How information in County Squad Tracker is recorded and interpreted.
Official Stockport County announcements and interviews are preferred. Other official bodies and clubs are used where they are the primary source for a rule, transfer or contract. Reliable reporting may be used when primary information is unavailable; rumours should not be presented as confirmed facts.
Guaranteed contract expiry dates are kept separate from club options. A one-year option therefore appears as an additional year rather than being treated as already exercised. Renewal and signing announcements are retained in each person's history.
For permanent signings, the current spell begins when the player joins County. Earlier loan spells remain separate history events. Academy records can be maintained privately in Admin so joining information and any senior appearances are not lost, but Academy-only players are not exposed on the public site. Unknown details such as DOB are left blank rather than inferred. When a first professional contract is confirmed, the existing record is promoted into the public professional squad so the earlier history can be retained.
Loan Watch records matchday involvement and basic performance statistics for County players while they are out on loan. Current loan club and duration come from the main loan record; match totals are calculated from the individual records entered in Admin. Matchday round-ups use the loan spell active on the chosen date, so a recalled player is not also shown for a later loan club. Where a detail such as competition, assist, card type or loan end is not known, it should be left blank or described as not recorded rather than inferred.
Only publicly disclosed football-availability information from an identifiable reliable source is published. Injury detail is limited to what the source actually stated and what is relevant to playing availability; CST does not diagnose injuries from absences or add private treatment information. Return estimates keep the level of precision used by the source, and any CST-derived date window is labelled as based on a club estimate.
Updates from the same injury spell are grouped into a case so later prognoses do not overwrite earlier public statements. An appearance or an explicit recovery / Available update can close a case as a return. A transfer, contract or otherwise unclear squad situation does not count as proof of recovery and cannot create an inferred return fixture.
Completed competitive games missed through injury, suspension and sourced fixture-specific one-off reasons are recorded separately. Illness, personal reasons, bereavement and another short-term absence apply only to the selected fixture and do not change the player's current fitness status. If suspension also applies, it takes priority because the player was ineligible regardless of fitness. Unknown availability only generates injury absences when it remains linked to an active injury case; if the reason for absence becomes unclear, injury counting stops from that date. An Other reason remains available for an exceptional manual correction; tactical non-selection and rest are not recorded unavailability. A player's recorded unavailability percentage only uses fixtures for which they were part of County's first-team pool, excluding games before joining, after departure and while loaned out. An Unknown current status is shown as not measured rather than as 0%. The squad rate is recorded injury, suspension and one-off absences divided by all possible player appearances for those eligible fixtures.
Appearances, starts, substitute appearances and minutes are recorded against completed competitive fixtures. A private Academy record can collect senior minutes before a professional profile is public; those appearances transfer into the professional profile when the player signs pro terms. An actual appearance overrides any same-fixture missed-game record, and an Injured, Back in training or Doubtful professional player is returned to Available when an appearance is saved. Where match-clock data is recorded, minutes include first- and second-half added time and any extra-time periods. Older manually entered records retain their stored total. Season totals and league/cup splits are calculated from those fixture records.
Official fee information is kept separate from reported or rumoured figures. Undisclosed, disclosed and free transfers can be recorded, as can compensation agreed between clubs or compensation set by tribunal, along with whether an official announcement describes a fee as a club record. Any reported or rumoured figure is labelled as such and stored with its own source and source date.
The Registration field is calculated from the stored season rules, date of birth and position where possible, with a manual override available for exceptional cases. Loan status does not erase a player's underlying registration category. Club Developed qualification is stored separately. It can be manually confirmed as Yes, No or Unknown, or set to Automatic using the player's DOB and the best available County registration evidence. Where an exact registration date is not publicly confirmed, CST may use the player's County announcement date as an approximate registration date; any resulting future qualification date is labelled as an estimate. Automatic status calculates the 12-month point and shows No, Will qualify on a future date, or Yes; on the estimated qualification date the effective status changes without a manual edit. In the pre-deadline working view, one qualifying player can be selected for the working Club Developed squad-place assumption. An otherwise exempt Under-21 player or goalkeeper can still be counted in that working 22 if selected for the Club Developed place. Once the official list is known, Admin can record whether a player was Named in 22 or Not named in 22, including an exempt player explicitly named in the published 22.
Fitness availability and wider squad circumstances are stored separately. A player can therefore have Unknown fitness while also being marked as Expected departure, In contract discussions or Transfer listed. These labels explain why a player may not be featuring without turning a non-medical update into a recovery or injury claim.
Wins, draws, losses and win percentage are calculated from completed competitive first-team fixtures assigned to the Head Coach. A match that is level before a penalty shoot-out counts as a draw for W/D/L statistics, while the shoot-out outcome is stored separately.
Records are editable rather than overwritten blindly. Contracts, squad numbers, loans, availability updates and club-history events can retain previous information, allowing corrections without losing the historical record.