Competition history

[DaddyPig86]

Whilst I agree with the idea that the records page should show records for the entire history of a country's top flight, for example correctly showing Dixie Dean's 60 goals as the record for goals in a league season in England, it is at the same time a little odd that the likes of Preston, Sheffield Wednesday and Huddersfield are shown as former champions of the Premier League. It's the same in other countries, too, such as pre-Bundesliga German champions listed as previous winners of the Bundesliga.

I suggest that some kind of feature be implemented where winners of a previous version of a competition are shown as having won that - so Preston would be shown as 'First Division' champions. Quite how you'd do this without creating separate (defunct) competitions is something that we'd need to figure out.

[Michael Sant]

This tends to be quite a divisive topic based on discussions I've had down the years with other football fans. For most the leagues are seen as a continuous lineage - it tends to be Sky Sports and the like who would have us believe that records only count since the "Premier League Era" began and such. What benefit do you see in distinguishing and separating these periods in a league history? How would the league history of past winners for these retired/defunct league titles be displayed in game? It's important I don't make presumptions or guesses on how you envisage this.

The ruleset hasn't been consistent across the Premier League history even, so the winners in the last few years are in different situations to those in the late 90's. Arguably even you could look at the Premier League and judge it by very different conditions insisting a new era began when clubs began to move from their traditional ownership to extremely high wealth individuals. Then there are league sponsors, would the Carling Premier League be the same as the Barclays Premier League? Would you be advocating for further distinctions based on other criteria? There are a lot of different ways in which people view and classify periods of footballing history so exploring this in a bit more detail helps accurately relay what you envisage this could be.

[Vänsterback]

The records summary could show type of competition, like first tier league titles and break it down into First Division and Premier League if we would want more detail. On the other hand, altering the name or the number of teams doesn't make it a new competition according to me. The database does not represent developments in league systems very well though, or at least it is not obvious for researchers how it should be done. For example, the Swedish second division (6 geographically divided leagues) was the third tier league until 2006 and since then it is the fourth tier. But in the FM database these leagues are kept (with just a change of tier) rather than creating a new set of leagues with new ID:s for the modern Swedish league structure, which would be more reasonable. To represent the Swedish clubs' league competition history (back to just 1987) correctly we should have five sets or generations of the league system in the database. And more to go back in history even further. I assume the same is needed to represent other countries' league system developments over time as well.