Django circular model reference

Question

I\'m starting to work on a small soccer league management website (mostly for learning purposes) and can\'t wrap my mind around a Django models relationship. For simplicity,

Answer 1

as you can see in the docs, for exactly this reason it is possible to specify the foreign model as a string.

team = models.ForeignKey('Team')

Answer 2

Here is another way to tackle this problem. Instead of creating a circular dependency, I created an additional table that stores the relationship between players and teams. So in the end it looks like this:

class Team(Model):
    name = CharField(max_length=50)

    def get_captain(self):
        return PlayerRole.objects.get(team=self).player

class Player(Model):
    first_name = CharField(max_length=50)
    last_name = CharField(max_length=50, blank=True)

    def get_team(self):
        return PlayerRole.objects.get(player=self).team

PLAYER_ROLES = (
    ("Regular", "Regular"),
    ("Captain", "Captain")
    )

class PlayerRole(Model):
    player = OneToOneField(Player, primary_key=True)
    team = ForeignKey(Team, null=True)
    role = CharField(max_length=20, choices=PLAYER_ROLES, default=PLAYER_ROLES[0][0])
    class Meta:
        unique_together = ("player", "team")

It might be slightly less efficient in terms of storage than the suggested workaround, but it avoids the circular dependency and keeps the DB structure clean and clear. Comments are welcome.