Related Players

One thing that would be nice to get more info on players who are related. The obvious ones are father/son and brothers, but there are also some players who are related but might not be well known due to differing surnames. For example George Broughton was fairly obviously the father of George Broughton Jr, but also the grandfather of John Atkinson (so George Jr was Atkinson's uncle), with all three having played on the wing for Leeds.  Whilst this might be fairly well known I expect a lot of uncles/nephews/cousins might be very obscure.  Then there are those players with the same surname but may or may not be related.

Is this sort of family detail going to be part of the RKC information?  

As an aside, one rule the AFL ("Aussie Rules") have here is draft preference for players under the "Father-Son" rule. We don't have a draft system obviously, but even small relief under the salary cap would be a nice touch.  There would have to be some qualifying criteria (e.g. father had to have played more than 100 games for the club and can only pick one club for the exemption) but it would be a nice acknowledgement that history matters.

On 12/07/2020 at 14:19, BrisbaneRhino said:

One thing that would be nice to get more info on players who are related. The obvious ones are father/son and brothers, but there are also some players who are related but might not be well known due to differing surnames. For example George Broughton was fairly obviously the father of George Broughton Jr, but also the grandfather of John Atkinson (so George Jr was Atkinson's uncle), with all three having played on the wing for Leeds.  Whilst this might be fairly well known I expect a lot of uncles/nephews/cousins might be very obscure.  Then there are those players with the same surname but may or may not be related.

Is this sort of family detail going to be part of the RKC information?  

As an aside, one rule the AFL ("Aussie Rules") have here is draft preference for players under the "Father-Son" rule. We don't have a draft system obviously, but even small relief under the salary cap would be a nice touch.  There would have to be some qualifying criteria (e.g. father had to have played more than 100 games for the club and can only pick one club for the exemption) but it would be a nice acknowledgement that history matters.

Why bring complications into it.

Thankfully salary cap decisions are out of the scope of the RKC  But in relation the familial relations, yes, at a point in the future we will look to incorporate this.  Certain club historians have done this already: we’ve identified over 100 related players at Warrington.  I expect that we will get a lot of traffic from family historians in due course, based on learnings from club heritage sites, so this information will be use to our audience (which won’t be exclusively RL based, though they may also find this info interesting).

I agree it won't probably ever be complete, but I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who finds these links fascinating.