Hi, my thinking has been that those stub tags do not necessarily imply nationality, and just sorting them into subcategories - The changed wording when moving into position tags (the decades just add a clause onto those) could be a problem, but the phrase "English football forward" is a bit ambiguous in that sense. This seemed reasonable as the idea of a stub tag, as opposed to regular categories is not to categorise people, but to group them for interested editors, so if all we know about someone is that they played English football, that is the obvious place to stub-sort them. I certainly don't have a problem with the alternate wording you mention, although I notice it has been reverted for consistency on one of the pages linked. I would be happy to go through and change all of those if there is consensus for that wording.

In most cases I think I only changed the country in persondata when a person was in Cat:English footballers, but in this case (and probably some others), I saw country of birth and location of junior club and jumped the gun. I will make sure not to do that in future. You are probably right that it is unnecessary even when correct, although I do wish I had a better idea what persondata is actually used for.