Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Esher Leopold F.C.


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was redirect to 1881–82 FA Cup. History is under the redirect if sufficient sourcing is confirmed for this to be spun back out. At the moment, consensus is against that Star   Mississippi  01:55, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

Esher Leopold F.C.

 * – ( View AfD View log | edits since nomination)

I redirected this to 1881–82 FA Cup, as all this club did was lose in a first round match in the FA Cup (playing the FA cup was no mark of distinction, all clubs could enter and many were supposed to play but never showed up anyway). No evidence that this is a notable organization, fails WP:NORG, only has routine coverage. Fram (talk) 09:21, 24 May 2022 (UTC)

Keep for the following reasons.

1. The criteria for notoriety in football are confusing. WP:FOOTYN seems to be the only attempt to create one and the club passes that as being a participant in a national - at the time, one of only three in the world - cup competition.

2. There needed to be some level of notoriety to participate in the Cup; a club needed to be a member of the FA and so needed to have the membership and the subs to do so. There were fewer entries to the Cup that year than there are current League clubs. I'm not drawing an exact one-to-one correspondence, but this was a club that had spun out of one that had won a tie the previous year, were unlucky enough to draw the holders in the first round, were not completely disgraced, and would at the very least have been the equivalent of a decent level non-league club today. There were dozens of clubs, currently in the League, who were around at the time and who did not enter the Cup.

3. That I have found nothing more about them does not mean that there is nothing more to find (I wonder if there was a name-change) but that would be better suited for someone closer geographically to check the sources, I cannot do so. One quick bout of research found that the club captain, Frederick Fricker, was still a teenager and became a professional photographer, there are surely more fruitful areas to get more details.

4. There are wikipedia articles on a number of clubs who played once in the first round of the FA Cup. They are all part of the gradual growth of the game and evidence of the quantum froth in the early part of the game as teams came in and out of existence, while club membership was a movable and non-exclusive feast.

5. The FA Cup match itself had full reports in at least four newspapers; the Field, the Referee, Athletic News, and (oddly) the Nottingham Evening Post. So it gained national (if specialist) coverage.

6. If there were a general catch-all page for FA Cup entrants in which the mayflies could be listed and described that would be perfect for this club, and many others; but that's obviously not wikipedia policy. So where else can an article about a short-lived, but briefly on the national stage, club go? There have been articles on clubs of a similar stature on wikipedia for years with nothing but the most basic details; I have fleshed some of them out, but nobody suggested deleting e.g. Saxons FC which for three years had a page looking like []. — Preceding unsigned comment added by In Vitrio (talk • contribs) 10:27, 24 May 2022 (UTC)


 * Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Organizations, Football,  and England. Fram (talk) 09:21, 24 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Sports-related deletion discussions.  CAPTAIN RAJU (T) 09:22, 24 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in WikiProject Football's list of association football-related deletions. ChrisTheDude (talk) 16:01, 24 May 2022 (UTC)


 * FOOTYN is not an accepted guideline; WP:NORG is. Not every subgroup of articles has their own dedicated notability guideline. As for the second point; FA cup was not only open to clubs in certain competitions or level of competitions, everyone who wanted could enter (e.g. here a brandnew club without any other standing: see also many other very minor clubs who participated in those first decades, or who folded before they could even play their schedule FA game). That many clubs didn't choose to enter is hardly an indication that those who did are more notable. You are basically claiming notability from a) an essay and b) through inheritance (FA cup is notable, so every team that competed is notable), which goes against WP:NOTINHERITED. That there are match reports for that one game is routine coverage, that their captain became a photographer is hardly a reason to believe this team to be notable. There is, until evidence of the opposite is shown, not a shred of evidence that this team has received indepth or sustained coverage, as required. Fram (talk) 16:33, 24 May 2022 (UTC)
 * But WP:NORG doesn't apply here - as it says in the first paragraph, "The scope of this guideline covers all groups of people organized together for a purpose with the exception of non-profit educational institutions, religions or sects, and sports teams." Emphases added.  So we have to look elsewhere.  And WP:FOOTYN seems as good a guideline as any.
 * Or we look at the sports notability guideline does not have one for football, but does say "A person is presumed to be notable if they have been the subject of significant coverage, that is, multiple published non-trivial secondary sources which are reliable, intellectually independent, and independent of the subject". So, this club had multiple published secondary sources, in national magazines and at least one regional newspaper which are not trivial, secondary, reliable, intellectually independent, and independent of the club.  There may have been others to which I have no access.
 * However one puts it, this club participated in what was the number one tournament in the entire world. That is of itself notable. In Vitrio (talk) 18:07, 24 May 2022 (UTC)
 * If NORG doesn't apply, then we fall back on WP:GNG. Multiple articles about the same event (the one match in the FA cup), giving routine coverage of a match, are trivial though. And "the number one tournament in the entire world" is meaningless if the remainder of the world didn't care and the tournament was open to every English club which wanted to participate. If you compete in the Marathon of London, you don't become suddenly notable, even though that marathon is perhaps the most important of the yearly ones. Fram (talk) 18:19, 24 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Because the London Marathon has 20,000 participants, most of whom are not "competing" but taking part. This is different.  Clubs did not come from nowhere, even poor hammered Farningham had matches before entering the FA Cup, and their captain learned the game at Charterhouse.  There are pages on people who had one race in early NASCAR when it was a very bush league series; pages on clubs that have never made the first round of the FA Cup; pages on Canadian minor league baseball teams who had one season.  This is a direct equivalent, if anything more prominent because so few clubs entered the FA Cup in those days.  And someone out there may have more about them but won't know what or how it all comes together. In Vitrio (talk) 18:44, 24 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Redirect to 1881–82 FA Cup as sole claim to fame. Not independently notable. GiantSnowman 18:52, 24 May 2022 (UTC)
 * And that applies to lots of other teams - including a quarter-finalist. Does that mean all of those need to be deleted as well?  And how helpful is it to take articles away?  If you exclude teams that get further than the first round, isn't that basically putting it down to the luck of the draw?  How about non-league teams that never made it this far?  To pick a team at random, Eton Wick F.C. have an article; they were flagged in 2011 as "not notable as it has not been shown that this football team has competed in the FA Cup which is one of the criteria of Football team notability in England" but they are still there as having passed the threshold - despite being 12 promotions away from the League.  You don't have to go far to find others of a similar low stature; Oakengates Athletic, Lambourn Sports, even the original Argonauts page was about a team which never existed (I added bits in about a separate club that did to avoid confusion).
 * The easiest way for a consistent policy is to consider any team to have got so far as the 1st round of the FA Cup to be notable. Because they had enough about them to get into a national competition.  And they were the subject of significant coverage (there was even at least one match preview in a national magazine), and played the Cup holders, which got them national attention.  Given there were no leagues then, there is no other criterion by which to judge notoriety. In Vitrio (talk) 08:44, 25 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Redirect to 1881–82 FA Cup. They don't look to pass WP:GNG, but are a team mentioned in that article. Joseph2302 (talk) 07:51, 25 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Redirect to 1881–82 FA Cup for now. But in general, I don't see why a general catch-all page for FA Cup entrants in which the mayflies could be listed and described as suggested by In Vitrio wouldn't work. List of FA Cup entrants/participants/whatever, with selection criteria of not already having a WP article of their own. I don't see any policy objection: WP:CSC bullet 2 says that Lists are commonly written to satisfy one of the following sets of criteria: ... Every entry in the list fails the notability criteria. These lists are created explicitly because most or all of the listed items do not warrant independent articles. A list isn't just a table of one-line entries: we are allowed descriptions of the items listed, see e.g. Grade II listed buildings in Brighton and Hove: M or the featured list that is List of places of worship in Brighton and Hove. cheers, Struway2 (talk) 13:42, 25 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Keep passes GNG.--Ortizesp (talk) 17:27, 26 May 2022 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.