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

I think I don't agree with your generalization. A team isn't just a collection of players. A team has so much more information about it - name, emblem, collection of management/admin staff, collection of coaching crew, then collection of players. So properly, your FootballTeam class should have 3 collections and not itself be a collection; if it is to properly model the real world.

You could consider a PlayerCollection class which like the Specialized StringCollection offers some other facilities - like validation and checks before objects are added to or removed from the internal store.

Perhaps, the notion of a PlayerCollection betters suits your preferred approach?

public class PlayerCollection : Collection 
{ 
}

And then the FootballTeam can look like this:

public class FootballTeam 
{ 
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public string Location { get; set; }

    public ManagementCollection Management { get; protected set; } = new ManagementCollection();

    public CoachingCollection CoachingCrew { get; protected set; } = new CoachingCollection();

    public PlayerCollection Players { get; protected set; } = new PlayerCollection();
}