What if you could spend 500K/1mil whatever seems like a fair price to create 1 player per season.
This player would go directly to your team, but is created very similar in how the players randomly assigned to new teams are made, only this player created is 18 100% of the time. This could help the market by taking some of the excess money out of the market, could possibly encourage more training your own players, help smaller nations get more players in as well, take pressure off of the draft and market as being the only ways to acquire new players, be fun.
Yeah you can experience problems if you let managers name the players so keep that random too, maybe just allow people to customize the face of their created player.
It's interesting. I'm not sure necessarily how to balance it well off the top of my head - if you're paying that much money, the player should be of a good potential (not elite, though) and have pretty good starting skills, but leaving it too much up to random would probably dissuade many teams from using the feature (since they can either pay 500k to get a known quantity, say, a trainable PG) or 500k to get an unknown (maybe instead of the guard they hope for, they get a 7'4 guy whose best guard skill is awful jump range and everything else atrocious).
But it's an interesting idea. It might even be something that could open up to partial customization (i.e., you're shown a list of options with potential ranges, heights, and maybe a break down of guard skill points vs. inside skill points). Perhaps you can even tweak the starting build slightly by allocating some "leftover" points (e.g., the player starts with 31 guard points, of which 27 are assigned, you could then use the other four to bring up some other skill or skills, subject to some sort of limitations). That might even be something that could be incorporated into the draft - you still see potential range, height, and general skill level, but instead of being fixed skills there's some wiggle room?
There's definitely stuff that merits thought there, in my opinion. I just don't have the capacity for much intelligent thought at the present time. ;)