Unplayable leagues

Let's say, there are plenty of unplayable leagues in each country, for example, Ukraine: 

https://sortitoutsi.net/football-manager-2019/nation/800/ukraine

Each of them has 12, 16, 18 teams or something.

My question is, what happens if I steal couple of teams from those unplayable leagues into a new league of mine I make? Would it somehow damage the simulation or it's fine as long as I don't activate those unplayable leagues (with mods probably)?

Example: the league on screenshot has 16 teams, it's unplayable without mods. What if I move 10-12 teams from this league into any other playable league I work on, would it crash the gameplay if I enable Ukraine as playable league and won't use mods? Unplayable league from screenshot would end up having 4-6 teams only.

In comparison, I used to grab teams from unplayable “Lower division” and it went well. But I'm not sure about these ones.

Thanks in advance.

It will be totally fine.  As long as the league rules are the same (i.e: number of teams in the league). 
 

I have done this before on a fantasy game.  Moving a side from Malta (Valletta) to the Vanarama Conference (England).  I then just moved a team out the other way. 
 

Something to bear in mind, is that dependant on what country you are doing this, you may have to tweak the nation rules.  So as U.K. is out of Brexit, I set it that Maltese players are treated the same as U.K. players.  Similarly you may want to set the nation they are based in as the country you want them to play in, otherwise your club will be stung for travel costs every time there is an away game.

Relatively easy to do via the pre-game editor.  Just ensure that you save it with a different save file name, so if you want to revert back to the original database you wouldn’t have messed things up. 

Thanks! Wait, so unplayable league still must have the number of teams written in their rules? I.e. if I take out 14 teams of 16 teams league that was unplayable, it keeps 2 teams, and I have no idea if unplayable league has rule of 16 teams. But would it matter now, since it's unplayable, would the game crash?

I mean, I used to move team out of czech league into german and doing vice-versa keeping same number of team in leagues I exchanged them from. But I didn't just take 12 teams from czech unplayable league into new fantasy league, making czech unplayable league almost empty.

No only the league that you wish to play. So for example if you were using a lower level league in the game that is playable, you would just need to ensure that league rules are met (like number of teams).  What you do with the teams you take out doesn't matter, as if they are from a league that isn't playable in the game (without a mod) it doesn't matter.

Which league are you hoping to play and are they playable without a mod?

As an example, I could want to move the 12 BOV Premier League teams from Malta to English Vanarama Conference South but will need to move the existing teams out of the league and place them somewhere, so usually I just swap them over to the non-playable league I am not bothered about.

Let's do concretic example.

I am remaking existing mod which adds from 1st to 5th league in Cyprus, the mod worked before, top league has teams, but leagues 2 to 5 have no teams in that mod. I just add new teams in empty leagues, I did it few years ago and it worked well with exact same mod, so I just assume it should work here too. I stick to number of teams these playable leagues should have, of course.

My question is only related to unplayable league. Speaking in details for my fantasy league, I want to add some teams from https://sortitoutsi.net/football-manager-2019/competition/36042400/greek-amateur-division-eastern-attica unplayable league, some teams from https://sortitoutsi.net/football-manager-2019/competition/136045/czech-fourth-division-c unplayable league, some teams from https://sortitoutsi.net/football-manager-2019/competition/71053306/ukrainian-christian-football-league-high-league unplayable league and so on. Those teams to be moved into Cyprus empty leagues that will become playable & the whole league becomes open championship with plenty of countries.

Question is: all of these unplayable leagues have some certain number of teams. Should I keep that number always same? or I can take teams from unplayable leagues not caring about the number of teams there?

Thanks in advance, I really appreciate your reply!

As you are not playing the unplayable leagues it should not matter.  All I can suggest is give it a trial run and see if it loads up ok.  It will come up with an error message if there is a formatting issue but I don't think there will be.  Let us know if it works out.

Thanks! I understand you moved teams from Maltese league but you didn't replenish Maltese league with other teams, right?

Malta are not a playable country without a mod so it is irrelevant.  I moved the teams out and swapped them over just to house the English Conference South teams somewhere.  I didn't test if I just left them not attached to any leagues so just did a mutual swap and it worked out fine.

Ohh I see. I did that in previous iteration of this update in 2018. But now I try to adjust it and I thought what happens if I don't do mutual swap in unplayable leagues. Thinking like, if lower division doesn't need mutual swap, so why would other unplayable leagues need that? Even if the unplayable league has some rule about fixed 16 teams in, how would that affect simulation considering those are unplayable thus not simulated, and only used to push teams up based on reputation. That's what I thought.