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Norwegian Eliteserien not fully professional?

Following Ranheim Fotball's promotion to the Eliteserien for the 2018 season, it seems that the league is no longer fully professional. They are a part-time team made up of locally-based players who either supplement their income with other jobs or study alongside playing football. I can find a write-up about the club here on Reddit and here by a long-time poster and authority on Norwegian football on a very respected European club football forum. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be widespread English-language coverage of the Eliteserien and I am not fluent in Norwegian so it has proven difficult to find other more verifiable sources, but perhaps any Norwegians on here might have more success. IrishTennis (talk) 02:01, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

@IrishTennis: Page 6 of this PDF from Ranheim, published in March, includes the following paragraph: "Semiproff modell: På nivået vi konkurrerer på har det vært en stor andel utøvere/klubber som har helprofesjonell status. Ranheim har hele tiden holdt på en semiprofesjonell modell, der det er viktig å ta utdanning eller jobbe ved siden av. Dette har gitt en forutsigbar og rettferdig lønnspolitikk som prestasjonsgruppa bygges på." Which translates to the following: "Semi-Pro model: At the level we compete on, there has been a large proportion of athletes / teams that have fully professional status. Ranheim has always been on a semi-professional model, where it is important to get an education or work alongside. This has provided a predictable and fair salary policy that achievements are built on." This article also mentions the club is semi-professional ("Ranheim skal være et stabilt 1. divisjonslag. Ranheim har en semiprofesjonell modell. Og Ranheim skal i stor grad videreutvikle lokale fotballspillere." / "Ranheim should be a stable 1st division team. Ranheim has a semiprofessional model. And Ranheim will largely further develop local football players."). S.A. Julio (talk) 03:23, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

@S.A. Julio: Great! Thanks for finding those. Will I go ahead and move it to non-fully professional leagues with those two sources attached? IrishTennis (talk) 04:53, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

If only a single team in the league is semi-pro, especially one that is has only just been promoted, then I'm not sure it should be reclassified. However, if Ranheim are confident of survival then it might suggest they might not be the only one? Number 57 11:11, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

If we were to end up using this information for it to be reclassified, it would only be 2018 forward, with the prior years remaining under FPL section. Players who played in prior seasons would still pass FOOTY. If this changed is made, only Ranheim and the other two newly promoted teams, along with 1st year players in the league, wouldn't pass(unless they already do somewhere outside of league). WikiVirusC^(talk) 15:51, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

I agree with N57 that only one team in the league should not prevent it being considered fully-pro (we had this debate a few years ago with the Finnish 1st tier and the Scottish second tier, amongst others - otherwise it gets too messy. In any event we also don't know what the club's intentions are for their season/league requirements to turn fully-pro. Summary - leave it as it is. GiantSnowman 15:54, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

I also agree with what's been said already, but I have to call into question whether the league is actually confirmed as fully pro. The only source we've got is a dead link to subscription only page, with no indication of what it actually said about the league. Pinging User:Eldumpo who added the ref many years ago. Do you by chance remember what it said, or where we might find a replacement source. Sir Sputnik (talk) 16:19, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

I can’t recall the content of the source I added which is now a dead link, it may have been some kind of thesis article (it wouldn’t have been subscription when I added it). I wouldn’t take that reference as definitive evidence the League was (at the time the reference was written) 'fully pro'. I’m inclined to wait for a bit and see how things turn out this season. It may be the status of Ranheim will lead to a number of articles that provide more details on the financial status of the other clubs.Eldumpo (talk) 22:23, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

If the league is still considered fully pro despite having one (and possible more) part-time team(s) then where is the line drawn exactly? The League of Ireland, for example, is listed as a non-fully pro league despite having just one completely part-time team, Bohemians, and one other team which combines part-time players with full-time ones, Bray Wanderers, as evidenced by these links: "They're full-time professional squads, with very talented young players.", "Kenny combines part-time players with full-timers and it's working for the Seagulls", "Probably ourselves and Bray are 'part-time' (while) everybody else has the resources.", "In truth, Bohemians and Bray are the only resolutely part-time operations with Limerick's status scaled back.". I accept that this is a discussion about the Eliteserien so feel free to transfer the above into a separate debate. I was just using those examples as a comparison. IrishTennis (talk) 00:23, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

They've certainly started well, but I don't have any problem with keeping it as a fully professional league for now. It's a hard topic to source, to be honest. In a promotion-relegation system, you could, in theory, have a semi-professional team promoted to the English Premier League. The difference I see here between the Eliteserien and the Irish League is there are enough teams in Norway to have a completely professional top flight, and Ranheim's participation is a happy fluke, whereas the League of Ireland First Division probably has relatively few if any fully professional teams. SportingFlyer talk 04:51, 4 May 2018 (UTC)

Superettan fully pro?

What level is the league now? It seems to have full sponsorship as far as I am aware. Govvy (talk) 13:50, 4 June 2018 (UTC)

It is the 2nd level. I’m not sure exactly what you mean by 'full sponsorship' but that’s not the same as all players being 'fully pro' anyway. Eldumpo (talk) 22:10, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

Is there a set amount players need to earn for a league to be fully pro?

So I see this deletion discussion for Nicole Simonsen being considered for deletion because the W-League isn't on the list of fully professional leagues. However in 2017 the league signed a collective bargaining agreement that meant Under the new two-year agreement, all players, other than those on scholarships, are guaranteed a minimum retainer of at least $10,000 for the coming season and $12,200 for the 2018/19 season. Previously, many players were considered amateur and received only reimbursement of expenses. So is that enough to consider the league pro, considering all players require get some payment for playing even if some are only getting $10k? NZFC^(talk) 23:29, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

Copying over my comments from the AfD as well, since it does make more sense to have this discussion here than on that particular AfD as such. I think at some point we need to look at the fact that WP:NFOOTY has issues with systemic bias and is going to lead to systematically less coverage of women athletes. This is problematic. As NZFC points out, the league considers itself professional. One can make arguments about the amount of money meaning they have to work second jobs so they aren't professional, or that the league does not receive as much media coverage -- but equally these reasons can all come back to concerns of systemic bias. we need to look at addressing WP:NFOOTY's gender imbalance. matt91486 (talk) 00:25, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

For a league to considered be fully pro, all players must be full time professionals. Considering $12,000 per year is about a third of what you would earn working a minimum wage job in Australia, this does not appear to be the case. Sir Sputnik (talk) 01:04, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

You're not really responding to the substance of my point, however. We've created a guideline that -- unintentionally -- systematically decreases coverage of women athletes relative to men. matt91486 (talk) 01:08, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

So what we have here is the answer is no because they need to be fully professional in that they can live off the wage. While instead maybe we need to discuss changing the guidelines as it appears to have a bias against women's sport (Yes thats another arguement) and maybe we need to consider if the league considers it to be professional then maybe we should too. The W-League and FFA believes it is professional league because it provides contracting certainty, roster sizes, a salary cap, an agreed commercial framework to underpin the growth of the women’s game, minimum medical standards, key principles for the first ever formal maternity policy for players and the establishment of a formal partnership with the players through the Professional Women’s Football Committee to drive further employment, performance and competition reform. NZFC^(talk) 01:18, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

I think you're right that they are two separate points -- they might be related as a potential solution, but we don't want to narrow the discussion too much. My main thought on the (broader) matter is this: I think it's problematic that players are not considered notable if, for example, they compete in the Frauen-Bundesliga and D1F: the top two leagues in Europe according UEFA coefficients. If our guidelines are written to exclude the best players in the best leagues, it seems as though we are missing something important. I say this not to say that players from men's leagues shouldn't be notable because I err on the side of inclusion; however, a guideline that excludes the top two women's leagues but confers notability on players in the second divisions in Belarus and Albania might need to be more inclusive towards women. This shouldn't be taken as a slight on either of those leagues, just as an illustration of the gap in coverage. matt91486 (talk) 01:42, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

I wouldn't consider the W-League fully professional, but I would be in favor of updating notability standards for women's leagues. There's no reason why we can't have a separate notability list for women's leagues, which typically aren't fully professional because they run over a shorter period of time. SportingFlyer talk 15:22, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

Question - "can this semi-pro league be considered fully-pro?" Answer - no. Lots of teams/leagues have some form of reimbursement, that doesn't make playing for/in them notable. GiantSnowman 19:06, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

Well, perhaps as SportingFlyer suggests, we can take this as an opportunity to determine a more appropriate notability criteria for women's football leagues. I don't really know the best way of setting up such a discussion, but I do think it is one worth having. I won't pretend I know what the best criteria actually is, but it does seem that while the current criteria may work fine for men's leagues, it does miss important things for women's ones. matt91486 (talk) 19:39, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

What notability, other than WP:GNG, do you want? It's a slippery slope... GiantSnowman 20:03, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

Also, if a league doesn't attract enough supporters to allow the clubs to become fully-professional, how are the players in that league notable? Non-international footballers are only notable by virtue of the game being a popular spectator sport (top division players in sports like field hockey are not notable because hardly anyone watches it), so if there aren't that many spectators, I can't see how the players can be given a notability pass. Number 57 20:12, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

Notability has nothing to do with the number of spectators, and everything to do with whether the subject has been reliably covered in independent secondary sources. The W-League for instance gets a lot of good coverage even though the attendance can be 5,000 at one stadium one game and then 600 for the next game at a completely different location for the same team. SportingFlyer talk 20:57, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

I think we'll have to disagree there – the number of people going to games is the key indicator of notability of notability for players in team sports IMO; the coverage is a secondary factor and linked to the fact that there is spectator interest. The National League has decent coverage by BBC Sport (it has its own section on the BBC Football site) and live matches on TV, but we don't give players from the league a free pass to notability because it's not fully pro. You can always argue on a GNG basis if the coverage is good, although experience from seeing dozens (if not hundreds) of AfDs where people have relied on GNG is that whilst editors arguing "keep" on that basis have managed to find several mentions in the media of said players, it's often just routine stuff like match reports and little detailed coverage of the individuals. Number 57 21:23, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

I don't mind the fully professional distinction in terms of the notability presumption, but it isn't necessarily tied to the number of spectators. For instance, 51,000 people watched the Liga Femenil MX final, but we had a number of AfDs recently about fairly prominent Liga Femenil players. I understand Wikipedia's a lagging indicator of notability, but I think there would be a common sense argument to allow a presumption at least prominent non-national team players from the W-League and the Liga Femenil articles, similar to how hockey presumes notability for minor leaguers with specific statistics. SportingFlyer talk 22:23, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

Right -- but we have to remember that the coverage itself is a product of systemic bias concerns as well -- so if we're trying to solve a systemic bias issue through the use of purely media reporting, it's sort of circular. (Does spectator interest drive media attention or vice versa?) My gut reaction would be perhaps something like a league's UEFA coefficient (or international equivalents for other regions) might be something workable for women's leagues. I don't know what the right number down the rankings makes sense as a starting point. But that's something close to an "objective" measure that theoretically should treat women's and men's leagues equally. But I am absolutely interested in other people's thoughts on other/better metrics. matt91486 (talk) 22:57, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

This basically sounds like WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS – it is not Wikipedia's role to artificially promote women's football. Regarding the use of coefficients, any indicator that doesn't reflect spectator/media interest in the sport is a non-starter. The current guideline does treat men's and women's leagues equally – the outcome is a reflection on the real-life levels of interest in the leagues. A guideline that said (for example) that players from the top 50 men's and women's leagues (based on coeffcients) are deemed notable simply wouldn't work because it doesn't take into account the fact that there is vastly different levels of interest and the 100th ranked men's league might still attract more attention that the tenth ranked women's league. Number 57 11:19, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

Given that Wikipedia as an institution actively discusses the problematic nature of its gender gap and concerns with systemic bias, I'm not sure that's a fair characterization. And again, I'm not suggesting any change should be made to the men's criteria. I'm merely suggesting that there might be some flexibility as an option to recognize that it might be important to recognize the notability of players in a few of the top women's leagues according to a secondary criteria. matt91486 (talk) 18:37, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

What Wikipedia does as an organisation isn't relevant to its content. I think it's worth looking at similar notability guidelines for comparison: WP:NPOLITICIAN grants notability to politicians who have held national or state-wide office. However, the vast majority of people who fit into that category are men. This doesn't mean the guideline is systematically biased – it simply reflects reality that there are more male politicians than women. I don't think anyone would consider that we should create separate criteria for female politicians to ensure more articles on them. However, when it comes to a similar discussion around football, there are always claims of bias (or worse; most discussions on the topic have quickly descended into accusations of sexism and misogyny, which I'm pleased to see hasn't happened here). Why this is, I don't know. Perhaps it's something to do with the reputation of football fans? Number 57 19:43, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

I entirely take your point re: politicians. However, I think it's different for one key reasons. In politicians, men and women inherently compete for the same offices. Here, men and women compete in parallel. So it would be very difficult to split the criteria for men/women for politicians, where as it is somewhat easier -- though it's clearly not easy, or else we would have an obvious solution, which I clearly don't! In this case, I don't think that the process is intentionally sexist or biased in any way (and I do hope that others share your view that this hasn't degenerated as a discussion in any way). I think we've just found an unintended consequence of a well-intentioned, and well-debated policy that was reached after a lot of hard work. I remember the original debates around NP:FOOTY. (My activity has waxed and waned a lot over the years, haha) -- and I will fully admit that this distinction never crossed my mind at the time. It's just sort of become more evident to me of late. One potential solution -- that goes even less far than sort of a UEFA coefficient-type measure, would be to confer notability to players who have appeared in a Women's Champions League match. If we really wanted to do a sort of trial of it, we could even limit it to knockout phases of it -- this wouldn't be my first preference, but that's a fairly hard sort of restriction that could allow for some testing of what the consequences are. matt91486 (talk) 04:28, 21 June 2018 (UTC)

I don't think it's a WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS issue. I do think we over-represent men's football articles and under-represent women's football articles. As I've noted above, we use questionable articles to ensure coverage of the Vietnamese V-League [1] [2] (since professional doesn't mean fully professional) but the W-League, which receives good coverage but doesn't even run a full home and away season, doesn't qualify automatically. There are players who have appeared in the UEFA Women's Champions League Final in this decade who wouldn't qualify under WP:NFOOTY. Plus, it may well end up being a novelty, but the women's league has grown significantly in Mexico in a short period of time. Europe's fairly established and attendances aren't great there, true, but there should be a little bit more leeway because of the wide disparity in notability in women's football, and the fact it's growing very rapidly. As noted, 50,000 can show up for the tournament final where 500 were in the stands three rounds prior. SportingFlyer talk 19:09, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

There have also been examples of similar crowds for the top semi-pro level in England (the 2007 FA Trophy final had a crowd of 53,262), and historically the Amateur Cup final attracted attendances of 100,000), so I don't think one-off crowds are any kind of barometer (although I have previously argued for looking at average attendances as a possible alternative to professional status). If you think the Vietnamese league's status is questionable, then by all means start a discussion on it (we have removed leagues from the list in the past based on new evidence). Despite being a fan of the women's game, I don't think it's under-represented; the levels of coverage are just reflective of real life. Number 57 19:43, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

Agree with N57 that spectators etc. are exactly why we consider FPL notable - if a league gets enough attention then it is presumed its players meet GNG... GiantSnowman 07:46, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

Semi-Professional Leagues

Hi all. Is it possible that we create a new section for leagues that are semi-professional? This may also then be useful when looking at leagues which may become professional in the future. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 121.219.246.185 (talk) 12:43, 22 June 2018 (UTC)

Here's a suggestion - we turn this page into a table, listing all leagues, and have columns confirming their status ('Fully Professional', 'Semi Professional' or 'Amateur'), year of turning fully-pro for those that have, and references. GiantSnowman 12:56, 22 June 2018 (UTC)

Costa Rican football leagues

I came across this article about Costa Rican footballers in the country's top two tiers receiving a minimum wage. This seems to be a good enough source to push the league into either category, but I don't know if it would be enough to consider either league fully professional. This official government website, updated for 2018, says that the average salary for a Primera División footballer is ¢ 13.141,39, or about $23,000 USD. For a Segunda División player, the numbers are ¢ 11.141,73, or roughly $19,500 USD. The article does refer to the players as professionals, but as shown in previous discussions, I don't know if the salaries would be considered high enough to consider the leagues as fully professional. Either way, I hope this source is enough to add the top two Costa Rican tiers into the main list. 21.colinthompson (talk) 02:06, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

We'd need a little more information, but it looks like the leagues might be fully pro. The relevant statistic in determining full professionalism is the minimum wage, not the average, and the article is a little ambiguous about it. I'm guessing the $590 and $480 figures cited are monthly wages, but we'd need a source that confirms that. We'd also need to compare those figures against the cost of living in Costa Rica. Sir Sputnik (talk) 02:56, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

Just a simple Google search gives a rough idea, best I could find for a single person to live on a month says between $1,400 and $1,700 a month. Which a few other articles agree with, seems to be for a couple (as most articles seem to talk about retirement) the amount is $2,500. NZFC^(talk) 03:04, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

I stand partially corrected, this PDF from the government ("SALARIOS MÍNIMOS" - Minimum Salaries, for clarity) says that those two dollar figures are minimum salaries, not averages. As for cost of living, this article basically says the number is variable based on location but a solid figure is $2500/month, $30000/year for a couple (would we cut this in half, $1250/month and $15000/year for an individual?). Elsewhere, this website says $1300 to $1600/month ($15600 to $19200/year) for an individual, and this site gives a more general comparison of costs between the United States and Costa Rica. As NZFC mentioned, though, most articles are referring to retirees. 21.colinthompson (talk) 03:29, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

So if that's the case and that's the minimum amount a player can earn then it's just under the cost of living in Costa Rica. It's liveable for nearly all players to play in top league on their playing contract. NZFC^(talk) 05:34, 20 July 2018 (UTC)