Old lineups for older seasons

You were reading it right: those older seasons came in with results and in-match events but no teamsheets. The cause was on our side — the job that fills in historical matches was downloading the lineups and keeping only the per-player numbers out of them, so the teamsheet itself was never saved. That is fixed, and a pass is now going back over about 97,000 finished matches from 2018 onwards to attach the lineups that do exist, so coverage on old matches will improve over the next few days rather than all at once. Two things it does not close, so you know what to expect: player stats on matches before roughly 2018 are a separate gap still being filled, and where a match still shows no lineup after this pass it is because none exists on record for that competition — that varies by competition rather than by year, so there is no cut-off date I can promise you. /football-coverage/ has the live per-competition picture if you want to check a specific one.