This article is intended to help a Member Association (MA) decide, for 2 duplicated records which need merging, which record should be primary and which secondary. In the scenario discussed, both records have a FIFA_ID and an MA owns at least one of them.

For information on another use case, when you have a record without a FIFA_ID and see 2 or more potential duplicates coming up, refer to the article What to do if two or more records come up as potential duplicates?


Prerequisites

The functionality discussed in this article is available since March 2023. Upgrade your SDK to use it.


Scenario

Let's assume you have two records:

  • record A, stored in your NRS, registered by your MA
  • record B, stored anywhere (can be your NRS but also other MA's NRS)

You determined that those two records are duplicated and you want to merge them.


SDK offers a Merge(primaryFifaId, secondaryFifaId) method. A primary record will continue to be used, while the secondary record will not. If the records are merged, any user trying to run any operation (even get) on the secondary record will receive a 309 error along with the pointer to the right, primary record. The decision, therefore, is important.


As a rule of thumb, the older record, i.e. the one that was registered earlier in Connect ID, should be marked as primary. Note that this is about the date of acquiring a FIFA_ID, i.e. registration in the FIFA Connect ID Service and not about the chronological registration in the NRS. Consider the following, hypothetical, case:

  • Robert Lewandowski started his career in Poland and then moved to Germany
  • however, Germany integrated (onboarded) with the Connect ID Service before Poland
  • as a result, it was Germany who first registered Robert Lewandowski in their NRS and got a FIFA_ID for him
  • a year later, Poland integrated with the Connect ID Service
  • when registering all their players (both current and past) they made a mistake and registered Lewandowski again. And got another FIFA_ID for him.
  • Lewandowski now has two FIFA_IDs. This is a problem, because if he transfers again, either Germany or Poland will miss on the training rewards. To avoid the problem, FIFA_IDs should be merged. Which record should be kept (primary) and which merged (secondary)?

The answer is: it should be the record created by Germany, despite the fact that Lewandowski played in Poland before.


Note that since Apr 2024, a new tool for solving duplicate cases - DXP - is available. If two FIFA_IDs are confirmed to be duplicated in DXP, the tool will automatically determine which one is primary and which secondary.



How to determine which record was registered earlier? In any duplicate related context, the SDK returns the date of the registration in Connect ID for each FIFA_ID. There are two distinct though similar cases here:

  • methods taking PersonData (contains name & DoB) as parameter - registerPersonAndWaitForDetailsInCaseofDuplicates(...), getDuplicates(...) - return the date of the registration in Connect ID for each of the potential duplicates
  • methods taking FIFA_ID as a parameter - updatePerson(...), getDuplicatesByFifaId(...) - return both: the date of the registration in Connect ID for each of the potential duplicates and the date of registration of a reference FIFA_ID (the one given as a parameter).

Depeding on your needs you can use any of the methods to determine the dates of the registration in Connect ID to decide which record is older and should be made primary.


Any questions? Send us an email to support.id@fifa.org.



If you are interested in merges, you may also find the following resources interesting:
What to do if two or more records come up as potential duplicates?
Connect ID Notifications
Merging rules explained
Merging: Understanding Primary and Secondary FIFA IDs After a Merge in Connect ID