Its a pain in the ass that they took this out, I really don't know why.
Anyway, if you go to edit mode, you can search for players.
You can select club/national/other/all and the playing position to filter a bit.
Anyway, once you get say all right backs playing for a club in the game, you can sort the results by attribute and then top speed for example. Its not ideal as you can't combine multiple stats (ie top speed >80 and shooting >90) but I guess its better than nothing.
In the online master league you can't sort by individual attribute but on the other hand you can add overall rating / value / preferred foot / etc into the filter.
I really wish they at least combined the 2 search features. Again, I have no clue why they went to all the hassle of making two different search methods.