Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Cleethorpes Town F.C. (1901)

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 keep‎. (non-admin closure) Vanderwaalforces (talk) 12:52, 1 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Cleethorpes Town F.C. (1901)

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Cleethorpes Town F.C. (1901) (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)
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Local club without significant, non-routine coverage. All we have are match reports, mostly from very local sources, which are primary sources, not the required secondary sources needed to meet WP:GNG. Fram (talk) 11:17, 10 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Keep: am biased as I created it, but helps to avoid confusion with other Cleethorpses, and they did get quite deep in the FA qualifying rounds.
Unfortunately am stuck with local sources because the British Newspaper Archive is no longer available to editors. There are long-standing stub pages extant for clubs of a similar stamp who did not have such good Cup runs. We probably need a definition of Notable for football, but note that the current Cleethorpes Town has not lasted as long a period as this one, plays at a lower level, and has been less successful in the FA Cup. Would it not be recency bias to have the current one but not a predecessor? In Vitrio (talk) 12:41, 10 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS. Fram (talk) 13:51, 10 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think that's relevant in this case - other stuff is evidence that a long run of FA Cup qualifying appearances has long been considered Notable and it does not seem to have been controversial. Especially as the club's run in 1919–20 made them one of the last 90 clubs in the competition, i.e. equivalent of Second Round Proper nowadays. There is not a page for the 1919–20 Qualifying Rounds yet, but in the 1920–21 FA Cup qualifying rounds page, every club reaching that particular stage has its own entry, so if notable in 1920, why not 1919? In Vitrio (talk) 14:24, 10 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Having an article doesn't necessarily mean being notable, just that perhaps no one has checked thoroughly. That's what "otherstuffexists" basically means, you are arguing that other articles are notable or that other similar articles about less notable subjects exist, but you aren't arguing how you will resolve the lack of secondary sources which means that this topic doesn't meet WP:GNG. We judge articles on AfD based on policies and guidelines, not on other articles. Fram (talk) 14:31, 10 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
My point is that in EVERY other instance, for a decade, teams which have reached this stage have either been accepted as Notable or nobody has even thought to challenge their notability. Hence all their pages are still standing. I don't get why the exception for this one side. That I cannot find more sources is more down to my access than anything else, and given a start I'd think others could find more. In Vitrio (talk) 16:16, 10 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: We seem to be operating on the vibes of notability more than the kinds of keep !votes that would establish consensus with this level of participation.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Barkeep49 (talk) 01:53, 18 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comment @Fram. Could you describe the content to me in the first two sources: "Sport & play" and "The football field". I'm not expecting much from the first, as this looks like it would be nothing more than an announcement, but otherwise I'd be surprised if the second source, citing the club's change of name, hasn't included some coverage of the past few years of the club's history. You have explicitly stated there is only match reports, so which matches are these first two sources reporting on? Could you also explain to me how these WP:TIER3 sources are primary, rather than secondary sources that lack independence from the subject? If these are indeed secondary sources, what is the involvement with the subject, based on the content, that excludes them from SIGCOV? I'm otherwise torn on this, at present in the article there is almost certainly not enough for GNG (although, unable to verify this), and from searching through some books there was only passing coverage. I'd expect a lot more coverage from a club in involved in the early history of English football, but I also don't have access to BNA either. CNC (talk) 13:41, 18 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    • WP:PRIMARY: "For Wikipedia's purposes, breaking news stories are also considered to be primary sources." Things like match reports are eyewitness accounts of a very recent event, not what is described in WP:SECONDARY: "A secondary source provides thought and reflection based on primary sources, generally at least one step removed from an event. It contains analysis, evaluation, interpretation, or synthesis of the facts, evidence, concepts, and ideas taken from primary sources."- I have no direct access to the sources here, but they look like match reports or recent sporting news overviews, not indepth secondary sources about the club and its history. In Vitrio (article creator) is rather thorough (which is a good thing), if the second source had more indepth info and background about the first few years of the club beyond the namechange, I'm sure it would have been included. Fram (talk) 08:08, 20 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    • Have now been able to see the relevant snippet of the source about the name change[1], and it's a small local announcement about the playing field having sustained damage, and the namechange is just a parenthesis: "Cleethorpes Town (late St. Peter's) Football Club", so no, it has no coverage at all of the club's history. Fram (talk) 08:14, 20 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    • One issue is you are not going to get ANY secondary sources for (within a rounding error) ANY football club in the first part of the 20th century. There was no football literature outside of the football annuals, which are not readily available. And any retrospecitves or club profiles are only going to be in newspapers. The British Library's Football Compendium lists only FIFTEEN general works for the first half of the 20th century - and that includes a thesis, two general sport books with chapters on football, and two books on football in PoW camps in World War 1. Even the biggest club of the 1930s (Arsenal) did not have a single book about them in period.
    But it goes back again to the point I made about Notability and recency bias. You're not going to get secondary sources about teams that are unambiguously Notable because there's not going to be a market. The wikipedia guidelines on sources simply do not work going this far back because the media environment was very different. And LITERALLY EVERY OTHER CLUB at this stage in the competition in this period has an entry, some up for a decade, and have NEVER been challenged. I question why Fram is only challenging this particular one. Not the first time Fram has challenged one of the articles I've put up - and nobody else ever has. In Vitrio (talk) 16:49, 21 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    "You're not going to get secondary sources about teams that are unambiguously Notable": if you don't have secondary sources, then they are unambiguously not notable, as it states there (bold in original): "Sources" should be secondary sources. Fram (talk) 17:31, 21 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    In which case you're wiping out ALL of football before the Second World War. Unless you count the annuals and I don't have access to them. It took until about 2018 for anyone to provide a decent secondary source for the Clapham Rovers and they were FA Cup winners. There still are none for Scottish Cup finalists like Renton or Clydesdale.
    The very fact that football does not have a notability guideline shows that strict policy does not work. Otherwise it would have been a piece of cake to draft one up. One has to take it in context and in this context it is bizarre to single out one club. You haven't explained why you are only nominating this one and not every other, more obscure, club whose article has been around for a decade (I give FC Alemannia 1897 Karlsruhe or Colne Town as examples). Why is THIS ONE not Notable but the others ARE? The point about others being obviously Notable is that it encourages research into those overlooked. You're seeking to stop all that. I don't get it.
    And indeed note the paradox. If this one gets deleted, why not nominate every single other club who got to the last 90 of the Cup? Because a fortiori they are not Notable either. But I've got all the drafts, so I could approach a friendly publisher, put out a book, and then there is a secondary source. Bingo. It's not logical to decree that e.g. W.O.A.C. are Notable because someone has put them in a book but Stafford Road are not because nobody has yet. They were both the same stature and notoriety in period. In Vitrio (talk) 17:53, 21 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    That's how notability on Wikipedia works. If X gets the secondary sources, but equally important or more so Y doesn't, then X is notable and Y isn't. We aren't here to second-guess the sources and why they choose to include one and exclude the other, and we aren't here to write histories for subjects no reliable source so far has bothered to do this. If this means unequal treatment or your favourite subject not getting a Wikipedia article, then so be it. Fram (talk) 18:11, 21 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    People HAVE written about Cleethorpes Town in the context of individual players' careers. There may be other sources of which I am unaware and people might use those to add in. It's not a favourite subject, by the way, never even been to Cleethorpes, but it was stumbling across something that made me realize that this was a different club from the other two Cleethorpes Towns, so needed to be split out, and having the page avoids confusion. Especially given the 1901 iteration did get to the equivalent of the FA Cup second round. As I've said, there are many clubs with less good sources and records whose pages have been up for years and nobody has challenged them. Because nobody doubts their Notability. In Vitrio (talk) 19:18, 21 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: Relisting. This might be an unusual comment but we need a source analysis here if the nominator is seeking deletion (or an ATD?) becauae closers base their outcome on the arguments made and so far there is a consensus to Keep this article. The OP has said that general comments about the unsatisfactory nature of the sources but a detailed list might help justify a deletion if that is your goal.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Liz Read! Talk! 04:29, 25 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

What´s the point of listing all sources individually and repeating "match report", "passing mention" 20 times? Not a single source which is indepth, not primary, and about the subject, has been presented. The closer should check if keep arguments are based on policy, not put an unnecessary extra burden on the nominator for no discernible benefit. Fram (talk) 08:23, 25 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Do you want to buy me a subscription to the British Newspaper Archive? SportingFlyer T·C 20:38, 25 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Can you give the newspapers, dates and titles of the 2 or 3 articles which seem the most promising? Fram (talk) 21:06, 25 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The problem with that is that there are over 2,000 hits between 1900 and 1949 alone, some of which are about town planning but most are about the football team. That includes this short list:
- Cleethorpes Town in the Final, Hull Daily Mail, 1911
- 12 January 1911, Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer
- 14 September 1906, Grimsby News
- Lincolnshire Cup, 24 November 1909, Sheffield Independent
- Cleethorpes v Scunthorpe TII, 23 March 1928, Grimsby News
- Horncastle and District Cup, 22 March 1911, Skegness News
- Boston Town Try Again, 9 May 1914, Boston Guardian
- Protest deferred, 30 October 1919, Sheffield Independent
I'm not sure if any of them would fall under our modern definition of WP:GNG, but this club was clearly consistently covered by regional papers at the time they were in existence. SportingFlyer T·C 00:25, 26 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Trouble with source analysis, as I've said above, is secondary sources in this era just do not exist, and the sources for most of the articles on most of the clubs which did not make it past World War 2 are primary. (Indeed in many cases the secondary sources are inaccurate - just look at the myths surrounding Arbroath 36–0 Bon Accord.) There may be some more recently (e.g. their Amateur Cup results are in a book from 2006), and I've set out a load in relation to the club's players, but I don't have access to everything, perhaps Lincolnshire football historians do. That I cannot find them does not mean the club is not notable. In context a club which makes the equivalent of the 2nd round of the FA Cup today is axiomatically notable.
Frankly, if this one is deleted, then you may as well delete basically every article of every football club that went bust before about 1945. I can't see how this helps wikipedia at all. In Vitrio (talk) 22:46, 25 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak keep It's hard for me to verify the sources, however based on whats there I feel this is fine and Grimsby Evening Telegraph is not a primary source. Govvy (talk) 16:58, 26 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak keep I also can't verify sources for SIGCOV, but the onus here for delete here is on the nominator given the article exists and there aren't any delete !votes. Also noting Liz's comment that there is already consensus for keep, and without any further evidence provided for delete, but instead more sources covering the subject included suggesting notability, then it's best to move this along. This is a weak keep as noting that if this was at AFC for example, it wouldn't be accepted until source analysis occurred, but this isn't at AFC. CNC (talk) 17:33, 26 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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.