User talk:Falastur2/Archive 4

Vicente Matías Vuoso - How to handle his and other similar cases

Per your comments about the squad, you make some very, very good points, and I fear that you are right when you say that I need to make a decision to drop my mindset. As you I am more drawn to treat the squad stats as a history of playing stats than a list of the current squad, and I would agree with you on the name change of the section (though I will not implement it yet as I have a point to raise at the moment). You also make a very good case for the treatment of players such as Nielsen, Kay, et al.

On a side note, the reason Robinho is not listed as on loan in the main article is because he is not. His original loan agreement with Santos was to play for them until the 4th of August. However, Mancini recently (about 3 days ago) terminated his loan and ordered him back to Eastlands. Thus he is in Manchester, not Brazil, and no longer considered in absentia. Anyway, back on point.

BTW, I never really understood what you were saying about Robinho up above re the main MCFC article, because after I read what you had written I immediately went over to it and check out what you said, and Robinho was still listed as being out on loan in that article. Maybe you had moved him back into the main squad and someone else had immediately reverted your changes. I checked the Revision History for that article but could not easily determine that that is what actually happened. FYI, I am the editor who actually changed Robinho's status in the main article and put him back in the main squad again. I just waited until August 4 (his official return date) to do the edit so that no one would object to it. He may well have been back in Manchester a week earlier as you state (that makes a lot of sense to me, although I have read no media article, even in the most speculative gutter press, to back what you said up) but where exactly he was a week or so ago is simply moot now. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry (talk) 16:34, 6 August 2010 (UTC)

According to Mancini at today's Pre-Valencia press conference our very own Namby-Pamby Samba Boi is still sunning himself at Santos. So I guess Mancini's ordering of Robinho to come home early is the figment of somebody's imagination. Do you read the Daily Mail by any chance? :)

I did check the main MCFC article after watching that video to see if someone else, after hearing Roberto's comments, had reverted my earlier changes and put Robi back out on loan again. No such luck. So now that article has moved into the business of predicting the future, and is now foretelling that Robinho will be back with the squad sometime soon. I kind of like that level of confident prescience so I think I'll leave it just as it is. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry 04:27, 7 August 2010 (UTC)

My sole real concern with your recommendations is that some part of me feels that players with no appearances should not simply be disregarded, however I am unsure of how to treat them. The thing is, to my mind, there is a "market" so to speak for certain information about players who were intended to play for the team and did not. The main case in my mind is that of Matías Vuoso who incidentally played against us for Club America in a pre-season friendly a few days ago. In 2003 as I recall, he was signed by Kevin Keegan on a two-month loan (again, I'm going from memory so this could be wrong but it was something like that).

He was acclaimed by the fans and by Keegan as a very talented forward who would help us out a lot. Instead, he clashed with Keegan and was left unplayed for his entire time with us. Now, according to your plan for the squad statistics, he would be left off the squad page entirely (in fact I suspect he has been from that page, if a squad section exists, but only because of the information I'm working from when I write the old pages, and I regard this a failing on my part). I personally feel that his time should be represented by more than a simple references in the transfers in and out section - if any unknowing person read the article and saw him there, yet with no reference in the "Playing statistics" section they would be confused as to what he ever did. The article makes no other reference to the fact that he was denied appearances that he probably in all fairness deserved.

Including him in the playing stats section with a big fat zero doesn't explain this properly, I admit, but it does at least tell the reader that he was there to be played and was not - which dispels the potential notion that he was not signed to play for the first team. Now I don't know how to handle this, but I think there is a case for keeping such stats there purely for the sake of adding a little info for the reader. Perhaps in Michael Johnson's case what we should do is remove the zeros for appearances and in exchange add a comment in italics using a colspan (code that merges cells together rather than keep them divided) that says something like "injured all season".

As for Vuoso I don't know what you could say but I don't want to start cluttering the table with additional comments. In a perfect world, there would be a section separate from the table with a written history of the season which mentioned stories like Vuoso's - unfortunately I don't quite have the focus to write this constantly. Certainly the last thing I want to do is make the table messy and harder to read. However, I hope you understand my motivation now, and I'd be interested to see your response. Falastur2 ^Talk 22:17, 31 July 2010 (UTC)

I'll get to how to handle the Vuoso case a little later on in this post. It might even have to be made as a subsequent post here. First, I would like to get back to basics and offer you my opinion of what the problem might be (as per your comments to me elsewhere, "... of course the squad section is problematic."). I've stated to you elsewhere in our interchanges that I feel your not including a source citation for the information contained in your squad table to be a kind of "cop out" - viz. you appear to hold some personal rationalization as an excuse for relinquishing in your mind any need to provide source citation for that particular section of your own created article (despite the fact that sources are cited almost everywhere else within that article, even in uncontentious places where they are probably not really required) when you know full well that the philosophy of the Wikipedia encyclopedia demands that you do so.

The squad table is only problematic because you seem to apply different rules to it than you do to information contained in other sections of that article, and that might be the case simply because you may have regularly applied different rules to most of the material you've created and edited on Wikipedia in the past. You can probably get away with (and I don't mean that negatively) saying whatever you want in an historical article about MCFC for the season 1919-20, say. There are possibly only a few people alive today, if any, that actually saw City play back then, and most of those probably don't read Wikipedia or even use PCs. So very few people that read your historical articles about City are going to challenge the veracity of any detail that you put there because they know darn well, from their own life experience, that it's plain wrong (should it be so). The only person that might possibly ask you for a citation to validate something you've written in one of your historical articles is a modern day football fan who is also very bookish and has his head buried in a Big Bumper Christmas Annual of Association Football for the year(s) in question.

So my point is that you have probably just got into the habit over the years of creating and editing your own work (which BTW is excellent in terms of presentation and detailed effort, but I wouldn't really know WRT veracity) in a vacuum without really having to worry very much about citing supporting documentation for anything you've written - because few people, if anybody, would know enough to be able challenge your work even if you had made a mistake. Furthermore, even as a City fan myself, it is still just one of many interests / passions in my life, so I find myself not that interested in pouring over all the old articles - because, after all, encyclopedias are meant for looking up random details in, and not being read like novels. However, the Wikipedia articles WRT City that you have created are a truly great encyclopedic resource. Nonetheless, if as a City fan I'm not that knowledgeable nor engaged enough with the older material to be able to challenge any of it, then few other people (who are not and have never been City fans) are going to want or be able to challenge it either. Until, that is, you come to the material pertaining to the last three or four seasons (at most, I would imagine).

In the last four years or so Manchester City have now become big news worldwide. The number of eyeballs on the internet that might now be looking at Wikipedia articles concerning City has increased by multiple orders of magnitude. Where nothing you have created in your individual season articles up until a few seasons ago was contentious (because no one cared or knew enough about the details in your work in order to challenge any of them) that is no longer the case. Thus you cannot apply the same mindset and approach to the last few season articles you've created as you have done to the vast majority of your earlier ones. Therefore, even as the main creator of the individual season articles, going forward I think you must change your past mindset (yet again) and accept that your work is now public property and that you must justify even your own changes to it with citations (when necessary).

For instance, I noticed yesterday that the correct squad numbers that you (or someone else) entered into the "MCFC Reserves and Academy" article have already been reverted by an anonymous someone (meaning they used an IP address rather than a Wikipedia handle). That is presumably because those squad numbers did not cite this article to justify their having been updated. Because who could rationally argue with that article as a verification of their veracity? So like gonads did with me, someone has applied "old news" (that can be cited if you challenged them as to why they reverted) in order to undo updates that have, to their mind, absolutely no justification. Doing my few squad number updates when I did (before that article was published last Thursday) I guess I was always going to have an uphill battle on my hands to defend them against such reversion, but now that that web page exists there really should be no excuse for the squad numbers being continually reverted in any of the MCFC related articles from here on out; but only as long as others can readily see its citation in the respective article at the top of the article section concerned. That is NOT the case with either that "MCFC Reserves and Academy" article nor your "MCFC Season 2010-11" article. So I think someone needs to fix that ASAP.

There being no citation to a reliable source for any of the the current contents of that squad table was actually a very valid reason for me (or anyone else) to change any of its contents at will without citing any supporting sources because two unverifiable facts are equally wrong or right (depending on how you wish to view them). Of course, I wasn't trying to change the data to random or ridiculous values, I was merely trying to make it match reality, but someone else could just as easily have done so, and how could you then say they were wrong if the current values are no more defensible via verifiable cited sources than their new ones are? To not put citations into the actual article, but to instead dispute the veracity of information in the background (which seems to be your and gonads approach to defending the information in the squad table) is simply counter-productive IMO.

If the source citation that validates the accuracy of the current information is there for all readers to see (as, for instance, it is for the "Results summary" and "Results by round" sections just above it) very few people are going to try and change the information to which it applies unless they feel they can cite a "more reliable" source to support their particular updates that "trumps" the current cited source. Without any such cited source present it potentially becomes open season for the squad table (because anything even vaguely citable has more claim to veracity than something with no citation at all). This situation is then greatly exacerbated during the preseason when the old established prior season squad numbers (that no one would normally think to challenge) are now all potentially in transition.

So I suspect that one of its qualities, in your eyes, that makes the squad table problematic WRT to the other sections of that article, is that the information contained in it (or minimally the squad numbers contained in it) is at its most contentious, and thus more in need of supporting source citation, during the preseason; while the information contained in almost all the other sections of the article at this time of year is totally uncontentious because, for the most part, it is null. Once the season gets under way that situation then flip-flops; almost any of the information added into the other sections might be disputed (although it is all pretty objective) and probably needs citation to make some of it "stick", while the squad numbers in the squad table become the least contentious of the information contained in it. Anyway, that's my take on the situation.

I digressed a little bit with my response here, but I did so in order to point out that this is a second instance of where perhaps you need to change your mindset with respect to the squad table. IMO the first change of mindset required is to think of it only as a "playing statistics table"; the second change of mindset required is to accept that your season articles for the last few seasons are now much higher profile articles, and although the way you have gone about creating them is exactly the same as the way you have created all your other individual season articles, almost all the facts in the few latest ones will become highly contentious (and thus in need of anal source citation support) even though every fact is correct, because contention is much more a function of the number of diverse eyes scrutinizing the information than it is a function of how erroneous the data is that is being scrutinized.

So, for instance, your 1918-19 season article might have been a complete work of fantasy more suitable to be posted as an article in Uncyclopedia than Wikipedia, but even I, as a 45 year long City fan, might still not have noticed ... or have noticed, yet still not have cared enough about its inaccuracies to bother doing anything to change any of them. There are, for example, details that I've noticed that are wrong in this upcoming season's article but I feel quite ambivalent about them and will let them be. The reason for all of the preceding digression was because I feel the Vuoso issue is another case of where a possible change of mindset may be required by you, but I'll address that next in a subsequent post here. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry (talk) 23:28, 1 August 2010 (UTC)

OK, I went ahead and added a source reference for the new squad numbers at the bottom of the squad table as per my discussion above. Post back here and let me know that you CONCUR. I think that should take care of not having them reverted back to last season's numbers every other day for the next couple of weeks. Also note that IMO a similar sort of global table citation needs to be added to all of the squad listing sections in both the "Main MCFC" and "MCFC Reserves and Academy" articles for obvious reasons. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry (talk) 03:03, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Having just read Oldelpaso's comments below I went ahead and made the rest of the text in this section a new section in its own right (and adjusted the relevant paragraph indentations accordingly) since it is your wish for others to now join the discussion. While I was at it, since I now know how, I also added some bulleting to my own posts in order to make the itemized points clearer. IMHO there is no need for anyone to read anything before this point in order to familiarize themselves with the issue. In fact, you probably should now archive this section so as not to distract others reading this page. I also modified the link back over here that you included in your duplicate post on PeeJay2K3's Talk Page to take him straight to the discussion below rather than the stuff up above. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 00:36, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

Establishing a deterministic rationale for constructing the PST

There are a number of ways you can handle the Vuoso and Michael Johnson situations without allowing those cases to completely stymie your thinking WRT who should or should not be in the "player statistics table" (note: I'll refer to the squad table as the PST from here on out). I hope I have already convinced you that the PST cannot be both a statistics table AND a definitive listing of the first team squad players except under exceptional circumstances. Those unusual circumstances would be as follows:

• (1) There were no players loaned into the club (such as Márton Fülöp) who clocked up playing statistics despite not being part of the squad.
• (2) There were no players sold mid-season - most likely during late August (e.g., Richard Dunne) or in the January transfer window - who clocked up some meager playing statistics before leaving the squad, such that most people don't even remember him being part of the squad that season.
• (3) There were no players similarly loaned out during the season that were mostly absent from the squad, but who nevertheless clocked up some meager playing statistics before leaving or returning to the squad.
• (4) Every player in the squad gets to play at least part of one game during the season so that his actual membership of the squad is duly immortalized by the statistics entry for his partial match appearance (c.f., Michael Johnson's single substitute appearance and goal against Scunthorpe United last season).

There might be other situations that we haven't even considered. For instance, if the Given-Fulop situation had not happened at the end of last season we might not have even thought of scenario (1) above - because loaning players in is an unusual situation for City, and as City's squad continues to grow in both size and quality it is only going to become rarer. But let's just consider those four.

I think your mindset is such that you believe that in the case of scenarios (1) - (3) the fact that a player has only a scanty one or two appearances in his statistics record is fairly well explained by examining the associated loan-in, loan-out, or sold records down below the PST. But in the case of scenario (4), where situations such as those exemplified by Owen Hargreaves (who missed the whole of last season for Manchester United due to injury while still being very much a member of the first team squad) and Vicente Matías Vuoso (who never played all season because he fell out with his manager despite being a senior member of the squad), causes you to feel that the PST, by not containing any record for those players, loses some essential information about them. However, if it's a PST and those sort of players did not play for the team all season, why should they have a record in it? I didn't play for Manchester City during the 2002-03 season either but you don't see anyone complaining that I don't have a row in that season's PST. :)

Once again you are trying to get double service out of the PST. If you want the MCFC season articles to contain a definitive listing of the first team squad for that season - and there is a very strong argument that they should, and I would support you 100% in adding that information in there - then it needs to be a separate section in its own right. I have already suggested to you in my previous comments how you might go about doing that. What you must NOT do is corrupt the integrity of the PST in order to make it show information beyond its prerogative. Similarly, if you want the MCFC season articles to address special situations that you feel require some sort of comment or explanation (such as why an acknowledged member of the first team squad clocked up zero appearances that season) then introduce a new section into your articles specifically for that purpose. In many seasons that section may well remain null because there are no Hargreaves or Vuoso situations to expound upon, just as the "transfers" or "loans" sections would remain null if there were no transfers or loans in that season. You could also simply omit that section from your article for seasons where that section would otherwise be null.

What you must also NOT do is to attempt to encipher that information to the reader via extraneous entries in the PST ... most specifically because the reader may still not decipher exactly what it is you are trying to tell him with a PST blank row. My initial interpretation of seeing a blank row in the PST for a player would be that the editors of that particular season's article had been caught sleeping on the job. Or that it was some sort of bizarre compromise arrived at by warring editors. Or that the entry actually belonged there in the PST and had once detailed that player's single substitute appearance that season, but someone had reverted it (for some reason) and nobody was interested enough in that player to go back and fix it again. A Wikipedia article should only say what it means, and mean what it says, and thus encrypting Vuoso's season long dispute with Kevin Keegan in a blank PST entry does not meet that criterion IMHO.

(BTW, just as an aside here, Vuoso's player article in Wikipedia does NOT show him being on loan to City for the 2002-03 season, and I think I have also recently read somewhere else - or maybe it was something one of the TV commentators said about him during the Club América game - that he cost City somewhere in the region of £3-4m. Common sense would dictate that if City paid that sort of money for him back then that he was at City a lot longer than a two-month spell. I seem to remember him as being benched (or not even match day squad selected) all season long. But that is exactly the problem with players that do not play in that manner; they very quickly drop out of our collective memories and consciousness. However, corrupting the integrity of the PST is not the correct way to redress our collective forgetfulness!)

Also note that introducing such a new section into your articles does NOT commit you to writing "an overview of the season" treatise for every one of your season articles going forward if you give that section a title that makes it obvious what the scope of it is meant to address. Besides, I detest those almost blow-by-blow accounts of some team's season that one sees in other team's season's articles, and I suspect much of that "gushing text" also violates the POV guidance. Here are some suggestions for how to handle the Vuoso bust-up with Keegan situation if you feel so strongly about it:

• Go update his player article with that information (after all, that is where it really belongs!) ... MY RECOMMENDATION
• Add that information for him in a footnote to the squad table in the appropriate "MCFC Season 2002-03" article
• Add that information for him in a new section in your season articles designated specifically for containing such info.

My more general thoughts on this issue are that you have really lost your sense of objectivity over it. That you might feel the way you do about this particular issue is one thing; that you let your feelings WRT this particular player (or, more accurately, this type of situation, because I fully realize he was just an example) affect your rational decision making in regard to other much more important decisions that must be made regarding the "MCFC Season 2010-11" article is a lot more serious. In fact it is quite problematic IMO, mostly because you are the driving creative force behind that article, and if you cannot keep your focus and objectivity WRT it then it is doomed to failure. Meaning that certain areas of it (such as the squad table) will always appear to the casual reader on the outside as having a somewhat arbitrary nature.

As the popular aphorism has it, a llama is a horse designed by a committee. If you do not stay focused on what your article (or any portion of it such as the squad table) is trying to achieve, and set the leadership for others in attaining that goal with your own edits, your squad table will eventually become much more of a llama over time than the thoroughbred steed I'm sure you would like it to remain. To shift metaphors here yet again, your thoughts re Vuoso (and similar special cases) appear to indicate that you are allowing the tail to wag the dog. You need to focus back on the dog again. Hopefully I have shown above that you can always fix the tail via alternative solutions. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry (talk) 19:59, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Hum. You make valid points as ever but I am finding it hard to agree with them. You're probably right that I'm losing my perspective, but I simply can't persuade myself that your proposed course of action is the right course of action. But frankly I'm finding it very hard to come up with answers to your points when I find myself so uncomfortable with the logical conclusions to these points. For instance, as a mathematician I recognise that "0" is as valid a statistic as "1" - that is to say, if a player plays zero matches for a team but all the time is a member of the team and could be playing those games then that figure is valid and could be mathematically significant. Your example given of how you also didn't play any games for City that season is meaningless - you weren't on City's books and you weren't training with the squad. Vuoso was, and by all rights he should have gotten a game or two. To give you a counter-example, it's like saying: "If Blackpool fail to register a single point this season, should they be deleted from any tables on websites that just show the league table by games played and points scored?" No they shouldn't, that's crazy talk. They were there and they were involved, the fact that they achieved nothing doesn't change the fact that they could have achieved something from their present position and without any tweaking necessary. And in this situation what you definitely wouldn't do is delete them from the Premier League 2010-11 season article and rely on users reading the article Blackpool F.C. to find out that they went without scoring a point in the league - or were even there in the first place. It's all well and good using "did they get a game?" as a qualifier for youths and such to be included but for players who were always in the first team I just can't envision why they shouldn't be included. The PST isn't a snap-shot of how the squad looks at any one point in time; nor is it a collation of data about the squad appearances. It is a series of snapshots from every moment in time during the season all merged into one AND it is a collation of data about them. Falastur2 ^Talk 23:01, 4 August 2010 (UTC)

Ooops. I only just noticed your response above. Your argument regarding Blackpool not appearing in EPL tables if it lost every game this season is not actually a comparable situation to the player statistics one. It is quite possible for a player to play no games at all during the whole season and thus generate a completely null row in the PST (because he could hardly score goals nor pick up yellow cards if he never played a game). That's not at all the same as Blackpool losing all its games and thus accumulating no points over the course of the season, because that will still not generate a null row in the league table listings, even those that only show games played and points. Because although the points value may be zero the number of games played will be 38. Thus that is not a null row in such a league table listing, and that was a completely bogus argument you just proffered, but I have to admit you had me sold on it too for quite awhile there.

To my mind, including a null row in the PST for a player that never kicked a ball competitively that season would be much more the equivalent situation of including a listing of Ipswich Town, Leeds United and Leicester City in the EPL table, all listed at the bottom of the table after the bottom twentieth team, with all their statistics set to zero because none of those teams competed in the EPL that year. IMHO you are comparing apples and oranges with your latest justification. What I really question is your criterion for including null rows in the PST for some players - such as (hypothetically) an Owen Hargreaves or a Vicente Matías Vuoso - but not for other comparable players (such as, for instance, the following omissions from last season's PST of Joe Hart, Felipe Caicedo or Javan Vidal) who are in exactly the same position WRT First Team squad status as those other two players. That decision strikes me as being quite subjectively arbitrary.

The only difference between any of the null statistics records generated by all of those named players is the actual cause for those players not playing any games in their respective seasons (viz. one because he fell out with his manager; one because he was seriously injured; one because he was out on loan all season to a single club; one because he went out on loan multiple times - and was available to play for the first team in between those loan spells; and one because he was simply not good enough to be chosen for any team sheet). As a mathematician myself I believe that a small formal system should be both CONSISTENT and COMPLETE. If your rationale for compiling your PST was CONSISTENT then ALL of those players I've mentioned would have a null record in the PST for the pertinent season. However, because some of those mentioned players do have null records in some of the past PSTs, while other comparable players do not have any null records in other past PSTs, the omission of those latter players makes your overall PST concept both INCONSISTENT and INCOMPLETE.

This is mostly just an observation. I don't have a dog in this race. I don't really care whether the PST contains zero null records (and thus only accounts for those players that actually kicked a ball competitively during the season), or whether it tries to account for the playing performance of every official member of the first team squad that season - and thus may well contain multiple null records for players who were:

• seriously injured all season (e.g., Owen Hargreaves and Michael Johnson - neither of whom BTW have null records in their respective PSTs for last season since they both managed a single substitute appearance as part of their each having returned from a serious and protracted prior injury only to succumb to injury yet again for the rest of the season, so they are both only being used as hypothetical examples here - what if they had not made that single sub. appearance after all? - because, off the top of my head, I cannot think of some other player who missed an entire season with his injury(ies), but there must be quite a few - I just don't have the time to Google up someone!);
• loaned-out for long periods of the season (e.g., Joe Hart, Felipe Caicedo and Jô);
• fell out of favor with the manager or got on the wrong side of the club chairman (e.g., Vicente Matías Vuoso);
• were just not good enough to be selected to play that season (e.g., Javan Vidal);
• failed to play at all that season because they wrapped their BMW motor cycle around a Ford Fiesta (e.g., Carlo Cudicini);
• failed to play because they were not registered for the EPL and UEFA squads based on their preseason performances;
• were seriously reprimanded for misconduct - e.g., received a season long ban from playing imposed by the F.A.; or
• (in the case of a character such as Joey Barton) possibly failed to play because they were incarcerated at Her Majestry's pleasure for the whole season!

It simply strikes me that the reason for someone not playing (or the CAUSE of the potential null PST entry for any given player) is quite irrelevant.

I just intuitively feel the composition of the PST should follow either the one strategy or the other, rather than reflect an arbitrarily subjective choice made by its creator that differs from season to season. Because that gives the impression of llama rather than horse. If I remember correctly how we actually got to this point, it was because of the noted difficulty of keeping the makeup of the first team squad (as it appears in the PST in your MCFC season articles) consistent with how that same squad appears in the main MCFC club article. That problem is compounded by the fact that it is hard to find a definitive description of the official first team squad anywhere. I would suggest that the squad listed here, even when that web page is correct and current (which it probably is right at this moment if you ignore the contents of the panoramic video collage contained in it at the top of the page), is actually just a de facto squad which contains a number of players that are simply too old to be EDS players (your own argument, but you've now archived that text already so I can no longer reference it with a link) rather than real contenders for first team selection this season.

Thus it was my recommendation to change your mindset about the PST having to always incorporate exactly the rather illusive and almost indefinable "first team squad" for any given season, and instead permit the PST to be simply a complete collation of statistical snapshots pertaining to any player that just happened to play for the MCFC first team at some point during that season. IMO that simple shift of focus would have resolved all of the tricky issues associated with trying to definitively nail the "first team squad" jello to the wall, and would have freed your "squad table" from unnecessary regressions that were ultimately more a product of its links to those other more contentious issues than to any piece of data ultimately entered in the statistics table for any of the players.

It now appears to me that your continual clinging to the idea that the PST should be used to display the rather arcane situations of certain players that are important mostly to you (such as Vuoso) rather than the entirely parallel situations of those players that are perhaps more important to other people (such as Joe Hart) is going to get us nowhere. This clearly is "your table" and will only contain the entries that "you" personally wish to see there, rather than display the entries according to some rational, easily verifiable criterion - such as the entries are only for players that set foot on the pitch in a competitive match during the season (thus no null records), or alternatively, the entries are for every player that was part of the official first team squad for that season (thus quite a few null records) - that can ultimately be used to determine that we might actually be missing an entry from the table, or alternatively, that we might actually have an extraneous entry in the table.

So for instance, if the PST is (a) only meant to contain entries for players that actually played that season, then if the Season 2002-03 PST did indeed contain a null entry for Vuoso (or even worse, one with some actual stats. in it!), an editor could delete that entry as an uncitable inclusion of a player that never played in the first team for City that season. Alternatively, if the PST is (b) only meant to show the stats. for every player that was officially in the first team squad at some point during the season (and that would include emergency loaned-in players such as Márton Fülöp), then if the Season 2002-03 PST failed to contain a null entry for Vuoso, an editor could later add the required null entry to the table as a valid citable inclusion of a player that was a documented member of City's first team that season (but unfortunately was never selected to play). (And BTW, I am fully aware that there are no squad tables in the MCFC season articles going back that far and that this is just a hypothetical discussion; but usually they are the best cases to use in order to think through general principles rather than get confused by isolated arbitrary facts!).

Therefore my main point to you is that if you continue to use an unclear and arbitrarily subjective criterion (whether accidentally or intentionally) for what constitutes a valid entry in your PSTs then future editors of your MCFC season articles are not going to be able to make rational decisions about which players should or should not have an entry in any given season's PST, nor exactly what sources they should be citing in order to justify their modifications (meaning additions to or deletions from) those table entries. Hence your PST, the way you have it, actually invites the situation of editing disputes and is thus (as you yourself called it) "problematic". But the fact that it is "problematic" is entirely of your own doing. The issue I'm raising is not even applicable to most of your MCFC season articles because the PST appears to only be a relatively recent addition to their content. It probably will only ever be an issue for the currently active (or upcoming) season PST (for any particular season going forward). OTOH, the issue became apparent to me when I wished to add null records to last season's PST for players I knew were officially part of the squad yet did not play any games. This then raised the issue in my mind whether to make such an edit would be considered anally pedantic on my part ... or even a minor case of vandalism.

If you genuinely want to relinquish control of your few latest articles (as I've already addressed in an earlier post) then you might wish to give serious consideration to heeding my advice and perhaps clearly define the purpose of the PST somewhere in that section of the articles. And then go back and make sure that the contents of all your prior season PST's conform to that stated purpose. Because right now your various season PSTs are inconsistent. Which means that if you, or someone else, were to revert changes made by future editors to that section of any of your most recent MCFC season articles simply because their changes happen to violate what is only "envisioned in your head" it may well become a very contentious situation. Possible contention aside, I would have thought the aesthetic and logical appeal of going about constructing the PSTs is some verifiably objective manner would be the reason you would personally want to resolve this issue. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry (talk) 19:38, 6 August 2010 (UTC)

WE NEED TO REACH CLOSURE ON THIS ISSUE ASAP. Please either acknowledge that you concur that the criterion used to date for determining what gets a row in the PST has been somewhat arbitrary (and we can work together to fix that) OR specifically define here what that deterministic criterion is (because I cannot for the life of me understand it right now, otherwise I would define it for you). But please do not procrastinate on this issue any longer. I'm not trying to be snarky here or a troublemaker or anything. To my mind, while this issue remains so fuzzy it makes your PST a bit of a castle built on sand. I want to help you fix that.

Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry 16:51, 8 August 2010 (UTC)

The criterion I have been using is simple: was member of first team squad, was available for matches.

My point is that that criterion is just fine and dandy IF AND ONLY IF you can definitively state who exactly is a member of City's first team squad at any given time in any given season (and back it up with a RS citation) AND you can definitively define who was available to be team selected for any given match in any given season (and back that up with a RS citation too). I do not believe you can do either (at best, you might possibly be able to do one or the other some of the time -but that is not definitive enough!). This is exactly the shifting sand (or what I have also called the "jello-nailing process") that I wish to avoid building the PST castle on. Which players did or did not play in any given season is something that is quite objective and can be supported with citable RSs. OTOH, who really is or is not on most EPL clubs' first team roster is an unwinnable debate that can never reach closure. {Note, this response rewritten and resigned) Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 21:54, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

To refer back to your earlier example, there was a specific reason for Joe Hart, Felipe Caicedo and Javan Vidal being excluded from this list. Hart and Caicedo were excluded because they were on season-long loan for the entirely of last season ...

NOT TRUE - last season Hart was on a season-long loan which was negotiated prior to the season starting. Hence Hughes could reassign Hart's number to Given (because it was now known for certain, before the first game of the season started, that Hart would not be using the #1 shirt at City). Jô's situation last season was similar to Hart's ... his season-long loan to Everton (which was a continuation of his prior season loan over there) was negotiated prior to the season starting. Hence Hughes could also reassign Jô's number to new boy Santa Cruz (because it was now known for certain that Jô would not be using the #14 shirt at City). The fact that Jô screwed up his loan deal with Everton by going back home to Brazil for Christmas without prior permission, thus allowing Moyes to subsequently weasel his way out of the agreement, is a whole other kettle of cod.

Nedum Onuoha's season-long loan at Sunderland this season is also the same sort of situation - it was negotiated prior to the start of the season, hence he lost his #4 shirt to Kompany. Last season, both Caicedo and Bojinov were also out on loan for all of the season. Both of their loan deals were also ratified before the first game of the season, so it is probably more fluke than good planning that Bojinov (whose loan contract ran for a full 11 months until the end of June 2010) kept his #9 squad number despite clearly being scheduled to be out on loan to well beyond the end of the English season like all the other players mentioned above. However, I believe the situation with Caicedo was somewhat different. Caicedo kept his #20 squad number because his initial loan to Sporting Lisbon was only to the end of the year, at which point he would have been expected to rejoin the first team squad and have been eligible to play for City in 2010. As it happened, shortly after returning in January he was loaned right back out again to Málaga for the rest of the season. And that is the subtle difference that you keep overlooking in his case. Being on loan MOST of the season is NOT the same as being on loan ALL season. You can (and do) argue that players such as Jô, Hart and Bojinov could not possibly have played for City last season because their season-long loans began before the season did, and terminated after the season ended.

However, their season-long loans are somewhat different to Caicedo's "season-long" loan because Caicedo had an opportunity to be picked to play for the City first team before he went back out on loan the second time. IMO the fact that he wasn't chosen to play puts him in exactly the same category as Vuoso. You stated above that Vuoso was available for two months (I personally think it was much longer, but let's go with your stated period) but wasn't picked by Keegan - exactly how is that any different than Mancini not picking Caicedo to play once he was available to do so after he came back from SCP (foir instance, I believe he was available to be picked to play in the Middlesbrough cup tie). So exactly how does his situation differ from Vuoso's ... he was a bona fide member of the first team squad who was available for matches ... that meets your very criterion stated above for INCLUSION in the PST, and not EXCLUSION from the PST (as you keep arguing). Is it something in the water that you guys are drinking over there, or is a blatant disregard for rules of Boolean Logic considered a prerequisite for being a Wikipedia editor in the UK ?! :) Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 04:35, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

... and if the Joe Hart/Marton Fulop/general City keeper chaos situation at the end of last season has taught football fans anything, it's that Premier League rules state that a player on season-long loan cannot be recalled.

NOT TRUE AGAIN - it was City's loan agreement with Birmingham City not containing a clause to cover such an early termination of his loan that prevented his recall, thus Birmingham City was under no legal obligation to do City any favors. It was once that contractual inability to recall Hart was pointed out to the Premier League - thus proving that City only had one available fit goalkeeper (Gunnar Nielsen) out of six or seven GKs on the club's roster (viz. Given, Hart, Taylor, González, Nielsen, Johansen and Mentel) - that the PL approved the invoking of the emergency loan rule WRT loan transfers outside of the two official windows. That loan of Márton Fülöp was NOT approved bythe PL because City claimed it needed a better GK than Nielsen if it was going to seriously contest 4th place, it was approved because City could demonstrate to the PL that it could not name two fit GKs for the next game's team sheet. It was not at all certain when the Fülöp loan was approved that he would not be the GK sitting on the bench. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 04:35, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

Thus, once a player is sent away for the season they categorically will not be making appearances for their mother club that season.

I don't believe that's TRUE EITHER - once Jô's season-long loan to Everton was cut short due to his indiscipline in going home to Brazil, thus allowing Moyes to invoke a cancelation clause in his loan contract (because by Christmas time Moyes no longer needed Jô, yet he was contractually obligated to honor the year-long loan contract), if he had rejoined the City first team squad (instead of fortuitously going right back on loan to Galatasaray the very same day he returned) he could quite well have been utilized by Mancini in the second half of the season if Mancini had been plagued with a number of striker injuries (just as he is being used by Mancini right now - because Jô was on the bench for the Spurs game yesterday). So I very much question your "categorically will not" statement above. Please provide a RS citation to back up that statement of yours. :) Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 04:35, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

Vidal was missed off because at no point in the season was he considered a first team player. He never even made the bench. I'll agree that my addition of him this season was erratic, but frankly my mind has been on other things, and since you raised the issue I haven't wanted to arbitrarily correct the issue since it's apportioning a solution to a problem which we are supposed to be resolving together.

You well know my feelings on this issue, yet Vidal remains included in the first team squad in the main MCFC article as well as in your own 2010-11 season article. If you removed him from the first team squads in both articles your above rationale might carry some water. However, as things currently are, your above statement contains more holes than a colander. OK, OK, I'm, just yanking your chain now! :) Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 04:35, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

The PST has always been part of the City season articles, incidentally. If you check this link, which is in fact the very, very first edit (i.e. page creation) I made to the very first City season article, which started the entire project off, the PST was there from the very start, and in much the same form it is in now. I'm not aware of many inconsistencies I've ever placed between those PSTs in different articles, aside from the inclusion of those youths in the 2010-11 article we are discussing.

The context of my comment was all of the articles identified on your User Page - many of which are TBD, and I fully realize that only some of the completed ones are actually "live" Wikipedia articles (viz. the ones that cover the most recent seasons). I quite understand that the articles go back historically a lot longer than you've been creating them on Wikipedia. My point was that the PST only appears in any of your season articles for the first time around 2005. Thus all our prior discussion over Vuoso's inclusion in a PST or not is completely hypothetical, because the 2002-03(?) season article to which that discussion pertains doesn't even contain a PST! You may have always included a PST in the current season's articles going forward after you had posted your first such article, but you have never gone backwards (based on my random checks), and added a PST into any of your "historical" articles (meaning those articles covering seasons prior to whenever you started creating them on Wikipedia), and I suspect that's becauuse you can't, since that kind of data is really hard, if not impossible, to obtain if you don't capture it at the time. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 04:35, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

So what to do. I remain personally unsure about your interpretation - though I see your logic I still can't quite see your point about how editors can remove Vuoso as uncitable, as I personally he is eminently citable - I can, for instance, cite a number of match reports which will show that Vuoso was actually an unused substitute for three competitive first team fixtures. You are right that my example of Blackpool being excluded for receiving zero points was flawed, but if we equate the points scored of that example to Vuoso's appearances, the logical corollary is that games played = times named on the bench, and Vuoso qualifies in that respect. In fact I was going to suggest earlier that we use "being named on the bench, even if not used" as a criterion for determining first team status in the cases of dubiously first team players - i.e. if Wikipedians can't decide this season if Javan Vidal is first team or not, if he gets a competitive first team bench place he earns a PST place. I'm not 100% convinced by the idea (it was a spur of the moment flash of "inspiration") but there's an idea to throw into the ring for your delectation.

My point was this. If, as an editor (call me editor A) I believe, by looking at a number of your extant PSTs, that your criterion for constructing them is to display stats. for every player in the first team squad, and I see that once you, or someone else, has created a PST for the 2002-03 season, a record for Vuoso is missing from it, then it is quite likely that I will decide to add a new blank row for him and cite one of the articles (in the information you just mentioned above) as an RS to support my new edit. If another editor (let's call him editor B) similarly believes, by also looking at a number of your extant PSTs, that your criterion for constructing them is only to display stats. for players that actually played that season, then that would stop him from doing the above edit because he would know that the omission of any row in the PST for Vuoso was correct (based on this latter criterion for inclusion).

Furthermore, if there was already a record in the PST for Vuoso then, based on the latter criterion for inclusion, editor B would be correct in removing him, and he could also cite one of the articles (in the information you just mentioned above) as an RS to support his edit too; whilest based on the former criterion for inclusion, plus a look at those very same articles, would tell me (Editor A) to leave his record there. Thus without a CLEARLY discernable criterion for how your PST is constructed, two different editors (A and B) can come to completely opposite conclusions about what really needs to be done, and both can cite a valid RS to support their particular choice of action. Consequently, adding Vuoso to the PST, deleting Vuoso from the PST, leaving him in the PST (if he's already there), and leaving him out of the PST (if he's already omitted) can all be justified with a citable RS by different editors. What's wrong with this picture?

Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 04:35, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

Overall though, given the time to think about it, I've decided that this really isn't a big enough issue to allow it to cause us problems - ultimately I'll settle with whatever we decide and if Vuoso et al are shelved then so be it.

They don't necessarily have to be "shelved" as you say; their situations/stories can simply be captured and told by other means (than a null stats. record in the PST), in exactly the same way that there are better ways of letting someone know that Ipswich Town and Leeds United are not competing in the EPL this season than by including null records for them at the bottom of the official league tables. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 21:54, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

There's little else I can commit to this discussion and I'll go with your recommendation if you remain unconvinced by my above suggestion. I would, however, like to request an independent source (or perhaps two) to give their opinions on this topic, however, if only so that I can gain understanding of where exactly other people sit on the issue. The people I'd like to refer this point to are User:Oldelpaso and User:PeeJay2K3, both of whom you may have noticed commenting on the WP:Football debate on whether the two City games articles should be deleted. Oldelpaso is a great City fan, and a far greater source of information than I - I often use him as a point of reference and I value his opinions on articles immensely. PeeJay is (unfortunately) a red, but is one of if not the most active and respected WP:Football Wikipedian and I'd dare say has ten or a hundred times better ideas and knowledge about good practice in articles than I do - I've had numerous dealings with him over the years and I've never had any reason to disagree with him. Honestly, I have no idea why I didn't think of consulting them on this issue earlier. If you wouldn't mind, I'd appreciate seeing what their opinions are - after they've given them then I'd be quite happy to concede the point if no new points of view or changes of heart are raised in the meantime. Falastur2 ^Talk 00:41, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

Going off the note on my talkpage (the above is a bit tl;dr) I see where you are both coming from, though I can't say I have a strong opinion on the matter. From a purely statistical point of view, Vuoso would not be included in a list of players in the likes of Manchester City – The Complete Record or Rothmans. If memory serves me correctly Vuoso was an unused sub once or twice, so if players in that situation are included then he'd go in. A fully developed article on that season would mention Vuoso – in the context of the transfer hubris that culminated in David Bernstein's exit after Fowler was signed – but that would be in prose, and would have no bearing on a squadlist. Oldelpaso (talk) 20:00, 15 August 2010 (UTC)

Discussing Vuoso's situation (and other similar ones) in prose somewhere else in a "fully developed" season article for the season in question is exactly how I would like to see them handled. ITMT, someone could also add some text (WRT this debacle affecting his short stay at City) into his personal player article because that looks to me like it could do with some work, but I personally don't know enough about Vuoso to properly fix it. WRT to "bums on seats" possibly being a criterion for granting someone a row in any given team's PST, then by my reckoning every home game at Old Trafford should by rights cause up to 76,000 new null entries to be added to the Manchester United PST! IMHO, that is a very slippery slope to start on down, which is why I'm trying to avoid doing it at all costs. :)

However, that said, this particular situation does change somewhat starting with the new season. Last season, seeing Jô's bum sitting on the substitutes' bench for one of City's games would have meant nothing; he made no first team appearances last season so he does not merit a PST entry (since there are no stats. to report for him). However, seeing his bum sitting on the substitutes' bench for the opening match at White Hart Lane does actually tell you something useful that could not be gleaned from the same observation last season. For Jô to have been a named sub. for that game implies that he must have been registered by Mancini in his 25-man EPL squad, because Mancini is not so stupid as to name a sub. he cannot legitimately play. Jô could very well be dropped from the EPL squad before the transfer window closes on August 31 (for example, to make room for Milner in the final squad going forward) but for right now we can deduce that he is in the squad. And if that same "bum on seat" observation had been made after August 31, then one could definitively conclude Jô is in the EPL squad for the duration of the first registration period. This is a conclusion based on observation that was not possible in any prior season. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 21:54, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

Thanks OEP for the comments. Not sure where PeeJay got to but whatever. I consider this case closed now, I concede the point willingly. However, your comments in the last paragraph aren't exactly accurate - "bums on seats" in the crowd is not the same as "bums on seats" on the bench. A person sitting in the crowd cannot be called up as a substitute, although that once were the case. To take a part in the game you must be registered with the FA and you must appear on the team lists submitted to the referee an hour before the game kicks off. Thus, being one of the 76,000 at Old Trafford does not mean you have as much right to represent a player statistic as someone on the bench. Someone on the bench can theoretically have a part in the game. Someone one row behind in the crowd cannot under any circumstances. But whatever, as I said, case closed. From now on I consider the conditions for inclusion to be: has played games or: has been named in 25-man squad. Falastur2 ^Talk 23:20, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

Initial discussion of the possible phasing of the proposed changes to the PST

NOTE: I've now made this chunk of text from the end of the previous section its own new section here Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 21:41, 27 August 2010 (UTC)

I'd be happy to roll this out. I see in the other sandbox linked that you've only got the one column stating squad statuses - are you just waiting for the official announcements of the squads for each competition? Before, you had the three columns. I'm willing to go with your not adding certain fringe members, too - see my recent comments further up my talk page where I essentially say that I'm willing to drop the issue for the sake of peace of mind - though I'd appreciate getting those outside judgments before going any further with it. Falastur2 ^Talk 01:19, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

I consider this to be a two phase process. Phase 1 is adding the "Squad Status" column as an "attribute" of each player ... and that is the version of the "updated PST section" that is in the Talk Page of the sandbox account created by gonads (with just that one column added along with the defining text and table). Phase 2 is adding the third "Squad" columns in each of the EPL and Europa Cup competition columns to the above Phase 1 update after that has been "rolled out" (as you just assured me you are about to do). The current status of the Phase 2 updates and experimentation with the ideas we are throwing around is in the Talk Page of my own sandbox account ("Mancini's Sandbox"). The User Page of that same sandbox account contains my "archived" (but nevertheless kept current with the latest developments) text of my original proposal (as explained in the text in the previous section above).

The reason for the phasing is because the addition of the "Squad Status" column is relatively uncontentious, but more importantly, it also contains information that people need NOW as they try and work out what the new 25-man squad provisions entail for their favorite EPL teams' squads come the start of the season / end of this month. OTOH, we clearly have quite a few issues to resolve before we can come up with a complete and elegant solution for Phase 2. Not only that, even if we had the design all sorted out, ready to go and pat today, we still could not publish Phase 2 because we don't know the actual 25-man squads until they are announced for each of the two competitions come August 31. Anything published by us before that date would be uncitable speculation on our parts. So we have minimally until the end of this month to get the design of Phase 2 sorted out. Once published, Phase 1 will also take on a life of its own (I'm assuming) and will be improved by other editors, rather than simply reverted because it was "not invented here" and/or posted by a newbie. Which is why I want you to post it.

Having said all that, the issues you raised in your last paragraph in the next section below re the fact that UEFA have slightly different stated requirements / stati for "HGP" players is pertinent to the Phase 1 updates (and, of course, Phase 2 because it subsumes Phase 1). So, since you have not done the roll out of Phase 1 yet, perhaps you should wait a little longer (OMG, I hate to hear myself say that!) until I can follow all the implications of that issue through to their conclusions and fix it accordingly (if it needs fixing). I'll post back here (as an indent to this post) when I think it is ready to go (it will probably be later today for me, but it may be beyond midnight your time). Alternatively, you could go ahead with the roll out of the Phase 1 release tonight and I'll do the fixes (if any required) in the actual article. But we've waited all this time since the weekend with the table ready to go so I guess another day will not hurt.

Any changes to Phase 1 (as it currently is in this sandbox) ... (NOTE: The contents of this sandbox are now completely different than what was being indicated at the time that comment was written. I've chosen to add this later qualification here rather than modify the original text.) Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 21:41, 27 August 2010 (UTC) ... will possibly require coming up with a 5th (and possibly even a 6th, etc.) "Squad Status" code(s) and reclassifying some of the players accordingly (if necessary; it is possible to have valid "Squad Status" codes for which City currently do not have any players that fulfill that status), as well as adding to the table and inline introductory sections more text that defines the new "Squad Status" code(s), and/or modifying the current table and inline introductory section text that defines the current four "Squad Status" codes. One thing I'm considering doing is adding a new column to my summarizing table that maps UEFA terminology (taken from the appropriate sections of the Europa League and Champions League Rules and Regulations WRT player eligibility) to our own "generic terminology" that is a synthesis of both the EPL and UEFA terminology. Of course, a column also needs to be added for the EPL to map its "player eligibility" terminology to our own "all embracing" generic terminology, but like you, I still haven't seen the source text published by the Premier League to rightly know what that terminology actually is.

All of the issues addressed in the above preceding paragraph (now italicized) have been taken care of (for over 2 days now!). One new squad status code ("YTH") was required and 2 new columns were added to the summarizing table that effectively defines the 5 squad status codes, plus all the preceding inline text was rewritten to be consistent with that new summary table. ISSUE CLOSED. You can delete this italicized paragraph plus the preceding one if you agree, otherwise explain below why you consider this issue still open. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 20:05, 15 August 2010 (UTC)

Consequently, such an update might best be rolled out as a Phase 1A improvement to what we already have once I actually have the source text for all three competitions. I also need the equivalent text for the UEFA Super Cup competition to do a complete job, but I really don't want that stupid non-competition to hold things up here. The 2010 Super Cup does not involve any British teams so IMO we have until the end of August next year to tweak anything that it might require. Not only that, the two teams that play in it are also automatically qualified as defending champions in the two other main UEFA competitions, so presumably their 2010-11 UEFA squad registrations for competing in either of those competitions simply carries over to the single Super Cup final game. Or maybe the last 2009-10 squad re-registrations of those teams simply applies. But it really doesn't matter, does it, because I don't necessarily see City playing in the Super Cup within the next year or so! :( Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 20:12, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

The issue of the Super Cup that I raised in the preceding paragraph (now italicized) turns out to be a non-issue (as I suspected it would be). I have now read the UEFA "player eligibility' regulations for all three UEFA competitions for the current 2010-2011 season and they ALL use essentially identical text. This text just has different article and section numbering depending on where it appears in each of the three UEFA competition regulations documents (actually it is ONLY the Super Cup document section and article numbering that differs from the other two documents because, as one would expect, it is a much shorter documment). Thus the above NON-ISSUE is now CLOSED and you can now delete this paragraph plus the preceding one. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 20:47, 15 August 2010 (UTC)

I believe the prior "HGP / ACG" distinction in the PST squad stati already took care of this issue, and that you acknowledged such with your, "We're in agreement. And yeah, you actually did capture that disagreement, my bad" statement in the next section below. ISSUE CLOSED. If you agree, just delete this italicized update comment and the now italicized text of the paragraph above. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 19:45, 15 August 2010 (UTC)

Take a look at the updates I've done to the Player Squad Status Summary Table (that's now my official name for it; I've been referring to it by all sorts of names up to this point) in the Phase 2 sandbox ... (NOTE: The contents of this sandbox are now different than what was being indicated at the time that comment was written. I've chosen to add this later qualification here rather than modify the original text.) Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 21:41, 27 August 2010 (UTC) ... as well as all the introductory inline text above it which I've now completely rewritten to be consistent with the summary table below it. Also check the parallel updates done here. I've tried to incorporate all the terminology that UEFA uses in its "Player Eligibility" section of the "Europa League Rules amd Regulations" PDF that you linked me to and map it to the existing terminology I was using via a new "UEFA terminology" column in that table. I need to do a similar set of updates to the table in the new "PL terminology" column for the EPL terminology when I can get my eyeballs on a similar PDF - for right now I've written all the text in the entries in that new PL column by flying by the seat of my pants.

This represents what I had previously referred to as Phase 1A. I'm a little worried that all my text and table to define the new Squad Status codes now completely dwarfs your PST (in which they represent just one column)! But they need explaining and this is the best I could do. We might be able to wordsmith the shit out of it and save a couple of paragraphs-worth of text, but I don't see doing much better than that. Possibly we could just keep the summary table and lose all that it is summarizing! I need your feedback on this. I don't feel very much like fiddling around with this much more, plus I don't have the time.

NOTE 1: I have already copied eveything but the PST (because that has the extra Phase 2 Squad columns in it) over to the other (Phase 1) sandbox and this has now alresdy become the Phase 1 version ready for roll out. The season started yesterday, Mancini has announced both his UEFA squad (at least 23 of them) and EPL squad (because he could not have fielded a team against Spurs without having done so), although I have no idea where that first iteration of his EPL squad has been published; I've personally still not seen it, but I bet my original hyperthetical one in my sandbox is still 95% correct! Thus the interesting element of these squad codes has now become pretty moot - after all, why would anyone try and work out the upcoming squads for themselves once Mancini has actually announced them (or at least most of them)!

NOTE 2: The above two leading paragraphs of this message were rewritten / updated since you had still not replied to the previous two previous versions of this post and the latest updates above made it all old news. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 20:47, 15 August 2010 (UTC)

Just as an aside here, I've also updated in that Phase 2 sandbox the Europa League squad column from my earlier hypothetical 25-man squad to the list of Mancini's 23 named players that was released today - it actually wasn't that much different!). Both sandboxes reflect the removal of Onuoha from the squad due to Sunderland duty. The surprises in Mancini's 23-man Europa League squad announced today is that it included Michael Johnson and Shaleum Logan, neither of whom has kicked a ball publicly in any of the preseason games (and accordingly I had just assumed Johnson was still not fit yet and Logan was playing with Vidal and Etuhu over in the EDS). So two Europa slots left and Mancini is stalling on what he intends to do with Bellamy, Ireland, Silva and Jô. His 23-man squad contained 4 strikers, 8 midfielders, 8 defenders, and 3 goalkeepers (which I personally feel is an extravagance given that the club is allowed to draft in another goalie in an emergency situation if it has to - just like City did last season with Fülöp - and that Given and Hart have both been very vocal about not knowing what they are going to do if they don't get the first choice goalie slot).

The current ACG-HGP-FOR spread for the squad is 4-7-12 so any 2 of the above four players could be added without restriction. As you pointed out elsewhere, the Balotelli purchase, should it be completed, will not cost City a LIST A slot in the EPL squad since he is under 21 ("U21" status in the PST) and can thus be LIST B registered to play in the EPL, however Balotelli no longer qualifies as a "Youth Player" ("YTH" status in the PST) in the eyes of UEFA as he did when still at Inter Milan, because he has not been at City 2 days yet, let alone 2 years! Consequently, Balotelli will have to be registered for the UEFA squad via a "Free Player" ("FOR" status in the PST) LIST A slot, and Mancini can still do that in time for him to be able to play in the Europa playoff game this week, because Mancini is allowed to make one change to the squad that he originally registered for that tie last week. Mancini can either replace someone (such as Santa Cruz) who is already registered via last week's LIST A submittal, or he can simply add Super Mario in one of the remaining two unused "FOR" slots.

The potential purchase of Milner presumably accounts for Mancini's procrastination over the other slot that Mancini left blank last week. Bellamy's loan to Cardiff City today explained (if one had not already guessed!) his omission from that first UEFA squad submittal, and the expected partial exchange of Ireland in the Milner deal also explains Stevie's omission from it too. Personally, I felt that Jô had done enough to earn himself a place, and I'm baffled why David Silva was left out given all the money that has just been spent on him. It looks to me that Mancini is still not quite sure which strikers he wants to use and where (choose any two from Santa Cruz, Silva and Jô). What are your thoughts on this? Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 08:47, 12 August 2010 (UTC)

A large chunk of the above two paragraphs was rewritten at the same time this new message was posted. You stated on the 11 August (see your timestamped signature above), "I'd be happy to roll this out" (the actual text is up above in your firs paragraph) and yet here we are a week later with no roll-out? So what's the problem? All of the concerns you initially expressed re Phase 1 had been taken care of for two days by the 15 August when I made my last batch of bold text responses in this section. Note, the roll-out is NOT dependent on PeeJay's feedback on a completely different issue that relates to Phase 2 (if at all) and NOT Phase 1. But here's the problem I have my end. gonads stated he would not revert and then he did so without explaining why he went back on his word. Now you've gone and stated you'll roll something out then you didn't without providing any explanation for why you haven't. You guys are coming across as a couple of BS artists. If you still have issues just say so and explain them. You also need to do some text tidyup here and remove all text pertaining to issues that are now moot, or at least post something to say why you think they are still an issue. Thanks. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 03:09, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

• Status of this section: I think that most of the points raised here are now resolved, moot or old news. It is especially old news given the subsequent roll out of the updated PST before your vacation - welcome back, BTW. :) I think you need to go through the above dialogue (actually, it is mostly a monologue!) in this section with a fresh pair of eyes on your return and satisfy yourself that all of the raised points have been satisfactorily resolved or have become non-issues - such as the phasing of PST updates (since what you effectively rolled out was Phase 2+). Should there be any point that you don't understand or feel might still be an issue then respond to it - better still, make your response a pointer to a new section below where it can be further discussed until resolved. That way, you will be able to archive this section, otherwise it will remain open and potentially become even lengthier and more complicated, and thus somewhat unmanageable.

IMO there are a couple of points raised above that are still unresolved but I feel that these issues have already been - or soon will be - touched on in some of the other ongoing sections, so I am hesitant to start yet more new sections here in order to specifically address them in their own right. Just as an FYI they are:

• The issue of what to do with all the inline text I generated. As I stated above, I'm fully aware it dwarfs everything else in the article and what was rolled out was a good compromise. However it is still an OPEN ISSUE that needs to be resolved.
• Some of my comments added on August 12 re Mancini's (then) recently announced UEFA squad for the Europa League play-off round may be pertinent to the discussion in the new "Squad Re-registration Issues" section I created below.

So there might be a case to be made for preserving the last couple of paragraphs of that Aug 12 post going forward, but as for the rest of this section, from my perspective, it's mostly old news and I'm now completely done with it. Mancini's Lasagne invite to Harry ^Talk 21:30, 29 August 2010 (UTC)