FIFA refuses to kick off with "your squad must have at least 11 players and 7
subs … currently below the minimum number of players (18)". The imported club's
squad carries ONLY its starting XI, so a freshly installed real club is
unplayable until someone fills the bench by hand in the hub.
`fill_bench_to_minimum` tops the squad up with the club's best spare players,
writing EMPTY bench slots from index 11 upward. The 23 slots are 0..10 pitch and
11..22 bench/reserves, derived from the index alone, so the starting XI — and
any bench the operator has already chosen — is never touched and a re-run is a
no-op. Only real PLAYER definitions are eligible: a kit, a manager or a
consumable in a squad slot is nonsense the client would drop anyway. Selection
is best-rating-first with a stable id tiebreak, so the same bench comes back on
a re-run rather than shuffling.
Scoped to the REAL club on purpose. The 14-item fixture is a market test bed
with a single spare player; demanding 18 there would abort a bring-up that never
needed to kick off. Fixture mode therefore does not call this at all.
Verified against a copy of the club snapshot (the live staging database was left
alone, since it currently holds a squad the operator saved by hand): 11 -> 18
players, slots 0..17, no duplicate instance in two slots, every filled pick a
real player definition, and a second run filling nothing.
This is NOT a diagnosis of the failure the operator just hit — that squad had
already been filled to 23 valid players before the match was created, and the
host log shows the client issued no request at all after `match-create` beyond
account-sync, so that refusal is decided entirely client-side. It removes the
variable: after a clean bring-up the club is now playable without hand-editing.
funman300
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