Thank you so much for this, it's honestly one of the most useful comments I've gotten. And it means a lot that you'd pick it up on Steam. Good news is I'm fixing both bugs in an update going out today.
You were spot on about the client requests not closing. They weren't being marked done when you handled them some other way, and that's what caused those brutal reputation hits as your roster grew. It's fixed now. Requests check whether their goal has actually been met and close themselves properly, so no more penalties for stuff you already dealt with. The event boxes covering the player cards are sorted too. Those panels now only show up in the Inbox tab, so your squad screen stays clean and you can always reach every client.
And you're right that the icons needed explaining. There wasn't a legend, which is on me. So this update adds hover tooltips to every icon and trait, plus a proper legend button on the squad screen. To answer you directly: the ⚡ means Wonderkid (young player, high potential), the 🎽 means national team caps, and traits like Wonderkid and Star aren't hidden modifiers. They're just labels summarising a player's strengths, like an attribute sitting at 80+ or an elite overall, so you can read a player at a glance.
Not overly critical at all. This is exactly the kind of feedback that sharpens the game before Steam, and I really appreciate you taking the time. Thank you for playing.