Club city lookup

club_city_lookup.csv assigns one consistent home city or town to each team name in standings.csv, standings24_25.csv, gold_dim_stadiums_pyramid.csv and silver_relegation_attendance.parquet. It contains 171 team-name keys, including historical names and spelling variants. Multiple keys can refer to the same club.

Team is the join key. Club_City is the club’s home location under that name, independent of where its stadium was in a particular season. London boroughs use London; district labels such as Birmingham (Bordesley) use their broader city. Towns are included even though the column is named Club_City.

For example, Coventry City consistently maps to Coventry, Bolton Wanderers to Bolton and Wimbledon to London. Milton Keynes Dons has its own Milton Keynes key. The season-specific stadium City is retained separately. In the gold outputs, GeoPlace uses Club_City, United Kingdom for every observation, including those without a stadium record. This supports city-level mapping for English and Welsh clubs without requiring the exact stadium location. Coventry City1 is retained as a source-name variant and maps to Coventry.

Most mappings use the existing stadium records, with districts standardised and temporary grounds excluded from the club’s home location. Records without a city include Chester/Chester City and Darlington; their home towns are supported by Chester’s history and Darlington’s history. Grimsby Town describes its base as Cleethorpes, so its mapping uses Cleethorpes. The historical Rushden & Diamonds club maps to Irthlingborough. Merthyr Town maps to Merthyr Tydfil, supported by the club’s description of its home.

The gold script validates unique, populated team keys and requires a mapping for every team in the silver panel. Add a row here when introducing a new team, then rerun gold_too_messy_to_melt_script.py; it exports Club_City to both CSV and Parquet and to the stadium event comparison report.