The list is not sorted by importance, but the ones at the top will be more significant to me.

1) Get rid of the technical bugs/crashes (yeah we all know that, so I won't even elaborate)
2) Stop favoring Manchester United too much.
3) Fix the 3D match engine. My biggest gripe is, when a player has only the keeper to beat, at point-blank range, he will miss the target 99% of the time. What on earth is that? And yet a player will almost always score with a free-kick outside the penalty box.
4)Bad teams SHOULD improve its reputation. My championship-winning Blackburn team can never sign names like Beckham or Scholes because of this stupid bug.
5)Create a USEFUL youth farm system, not one that can only produce players that drop their skills dramatically after promotion.
6)Ability to demolish buildings, because we all make mistakes :-(
7)Some music will be nice; I didn't know life as a football manager is DEAD silent.
8)I find the 'old player retiring and coming back' bug a bit bothersome; program a useful youth farm instead.
9)Ability to search players sorted by SKILL. I couldn't belive I CAN'T do that. Or maybe there's a way... if so, somebody please tell me.
10)Scouts that can keep a watch on the transfer market. For example, I can ask my scout to "alert me if there's a right-winger with a skill of 80 or above that's available on the transfer market"
11)The "youth talent email alert" is pretty useless for me. Does anyone find ANY use of it yet?
12)Players retiring due to injury occurs way too often.
13)I'm still not convinced that the 'individual orders' are working... or even the 'team order' of counter attack, long ball etc. I tried to use different tactics, in the SAME match with SAME players (I played, saw the result, reload the game, change tactics and played the same game, etc. with different settings, I didn't get a concrete proof of what's good and what's not!)
14)If the individual orders DO work, I want one that can be more than one. I mean, for example I can set Patrick Vieria to Push Forward and Long Shot at the same time (because those two are not mutually exclusive).
15)Manchester United winning all the time really bugs me (I know it's number 2 up there, I'm mentioning it again because it's getting out of hand in my game).

16)Ability to negotiate deals with sponsors. Of course it doesn't have to be real (like Man Utd's Vodafone), mock-up companies will do.
17)Selected to manage international team if my team shows that the manager deserves it.
18)More appreciation/awards, or make it more obvious! My player Dani won the Writers' Player of the Year, but if I didn't accidentally check the ratings button, I wouldn't have known! Award winning players should be given more value too.
19)Explanation of what each attribute does. My player has agility of 10, confidence of 28... so what??!!! The manual doesn't say how those categories affect a player's game!! And what about the morale too?!!
20)Stupid chairman should be done away with. He interferes with all my transfer bids.

Great list........I read every point you had made about improvements for Fm 2002.
Mostly your list covers bugs, which in my mind is what EA needs to work on before anything else comes into consideration. :o

Also, when building the arena, the highest possible attendence level shouldn't be dependent on how big the stadium was from the beginning. If you take a crappy team and brings it to glory, of course you should be able to build equally big arena as your opponents!

Good list, I agree with Jabberwork - attendance is annoying -
Also when u win the FA cup or another main achievement, it passes on unnoticed - give me a ceremony or something.

why we cant improve the whole stadium in one construction event
it's annoying that improving the stadium part by part
FM2002 should be able to build a new stadium on the other place or improve serveral parts of the stadium