Can anyone advise why I can’t get teams anywhere near my level in the Play Game section.
I’m ranked about 4000 and have ave rating of 83 but everyone I can challenge has well over 150 or often over 200 so seems pointless to even try.

Any advice?

There are a lot of players that don't bother trying to advance in the rankings so sometimes you get quite high levels at low rank.
It's still worth playing them though, even if you don't win you still get training points which is very important to progress your team.
If you get fed up of losing then don't play for a few days and you should drop back to more even matches.

I have to admit, the ranking games part of the game are pretty damn boring until you progress much higher in the game. Once you get in and around the top 100, it starts to really become fun.

My advice is to play all ranking games with your offline strat so you don't progress too quickly and only to a level you can defend whilst offline. The other thing I used to do to try and make it interesting was to use subs only in an effort to get a draw. Gives you a target to go for that you feel satisfied in achieving without moving too high up the ladder too quickly.