Methodology: I used a number of sources to identify a player's numbers and his statistics.
For
statistics, I used the following resources.
1. Media Guides
2.
3.
The data here has playoffs and regular season combined.
When I have the data available from other sources I include only
the regular season.
4. The MLS stats come from
5. Some APSL data comes from the APSL 1993 Media Guide
For players numbers I used the following resources in descending
order of priority.
1. Home team's programs-My assumption is the home team is pretty
reliable on it's own roster. Hopefully that's not a false
assumption.
2. Media guide-I used these mainly for players who were on the
roster, but didn't make it into a game. They are not that
reliable for general numbers. Media guides were put out
before the season. As players got cut, players would
switch to the cut player's number.
3. Road programs-Road programs are prone to misspellings and number errors.
4. Photographs-This is a chicken and egg problem. You need to
know the number to identify the player. You also need to
know the jersey style to accurately identify the year.
Over time you recognize both and can be reasonably accurate.
in 1977. In that case, I separate the
numbers with a comma, e.g. "9,10." It was not uncommon for
a player to really have 2 numbers in a year. However, my sense is
most of the times it is a bookkeeping error and not a real
number change. One of the two numbers is right.