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April 26

Stats boxes in articles on football (soccer) players

There appears to be a standardised stats box that appears in articles on football (soccer) players. It lists clubs played for, season, and by competition, with two performance columns - appearances and goals. This seems to be used regardless of the position of the player. This is very oudated way of recording key performance data for footballers. Only forwards are judged primarily on goals, and even there assists are also significant. for defenders and goalkeepers, however, simply listing goals is meaningless. There is no reason why additional columns for 'clean sheets', and others like 'goals conceded per 90 mins' could not be inserted into the standard template. Would you consider this? I appreciate there may not be an official 'standard template' but there clearly is a template that people use for these articles, which they must get from somewhere, and it would good to change it to provide more relevant data. Creeves25 (talk) 15:22, 26 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Can you provide an example? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:24, 26 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The right place to raise your concerns is Template talk:Infobox football biography. Note, however, that your point on goalkeeper stats was discussed almost twenty years ago and rejected - see Goalies. --Viennese Waltz 17:55, 26 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I see that that template talk lists some soccer-related projects. I would think questions like this one would get broader attention at one of those projects. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:06, 27 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This issue appears in all team sports where not all members of the team share the same role: football, hockey, road cycling. Sporters can be valuable to the team without personally scoring points, but there's no simple statistic to quantify their usefulness. Number of drinking bottles delivered to the team leader? Nobody keeps track of that. PiusImpavidus (talk) 08:42, 27 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Listing goals is not entirely meaningless, since those knowlegeable about the game will be able to put the number for non-striking-position players in the context of what might be expected for those positions. The problem with more elaborate stats is that most were simply not compiled until relatively recently (even formally noting 'assists' is quite new to this sexegenarian), so the effort of calculating them, even if the necessary base data were to be available, would be immense. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.194.109.80 (talk) 22:26, 27 April 2025 (UTC).[reply]

Fine, but going forward the stats box could have columns for this data (being left blank for older players for whom such data doesn't exist), yes? Creeves25 (talk) 23:18, 27 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Also, goals scored for goalkeepers is meaningless, and clean sheets data is readily available since at least 1992-3 Creeves25 (talk) 23:21, 27 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

See List of goalscoring goalkeepers. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:26, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]