I'm being lazy here as I could probably do a test save for this especially as I'm in my yearly only sign FA to become a financial giant save, but I figured that maybe a few players or mods who've explored this area of the engine more extensively would be able to clear up information for me and perhaps the community at large. The information would also be helpful for a FM based project that I'm doing. Thanks