How to disable player input right after joining

I have my Player Input Manager set to “Join Players When Button Is Pressed”. When I am in the menu with some GUI Buttons and a player joins, the same button press is also registered on the UI. For example, the first button is “Start Game”, so when a player joins he automatically “clicks” this button and starts a new game.

How can this be prevented? I tried using PlayerInput.actions.Disable() but it does not work in the Awake function. Putting it in the Start function does work (player can’t move) but does not prevent this from happening. I would need a way to instantiate the PlayerInput with its action map disabled, or some other way to ignore player inputs.

A workaround would be to define a specific join button, but depending on the situation this could still be problematic.

Edit: I tried changing the default action map to None. Doesn’t work either.

Did you find a solution to this problem? I’m faced with the exact same issue.