Players with the same name in previous seasons

[jack89roberts]

Liverpool have signed a player called Ben Davies. Spurs already have a player called Ben Davies. Havoc ensues since we use names as the basis for our unique identifiers. FIFA are yet to respond to our demands for all football players to have unique stage names like actors.

This also happened in the 18/19 season with two Danny Wards, see #90. Tricky to fix because we have no other way to match player histories between seasons, besides creating a record ourselves for these edge cases maybe (FPL player IDs change each season, at least the ones they make public in the API).

This is currently causing some issues with airsenal_update_db (no player found with FPL API ID 653, which is the Liverpool Ben Davies).

[jack89roberts]

Currently causes some prediction attempts for 20/21 season to fail:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Users/jroberts/opt/anaconda3/envs/airsenalenv/bin/airsenal_run_prediction", line 33, in <module>
    sys.exit(load_entry_point('airsenal', 'console_scripts', 'airsenal_run_prediction')())
  File "/Users/jroberts/GitHub/AIrsenal/airsenal/scripts/fill_predictedscore_table.py", line 264, in main
    tag = make_predictedscore_table(
  File "/Users/jroberts/GitHub/AIrsenal/airsenal/scripts/fill_predictedscore_table.py", line 185, in make_predictedscore_table
    calc_all_predicted_points(
  File "/Users/jroberts/GitHub/AIrsenal/airsenal/scripts/fill_predictedscore_table.py", line 152, in calc_all_predicted_points
    predictions = calc_predicted_points_for_player(
  File "/Users/jroberts/GitHub/AIrsenal/airsenal/framework/prediction_utils.py", line 300, in calc_predicted_points_for_player
    df_player[position].loc[player.player_id]
KeyError: 'name\nBen Davies    DEF\nBen Davies    DEF\nName: position, dtype: object'

[jack89roberts]

• Danny Ward: 1819 (Daniel Carl Ward CAR MID, and Daniel Ward LEI GK)
• Ben Davies: 2021, 2122 (Benjamin Keith Davies LIV DEF, and Benjamin Thomas Davies TOT DEF)
• Álvaro Fernández: 2122 (Álvaro Fernández Carreras: MUN DEF, and Álvaro Fernández Llorente BRE GK)

Proposal: Rename players in historic data:

• Cardiff Danny Ward (1819 MID, id 105) -> Daniel Carl Ward
• Liverpool Ben Davies (2021 DEF id 653, 2122 DEF id 248) -> Benjamin Keith Davies
• Brentford Alvaro Fernandez (2122 GK id 556) -> Alvaro Fernandez Llorente

For future occurrences:

• The script airsenal/scripts/duplicate_names.py will print the names and IDs of players with clashing names.
• Rename the player least likely to reappear in FPL
• Rename to their full name (e.g. on Wikipedia) if this differs to the clashing FPL name.