Names

This works pretty well. To increase the "local flavor" of a country in FM2010, all you have to do is add players with the right first and last names. In my case, I want the Ethiopian players to have Ethiopian names (by default, they pull from a very Kenyan seeming "East African" set of names). This is especially obvious, since Ethiopian names are so distinct.

To do this, I just opened the editor, and added players to the teams in the Ethiopian Premiere League. I whipped up an Excel spreadsheet that randomly pulls names from a list I gathered somewhat randomly. The only fields I completed were

First Name
Second Name
Ethnicity
Hair Color
Skin Tone
Nation

and, under Contract, Club

It turns out that ethnicity, hair color, and skin tone were a waste of time--any players added to the game do not have faces created for them. I don't know how these things are generated for newgens, so maybe doing this will more accurately reflect the makeup of future generations. We'll see.

Save the editor file, then fire up a new game and all those players are there, assigned to those clubs, with a nice range of positions, etc.

Note that, other than about a dozen players from St. George, these are fictional players, and I am trusting the FM2010 engine to make them league appropriate in their abilities. So far, though, so good.

I am assuming this works for regens, too: will autoplay a year or three and see.