Why I wasted 3 years of my life to train a player who will never play for any national team???
That's why if you're hunting for foreign talents, you should train players that come from micronations, like Singapore. There's a higher chance for your player to make the senior NT.
I remember many seasons ago, US NT had a "training camp" for 70 players for their NT. Which means that they had 70 potential senior NTs. Our whole U21 database isn't even that big, and our NT database even smaller. So if you really want NT bonus to offset your training salaries, do consider snapping up our young ones ;)
You can train 90 tsp player with the salary 200+k and 160 tsp player with the salary of 170k. It is big difference in the training time. Where is the satisfaction for years and years of training? Nowhere. And it is so stupid that players which reach 12 players squad earn money. So player who score 30+ points earn the same % of the salary as player who just appear on the bench...
Ironically in your example, the 160 tsp would actually earn more merch than the 90 tsp player. This is because the 90k player probably won't even make it into the top 60 NTs (he won't even be in the shortlist for Singapore, which are at 50+), therefore if he's a foreign player, he would likely only have close to 5% of his salary as merch. Meanwhile the 160 tsp player is probably good enough to be in a top 10 NT, so his merch would be around 9% of his salary. Coupled with the fact that you're actually paying 30k more per week for much less efficiency, it's not hard to tell which is worth more.
Also Dwight Howard is putting up solid numbers in Taiwan and is a star of Taoyuan Leopards, but his salary is still lower than that of Stanley Johnson's last salary as an end of the bench player at Spurs, which are tanking this season (meaning he can't even make the first 10 in the 3rd worst team in the NBA).