North American Soccer League (original) (raw)

Methodology: I used a number of sources to identify a player's numbers and his statistics.
For statistics, I used the following resources. Sometimes the information conflicted. When they did I ranked the Colin Jose's data highest:
1. Colin Jose's book: "NASL A Complete Record of the North American Soccer League." This is an excellent book.
2. Colin Jose's book: "North American Soccer League Encyclopedia"
3. Zander Hollander's book: "The American Encyclopedia of Soccer"
For players numbers I used the following resources in descending order of priority.
1. Game films.
2. 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.
3. 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 their number.
4. Road programs-Road programs in the early years of the league were prone to misspellings and number errors.
5. Colin Jose's "NASL A Complete Record of the North American Soccer League."
6. 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.

Sometimes a player wore 2 different numbers in a year, such as Teofilo Cubillas in 1980. In that case, I separate the numbers with a comma, e.g. "10,20." 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.