I assume you create @players somehow. If you have a loop in which you do so (or if you can arrange your code to create some sort of loop), you could make a hash instead of an array and write:

my %players;

while (my $player = make_next_player())
{
    if (exists $players{ $player->{name} }
    {
        # merge new player data with existing player
    }
    else
    {
        $players{ $player->{name} } = $player;
    }
}
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