Merging duplicate players

The same person often ends up in the directory twice — typed in by hand one season, imported from a spreadsheet the next. Merging fixes that without touching any results.

Most of the time you should not go looking for these pairs yourself: Directory → Players carries a Possible duplicates panel that finds them, ranks them and shows the evidence it used. See Reviewing possible duplicates for how the queue decides what to suggest, what it deliberately never suggests, and how consent is resolved.

This page covers the other route — the pair you spotted yourself.

Merging a pair by hand

In Directory → Players, find the entry you want to fold away and choose merge…, then pick the record to keep. Everything attached to the duplicate moves to the record you keep:

• Team and entrant memberships — every roster the duplicate was named on.
• Fixture lineups — past selections stay intact under the kept name.
• Sport profiles — position and attribute profiles per sport.
• Suspensions and bans — a ban recorded against either record survives and applies to the record you keep.
• Availability replies — RSVPs to fixtures.
• The account link — if only one of the two was claimed by a player, the kept record inherits it.

Season statistics are recalculated, not copied across: every affected division is folded again from its match events, so anything recorded under either record is counted once, on the kept player.

Where both records were already on the same team, fixture or sport profile, the two are resolved into one entry rather than one of them being thrown away — the kept record's details win, and the duplicate's copy is preserved in the merge record.

The button stays dead until you confirm the two records are the same person. There is no automatic merging anywhere in the product.

What to check first

• Keep the right one. The kept record's name, date of birth, photo and consent settings are what remain — merge the sparse entry into the complete one. Consent is the exception: it is resolved to the stricter of the two, so a merge can never make public something one of the records had kept private.
• Different dates of birth are a warning. Two records giving different dates are the best evidence in your own data that these are two people who share a name. You can still merge them, but check first.
• Two claimed accounts cannot be merged. If each record has been claimed by a different login, the merge is refused — that is two humans signing in.

Nothing is deleted, and you can undo it

The record you merge in is not deleted. It is marked as absorbed and hidden from rosters, reports and public pages, and a full snapshot of the state before the merge is kept with it.

That is what makes undo real: Recent merges, under the duplicates panel, lists what has been merged and Undo puts both records back exactly as they were. There is no deadline for it.

Results are safe. Match results and score history are never affected by a merge or by undoing one.

Common questions

Why do I have duplicates at all? Usually one import and one manual add with slightly different spellings, or a player who registered themselves for one competition and was entered by their club for another. The duplicates panel catches most of them without you looking.