Q2 measured, not guessed. The operator moved a card Club -> Transfer List without
listing it (PUT /item, no POST /auctionhouse) and the state was captured read-only.
Finding: we do not represent the unlisted state on the wire AT ALL. Such an item is
byte-identical to a club item -- itemState `free`, no `pile` field emitted, still
returned in /club and counted in clubPlayers -- while an actively-listed item is
correctly excluded from /club and present in tradePile. Only the host's own pile
store knows the difference. Trade pile held 6 items: 1 listed, 5 unlisted.
The FIFA 17 ENCODING of that state stays UNKNOWN on purpose: returned itemData.pile
is numeric with an unrecovered mapping, and tradeState is a closed table walk where
an unrecognised bidState is silently swallowed as `none`, so a wrong enum produces a
plausible-looking but wrong UI. The corpus warns `inactive` decodes but no client
path treats it specially. One client-only discriminator is recorded instead.
Also models the domain boundary both limbo bugs came from: pile membership and
auction lifecycle are separate facts requiring coordinated transitions. States the
testable invariant -- an item must never be simultaneously excluded from /club and
absent from /tradePile -- with the two ways it was reachable and the commits that
closed each.
Records the live-client resolution so the market shape is now a fixture rather than
folklore, and so a future agent cannot burn deployments on tradeOwner again.
Confidence notes updated: tradeOwner remains FIFA17-HISTORICAL (it does exist in
the FIFA 17-era API) but "required by FIFA17.exe Transfer List Actions" is now
DISPROVEN for this client path -- it is not among the twelve atoms the client's
auctionInfo deserializer reads, and it was implemented, deployed, observed inert
and removed.
The real blockers are recorded as CONFIRMED live-client findings: trade/status
polling is load-bearing, `expires` must EVOLVE with wall-clock time (a frozen
value is structurally valid and behaviourally broken), and relist must persist
through the PK conflict that FIFA's re-sent ISStart necessarily causes.
Freezes the known-good bodies under docs/evidence/market-lifecycle-2026-08-17/
with a machine-checkable countdown proof (_index.json._countdown_proof records
expires decrementing, frozen:false) rather than asserting the clock in prose.
States the general rule this cost us: a response can pass differential parity and
render perfectly while still being wrong, because FIFA expects an evolving
server-side state machine, not a static object that resembles one.
funman300