Wikipedia:Today's featured article/requests/Scotland national football team

Scotland national football team

 * This is the archived discussion of the TFAR nomination for the article below. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as Wikipedia talk:Today's featured article/requests). Please do not modify this page unless you are renominating the article at TFAR. For renominations, please add   to the top of the discussion and   at the bottom, then complete a new nomination underneath. To do this, see the instructions at TFAR nom/doc.

The result was: not scheduled by — Chris Woodrich (talk) 02:02, 8 November 2015 (UTC)



The Scotland national football team represent Scotland in international association football. The team are members of FIFA and UEFA, and compete for the FIFA World Cup and the UEFA European Championship. Scotland have a rivalry with England, against whom they contested the world's first international football match on 30 November 1872. They have qualified eight times for the World Cup and twice for the European Championship, but have never advanced beyond the first stage of either tournament. Scotland's fans are known collectively as the Tartan Army, and the team play most of their home matches at Hampden Park (pictured) in Glasgow. Kenny Dalglish holds the record for most appearances for Scotland, with 102, while Dalglish and Denis Law each scored a record 30 goals for the team.
 * Most recent similar article(s): Sport: Roy Kilner (17 October 2015); Football: Carrow Road (31 August 2015)
 * Main editors:
 * Promoted: 11 September 2007
 * Reasons for nomination: Anniversary of the first international football match. 30 November is also St Andrew's Day in Scotland. Article exists in 50 foreign languages.
 * Support as nominator. &#39;&#39;&#39;tAD&#39;&#39;&#39; (talk) 14:30, 13 October 2015 (UTC)


 * Comment: This article was promoted eight years ago. It has obviously been updated, but the prose needs extensive attention if it is to meet today's FA standards. There is poor syntax (e.g. "During these early years, defeats for Scotland were something of a rarity, losing just two of their first 43 international matches"), contractions ("wasn't"), non-encyclopaedic expressions, e.g. describing the defeat by  Uruguay as "horrific". There are several misuses of italics. There are also uncited statements at the ends of some paragraphs, and none of the ten footnotes is cited to a source. There's a few weeks in hand, so it is perfectly possible that the article can  be made ready in time, but it will require some dedicated attention from interested editors. I wouldn't be prepared to schedule it for TFA as it stands. Brianboulton (talk) 23:40, 13 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Oppose for now based on Brian's analysis, which a 3 minute scan confirms. Ceoil (talk) 18:59, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Oppose on the basis of frequent TFAs on sport and football. Would like some diversity in topics in order to encourage writers to consider other topics as valid, valued and noteworthy. MurielMary (talk) 05:04, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
 * This is not a justifiable ground for opposing this article as TFA. "Sport and leisure" accounts for about 10 percent of all featured articles that have not yet appeared on the front page, which suggests that around three "sporty" articles a month should appear on the main page. In fact this proportion is usually underachieved – two in August, two in September, one in October, two (so far) in November. Only one of these (in August) was about football. The subject areas in which we have most featured articles (e.g. MilHist, Biology, Media, Sports, History) are always likely to appear most often on the main page, until writers on other subject  areas can bring more of their articles to featured standard. If you wish to discuss coordinators' current policies for selecting TFA, it would be better to raise your concerns on the TFAR talkpage rather than within individual nominations. Brianboulton (talk) 23:02, 7 November 2015 (UTC)


 * I have opened a PR for the article. Jmorrison230582 (talk) 12:58, 19 October 2015 (UTC)