I knew that shell files, especially in build systems can get hard to read, but this was absolutely painful to look at from start to finish, even with the very helpful explanations in between. Of course the obfuscation is mostly done by design in this case.

OpenSuse Slowroll does pretty much that, a slightly delayed rolling release.

I don’t think there is a good way of having references within the same struct, but you could store reference counted matches:

matches: Vec<Rc<Match>>,
players: HashMap<String, Rc<Match>>,

You would still have to make sure that the players map is updated, maybe weak references are useful there.

Maybe you could also consider storing the players of a match in the match itself, not outside.