Talk:Prince of Wales F.C.

National championships and other issues in article
There seems to be some confusion over the national championships, as witness the additional of "unofficial" to the pre-league wins by Prince of Wales. If you call them "unofficial", then you run into problems with the article, and everything comes tumbling down. Here's why.

The big claim here is that Prince of Wales F.C. holds the record of nineteen national championships. (Lincoln F.C. is closing fast at eighteen.) I've also seen this written as "league championships" or "league titles" in the article, which I have endeavored to correct because it isn't true. The Rsssf web page which is the basis of this claim—which is repeated in the press—lists 19, but they start in 1900/01 and there are four of these prior to the 1907 start of the league. These are presumably the Merchants Cup, though we don't know this for sure; the article does call the Merchants Cup the national championship. If you call the Merchants Cup "unofficial", then you can't also count it as a real national championship (and probably shouldn't say that it is), and you lose the number 19 and the record altogether.

Then there's the Rock Cup. The records are incomplete, with a huge number of years missing. You can say that Prince of Wales won in 1949, since we know that to be true. But you can't say they won it once, because of all the years that are missing. State what you can support, and don't say anything about what you don't know.

I've deleted the addition of the club disbanding "for an unknown reason after 1953". First, we know they won the championship in 1952/53, but have no idea what happened next. If we don't know, we shouldn't say anything beyond "later disbanded". The club could have gone bankrupt and disbanded in 1953 itself, so you can't add "after 1953", and "for an unknown reason" isn't supported: I imagine the reason probably is known, but we don't have any sources immediately available to us. Someone on Gibraltar might, which would help, but absent that material, the article has to do without. BlueMoonset (talk) 01:26, 14 January 2014 (UTC)