Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Gloucester City footballers

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was merge and redirect to the club article. Johnleemk | Talk 11:34, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Gloucester City footballers

Nomination for all of the following: Matt Bath, Chris Thompson (football), Marvin Thompson, Tom Webb, Darryl Addis, Luke Corbett, Adie Harris and Dave Wilkinson.

All of these are players at Gloucester City, a minor semi-professional (i.e. part-time) football club from England that competes in the Southern League Premier Division, the seventh tier of English football; there are over 140 teams ranking above them, and their average home attendance is 337 [1]. None of these players are currently professionals. Two of them were had short spells at minor professional sides when they were younger (Chris Thompson at Northampton and Luke Corbett at Cheltenham), but neither made a significant number of first-team appearances for these clubs (six and one respectively): these are not seasoned pros who have stepped down a few divisions in the twilights of their careers, but players who never made the grade in the first place. As none of them have had significant careers as fully professional athletes, they do not meet the criteria set out in WP:BIO so Delete All as non-notable.

NB This is a similar nomination to last week's WP:AfD/Dorchester Town footballers, about players at Dorchester Town, who play in the division above Gloucester. All were deleted. Qwghlm 18:11, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

• Move Maybe it's worth moving them into the main Gloucester City entry? Otherwise I don't have a problem with them being deleted. ArtVandelay13 18:29, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
• Delete, just as with the Dorchester Town footballers. -- Elisson • Talk 19:43, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
• Merge into Gloucester City F.C.#Current playing squad in the same style as F.C. United of Manchester#Current players, or if that would make the article too big, create a new article Players of Gloucester City F.C and put this content there. Image:Yemen flag large.png CTOAGN (talk) 22:03, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
• Delete, per nom Incognito 00:21, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
• Delete 'em all. Mariano(t/c) 06:31, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
• keep the professionals, merge the non-professionals somewhere. Kappa
• keep Luke Corbett has already had his credentials enquired into at [[2]] and the decision by Chiro was that he was to be kept. Since then, his time at Crewe Alexandra as a youth was added. Kappa and ArtVandelay13 were supportive of the decision to keep him. How many times does he have to go on trial?

The fact that Marvin Thompson was at Cheltenham is not mentioned in the argument to delete these players. It is a fact that they are not all "seasoned pros who have stepped down a few divisions in the twilights of their careers". Corbett is 21, Marvin Thompson 19, Tom Webb 21 (and was at Luton Town when younger), Chris Thompson is 23. These are all players who are improving and who will play at higher levels. There is also a discussion to be had as to what image of Wikipedia this systematic elitism (Gloucester after Dorchester) gives out to the millions of fans of semi-professional football around the world. They don't all get paid millions by Arsenal, but in their county they are household names, get mentioned on radio and television, have newspaper articles devoted to them, and matter to people. WP:BIO was meant as a guide to ensure sensible contributions; if it is to be used as a stick to beat any football team outside of the 92 "Great and Good", then perhaps it has been perverted from its original purposes and should be updated to more accurately reflect the fluidity of the pyramid structure. How long before the players of Stockport County become "non-notable" ? Dave Hatton 01:40, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

• Comment I wouldn't say that's entirely true. They may be household names in some football-loving households in Gloucester, but I'm from Gloucestershire (Cheltenham) and I've never heard of them. The average attendance at Gloucester games speaks volumes, I think. --kingboyk 21:37, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

• • Wikipedia is not a crystal ball. It is possible that one of these players is destined for greater things and becomes a full-time professional, but until they have achieved that they should not be included. They don't earn millions at Arsenal, but they're not even earning thousands at Stockport (the bottom club in the Football League at this point in time) right now. In fact, they are currently playing for a side over 50 places beneath Stockport, that attracts a crowd of only a few hundred (which makes your claim they're "household names" rather dubious).
    
    Your worry about deleting Stockport players should they be relegated is not an option. They have played dozens if not hundrerds of matches as professionals, and that achievement cannot be undone. The Gloucester players, on the other hand, have done next to nothing at the professional level of the game. You might call that "elitism", but Wikipedia demands that they be notable in their field. Qwghlm 08:38, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

• • You have chosen to carefully twist what I actually said: I claimed that they were "county household names" due to media reporting.
    
    I have no worries about Stockport players being deleted should they be unfortunate to be deleted, but this would mean the end of their supporters (or anyone else) being able to create entries for new Stockport players in the future without the prospect of contibutors such as yourself deleting them. The only players that they would be allowed to work on would be older players moving through the pyramid. This would apply to any club that was relegated to the Conference.
    
    Any players listed for F.C. United of Manchester or AFC Wimbledon would also be due for deletion by you unless they had played a number of games (specified by yourself) for the top 92 clubs.
    
    You also chose to ignore other points such as players being put on trial twice.
    
    Adie Harris was one of the players you listed for deletion, but he has played for Aberystwyth Town. Are you going to claim that a national league is not notable?

Dave Hatton, 22 Jan 2006

I don't think they even qualify as household names in their own county - Gloucestershire has a population of 820,000, the city of Gloucester 110,000, and yet only three or four hundred actually turn up to watch them play every week. I haven't the resources to do ask every person in Gloucestershire but those numbers give me reason to believe that not many local people are going to have heard of them as you make out.

I will push for deletion any player who has not had significant experience playing as a professional in the Football League (and I don't count the League of Wales, as most of its members are semi-pro and were formerly in the English non-league system), regardless of what club they currently play for - AFCW, FCUM, Stockport, Gloucester, whatever. To let players whose experience is mostly semi-professional into Wikipedia would make a mockery of the notability guideline and mean literally tens of thousands of stubby biographies of footballers few people have heard of can be added. Qwghlm 21:30, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

I don't think it "makes a mockery" of anything. There are effectively no space restrictions in Wikipedia and the guidelines for people in other fields don't set the bar all that high. For example, Wikipedia:Notability (people)#People still alive states that authors who've sold more than 5,000 books and musicians who've sold more than 5,000 albums "may be included in Wikipedia". I don't know what that translates to with regard to footballers, but a musician who's only sold 5,000 albums doesn't strike me as being any more notable than a good Conference player.

I'm not in favour of creating a load of short stubs though. If people want to look at one Gloucester City player then there's a good chance that they'll want to look up some others, so I'd recommend starting off with a single page for all of them, as with FCUM, and then splitting them out using summary style when/if there's too much info to fit it sensibly onto one page. If I get enough information about one of FCUM's more notable players (not really likely in the near future) I'll do this, and strongly oppose any attempts to delete it.

As far as I'm concerned, the guidelines are there to stop people writing about their mate who plays for a pub team and so on. It doesn't do WP any harm to have articles on non-league players; if anything I find it quite impressive. Image:Yemen flag large.png CTOAGN (talk) 04:45, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Well, if in the book world, you need to have around 5,000 people hand over money to read your work in order to be notable, then the parallel in the footballing world would be having around 5,000 people hand over money to watch you play (the average Football League Two attendance is about this, maybe a little less [3]). Gloucester's average gate is 337 - less than a tenth of this - that's not just a little bit off but falling far short of it.

If you want to put information about the current squad in the current Gloucester City A.F.C. page then fine, it's probably a good place for it and I'm not going to delete it from there. But that's not the concern here - the concern is whether these individuals deserve to have a page to themselves, and they clearly do not - not by WP's standards, anyway. Qwghlm 08:42, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.