Uniquely identifying players

Just wondering how you go about uniquely identifying players with the same name. Obviously if you have DoB or middle initials are different etc you can do it.  Leeds have something like 11 sets of players (so 22 in total) with the same name.  For some of these the gap between games makes it obvious (i.e. the Ben Walker who played in 1895 is not the same person as the Ben Walker of 2002).

However, in a couple of instances players with the same name played relatively close together - certainly potentially within a single career.

In other cases players have gaps - sometimes of even a couple of years - between games. Some of these are those classic "A Teamers" who just hung around playing reserve grade and got the odd game due to injuries (Des Armitage, I'm looking at you...).

For Leeds Dave Makin has pretty much sorted all of the potential confusion. But how are you doing it for other clubs?

It's just a question of working through really BR.  A lot of clubs have done this already, and we're taking the time once info is loaded into the database to make sure these splits / mergers on records are done correctly.  It's a tricky area, but we'll do our best!  The good news is that this is easy to handle in the database - the bigger challenge is linking players between clubs, but that's for another day

I can see how you can work through this for a single club if there are people who have looked into the records in more detail.  I'd guess for some clubs at the moment the only source of info are the RKC sheets though? 

So a question when looking across clubs.  How do you deal with a player being entered into spreadsheets as Bob at one club and Robert at another (just an example - assume this is quite possible)?

I've tried wherever I can to record where players came from and went to (ditto Guest players, which is even more chaotic and some players in the RKC sheets are not marked as guests when they were). Ken Dalby was pretty good at providing that for major players for Leeds and Rothmans/JP books provide a lot from the 1970s onwards. The biggest problem are the lesser lights from earlier years who (understandably) don't get much of a mention when they sign or leave, particularly leaving.

I've tended to just put "ARL" as the source for a lot of players in my spreadsheet - I know I should be interested but I've never really worried if a player was at Milford or St John Fisher or whatever before turning pro.  Similarly I have the lazy "Left the club" if I don't know where a player went to after Leeds.

I do find it fascinating looking at what players did elsewhere in their pro careers, which is why I 100% support the RKC attempts to track all movements.  I like knowing who won what trophies with other clubs and my personal favourite is seeing players get over 100 tries in a career across various clubs when they didn't get there for any one club. I probably care a lot more than they do!

There’s quite a few sources that will help with linking players, even with first name issues as described: Rothmans and the RFL player records being the main two.

The beauty of the database is the ability to run reports to help with this sort of stuff: it’ll not be too difficult to run a report of players with the same surname, playing in a similar era for different clubs, but never playing on the same date twice.  There will be plenty of false positives in a report like that, but also a lot that stand out / warrant investigation, such as Bob X / Robert X as described.  Ultimate lunch though, as noted it will be time and patience (and research).  The added advantage here though is you only need one club’s historian to have done the research to be able to link a player across two (or more clubs).