Why not inherit from List?

Question

When planning out my programs, I often start with a chain of thought like so:

A football team is just a list of football players. Therefore, I should

Answer 1

What is the correct C# way of representing a data structure...

Remeber, "All models are wrong, but some are useful." -George E. P. Box

There is no a "correct way", only a useful one.

Choose one that is useful to you and/your users. That's it. Develop economically, don't over-engineer. The less code you write, the less code you will need to debug. (read the following editions).

-- Edited

My best answer would be... it depends. Inheriting from a List would expose the clients of this class to methods that may be should not be exposed, primarily because FootballTeam looks like a business entity.

-- Edition 2

I sincerely don't remember to what I was referring on the “don't over-engineer” comment. While I believe the KISS mindset is a good guide, I want to emphasize that inheriting a business class from List would create more problems than it resolves, due abstraction leakage.

On the other hand, I believe there are a limited number of cases where simply to inherit from List is useful. As I wrote in the previous edition, it depends. The answer to each case is heavily influenced by both knowledge, experience and personal preferences.

Thanks to @kai for helping me to think more precisely about the answer.