Ghost player: who the heck is Sultan Tankar?

https://sortitoutsi.net/football-manager-2019/player/23471733/sultan-tankar

This guy is aged 25, is uncapped by Saudi Arabia, does not appear on any club website, cannot be found in a google search, is a new addition to the FM19 database, and yet has top division stats (134 CA 142 PA). Who is he? Where has he been? Why has he not featured in FM before?

A quick Google search takes me to the club's Wikipedia page, which shows him as having joined the club last month and gives this Twitter link as proof. I can't access Twitter at work due to a firewall, but hopefully that answers your query.

Additionally, and with the greatest of respect, I'm not sure the tone of your post is warranted. We're a fan page, we don't add players into the FM database ourselves after all

Thanks. However, people who use "with the greatest of respect" often show very little. It was a valid question and I never said anything about this site.

This player has come out of nowhere and, as a facepack maker I spent an hour mins of frustration trying to find him.

This player has come out of nowhere and according to what you have found has been transferred down to the Saudi second division from al-Wedha, of the top division - I'm not confident that's the same player. But there's something going on in the FM database - there seem to be a few Gulf state players who have had stat bumps. This one seems the most extreme and, until I can find verifiable proof, doesn't even exist.

If you have any doubts on the veracity of the official SI data, that's something you should probably post on the official data issues forum. Not much we can do here on this site.

This particular player also appears to be in FIFA with 56 overall ability. He's on 2 Wiki pages (doesn't mean much, true) and is linked to a news item on a club's official feed. My hunch is that he only came to the researcher's attention this year and was added then. I doubt there's a great depth in lower division Saudi FM research tbh...