Set yersefs down, chillun, and all tell yall bout da FREDs.
Once upon a time, a long time ago, in the mythical Land of Nod, there was a game called CM. It evolved into FM and thence to FM05. In all these games, when a player retired, he was replaced by a carbon copy of himself as a youngster. Swedish ST with -10 PA retires, a Swedish ST with -10 PA was created. And the Gods of the SI called this system "regeneration", or "regen."
(side note: for those who don't know, a PA of -1 through -10 means a random number will be assigned to the players PA within a range defined by the number. -1 is something like 1-20, -2 is 21-40, and so forth until we get to -10, which would be 181-200.)
The Players looked on this system and were bummed. They moaned, and the Gods at SI heard their moaning, and gave the problem a Great Think. And when they had Thought their Think, they came up with a New Way. This was to replace retiring players with new players of differing nationalities, positions, and skills. So now, in FM06, regens were replaced with "new regens". The Swedish ST with -10 PA was replaced with a French MC with -5 PA.
But still the users moaned. The overall number of plares was still constant. But Lo! The Gods were not done. They announced with patch 6.02 that "new regens" were replaced by an entirely new system. Now, when a player retired, that was it. When new players were created, they were entirely random. Gone was the one-for-one replacement system.
But the Gods were lacking. They didn't give the new system a name. And when one God was asked by a user what the new system was called, the God replied, "I don't know. Call it fred."
And so it came to be. There were a few threads pondering the meaning of FRED (Frustratingly Replicated Endothermic Dunces? Frequently Repeating Entire Domains?), but none this quthor has heard were really any good. But FREDs are what we have, and thus it will likely remain. | 
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