Talk:Geography of association football

Argentina
Argentina has an unusual system. They play the whole season in two halfs. The 'Apertura (opening) is the first half. A championship title is awarded when this finishes. The points are then reset and they play for the Clausura, in the second half of the season. After that finishes another championship title is awarded. Mintguy (T) 08:48, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Views on some proposed changes
For me, this is currently a very useful article, containing links to nearly everything I might want so good work so far.

I want to propose a few additions and changes however:


 * Firstly, would anyone object if I added every nation from around the world? This is certainly what I'd expect to see if I viewed this page. I understand some nations don't have a national league, for example, but this can easily be left blank and we'll have a more complete table?


 * Also at the moment entries tend to link to the highest league within a nation, but wouldn't it make more sense to link to the general system? For example English football league system instead of two separate links to the Premiership and Football League, Chilean football league system instead of just the highest league, and so on.


 * Next, could international football competitions be listed also? At the moment only domestic ones are. So, the European Championships, or African Champions League could be listed under the relevent headings.


 * Lastly, a very small point, what is the convention on linking years, like 2004? It makes more sense, and looks nicer, not to, in my opinion and I'd have thought there'd be some kind of convention on it.

Anyway I'd be interested in hearing any views on the above. Iae 18:45, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

One problem with merging is that the resulting page would be quite large. This would be a detriment to users on public systems with limited bandwidth or individual systems with slow dial-up connections. Perhaps the tabular and visual information could be combined on a single page and the narratives left as they are, with links to combined data where appropriate?

74.109.12.135 (talk) 02:38, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

Merge FIFA lists
Currently there are three articles giving a subset of fields for each country:
 * 1) Association football around the world:
 * 2) *flag, country, overview, national_team, club_list, FA, league(s), cup(s), super_cup
 * 3) List of FIFA country codes
 * 4) *flag, national_team, trigram
 * 5) List of FIFA Member Associations
 * 6) *meaningless_number, flag, national_team, trigram, FIFA_name_in_English, _French, _Spanish, _German, FA_founded, FA_affiliated, Confederation

I propose having a single table, sortable, and not split by confederation, with the following columns:
 * flag, FIFA_name_in_English, overview/trigram, Confederation, FA, FA_founded, FA_affiliated, national_team/trigram, club_list, league(s), cup(s), super_cup

Two sample rows as follows:

Some notes on this proposal:
 * 1) I don't really propose that the trigram should be used for both the overview and the national team; just pointing out that the trigram doesn't need a row to itself, and can be used to save space in another row.
 * 2) Sortable by Confederation is more efficient than having separate sections per confederation
 * 3) Some other columns might be left unsortable: FA, league(s), cup(s), super_cup
 * 4) List of FIFA country codes has several sections:
 * 5) FIFA members
 * 6) Non-FIFA member codes used by FIFA or confederations
 * 7) Irregular codes
 * 8) Obsolete country codes
 * 9) FIFA and IOC differences
 * 10) FIFA and ISO differences
 * Of these, #1, #2, and #3 could be combined into this table, with footnotes for entries in #2 and #3 (which would have no "Joined FIFA" date) ; #4 could be a separate table (like now, but hopefully with references); #5 and #6 could just delegate to Comparison of IOC, FIFA, and ISO 3166 country codes.

jnestorius(talk) 18:21, 8 October 2009 (UTC)


 * I wholeheartedly support this merger. The association football around the world article doesn't even fit with its title, and the List of FIFA Member Associations contains three columns that are irrelevant to the English language Wikipedia (i.e. the French, Spanish and German country names). IMO, the articles should be merged to List of FIFA member associations, but unfortunately that does leave the NF Board teams out in the cold a bit. If we could find some way of including the NF Board teams, that would be a perfect scenario. – PeeJay 18:49, 8 October 2009 (UTC)


 * I don't see any problem with the title Association football around the world. Or how about something like Association football overview by country? jnestorius(talk) 20:27, 8 October 2009 (UTC)
 * "Association football around the world" implies to me that the article gives an appraisal of the reception of association football on a global scale and in individual regions/countries. Since this article is a list, it should begin "List of...", and the title should actually convey what is contained within the list, hence "List of FIFA member associations". – PeeJay 23:19, 8 October 2009 (UTC)
 * In any case, the name of the page is a separate issue. Since the association football around the world page is the biggest and has the longest history, it should be the target of the merge for the other two, even if the merged page ends up having some other name. jnestorius(talk)


 * I also like the idea. My suggestion would be to remove the "easter egg" wikilinks from the trigrams (leaving one instance, unlinked) and instead have one (unsortable) column with three navigations links (e.g. Overview National team |List of clubs .  (Also use  instead of &amp;nbsp; Foo .)  — Andrwsc (talk · contribs) 19:04, 8 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Some countries have nonstandard names (e.g. Republic of Ireland) or flag (e.g. Chinese Taipei). I think flag and/or flagcountry should be able to handle that. Maybe a variant of these templates could provide the three-in-one you suggest. Should be straightforward to code since most relevant articles have standardised names. jnestorius(talk) 20:27, 8 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Support, including improvements suggested (not going to get into details; just use good judgement). One detail I will get into: It's important that the trigrammes have their own column so they are sortable, and because trigrammes don't have anything to do with "overviews" whatever those might be; don't mix apples and oranges. Maybe whatever is in them should instead move to a "Notes" column at the end. The trigrammes are very important (thus their being subject to an entire list article of their own so far). Further, as I brought up at the talk page of the list of member associations, we should not be giving columns of Spanish, French and German names, this being the English Wikipedia. This was done in as misunderstanding response to a requests for addition of country names in the majority native language of the country in question, if different from English name. E.g.: . That would actually be useful. —  SMcCandlish    Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 05:23, 17 January 2010 (UTC)


 * This merge proposal is now OVER THREE YEARS OLD. There really hasn't been much discussion here, and not much opposition. If the editor that proposed it still cares, then I suggest being WP:BOLD and WP:JUSTDOIT. But I will remove the merge tag now. WTF? (talk) 02:21, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

Non-FIFA associations
I removed from the list Barawa, Bougainville, Kurdistan and Tibet, since are out of criteria applied in the introduction of the section. From the same introduction I also removed "...stateless populations...", if we apply also this criterion then we should add a lot of other Football Associations, not only Barawa or Tibet (moreover, this cluster was already included in "Regional" sub-section). Our guideline should be our page List of sovereign states and dependent territories by continent, obviously referring to those permanent inhabited only. Following this principle I added to the list Transnistria, and I also added as a note the absence of a FA for Akrotiri and Dekhelia, Pitcairn Islands and Svalbard. SouLFlamE (talk) 10:52, 6 December 2020 (UTC)