Extracting person names from databases?

Hey, lately I've been interested in working on a “newgen name pack” - i.e. adding a bunch of blank, retired players into the database with names of players from past databases in order to add more variety to the pool of names which newgens can use. Obviously, combing through every game's database manually to find every player is extremely tedious and takes a long time - doable, but certainly an incredibly long-scale project. I did notice this website has several databases available for browsing, so I was curious if all the name data could be extracted in a viewable format somehow. Even better if data can be retrieved from games before 2014. As good as the newgen name generation system is, I feel like it can always be better. Players from certain nations always end up having similar names through every save (looking at you, DR Congo), so this is a little something I wanted to try to breathe some more life into the game. Let me know if this is at all possible. Cheers!

I have noticed some has been converted to a spreadsheet and uploaded to statista. You can download an archive of them. It's still tedious, but you have them in a format you can play around with. You could use software like Genie Scout or FMRTE to get a filtered view of specifics and save them that way, you could potentially get what you need in-game and save by nation (although that means at least 251 files so not always practical) but from the game you can export directly to html and then into excel if you so desire.

Otherwise it's looking through this site to get everything you need, which is a long process but this is probably the most accurate I've seen.

It's not really a problem to load up the editor, search a range of Unique IDs and find every person in the database that way, which is how I've been doing it - very very long process. Pain in the arse if ever there was one, but definitely still doable. I was just hoping there'd be a much easier and more automated way to go about it.

Might be a shot in the dark anyway since I've noticed some names aren't necessarily tied to a nationality but often sometimes a sub-region - Catalan names seem to be different to names elsewhere in Spain, for example. I just think it'd be a cool project. Just because a player disappeared from the database ten years ago doesn't mean the game should stop using his name for newgens, right??? Lol.

Yeah I agree with you. I mean to be honest unless they're dead or formally retired from all things football, I wish they'd stop removing people from the database in general anyway. It's a pain having to re-add them all the time. One thing I do wish, is there was a file (like they have for FIFA Manager) that contains a list of possible regen names by nation. That way you can change and edit to make them seem authentic. There must be a list somewhere but I wouldn't be surprised if it's locked deep into files that will never see the light of day from our end.

Yeah. There was a file like that for one of the original Championship Manager games. There must be a list somewhere because I don't think it just goes off of people in the database; checking the names in a long-term save of mine with over 200k newgens, some people's names aren't used. Don't know if it's just because of RNG or if some names are excluded from the newgen list - haven't seen any new Italians named Buffon, for example.

Maybe it goes for the most common names as opposed to specifics? I mean you wouldn't expect to see many Alexander-Arnolds for example but you might expect to see a few Davies and Davis.

I always presumed the “common”-ness of a certain name was governed by how many times it appeared in the database. There will certainly be a lot more people named Mark Williams than something more out-there like Exodus Geohaghan, lol.

Well I am sure eventually someone will be able to shed some light on the situation. Hell given the wholesale changes in FM25 the entire structure will probably change anyway