
When a player retires, a young regen is created. It’s possible that without regenerating players, and instead using a generator to create players from scratch, the database could be in a real mess by the time you begin your tenth season. Presumably this is done because the player database has some sense of balance with regards to positions, nationalities and ratings. ‘Regenerated’ because they are exactly that, FIFA career mode reincarnates players. ‘Regens’ is the term used by the community for regenerated players. The way that it has managed this for years and continues to do so in FIFA 19, is to create regens and pregens. Therefore the game has to create new players to make sure there isn’t a net loss of players in the database. Don’t forget that other teams don’t scout like you do, although they do poach players from your monthly scouting reports. There are free agents, which almost works as an overflow bucket, but these players will also age and retire. Obviously you can effectively ‘create’ new players via youth scouting, but you wouldn’t create nearly enough new players to balance things out. If approximately this many players retire at the end of each season, that means every team on average would lose 2 players. If you consider that at the start of FIFA 19, there are over 1000 players aged 33 or over.

The problem here is that the player database would shrink significantly over time.

For career mode to work, players have to grow and decline as they age, before eventually retiring. However, in career mode you can play for more than a decade. This is fine for the other game modes as nothing changes over time. FIFA has a vast player database to fill all the teams at club level and internationally.
