Fix Problems with a Wordpress page template and Custom Taxonomy

I need help to fix an outdated Wordpress template and replace an old custom post type and taxonomy plugin with taxonomy information in functions.php. I also want to make sure that nothing is wrong or corrupted in the database. The website page with problems is: [login to view URL] (Attached is the template that creates this page.) The page loads very slowly. In the source code please inspect #45 in the noted column and see many extra empty <a> tags. The outdated plugin: Ultimate CMS is responsible for 50% of the sites load time. It creates a custom taxonomy 'Players' which has two custom fields: 'Born' & 'Died'. Which you can also see on the page listed above and in the attached page template. I would like to re-create the Players taxonomy in [login to view URL] and make sure the data from the two custom fields are with it and working. I have a duplicate site set up to use for development. I would like to identify and fix the problems in the development site first and migrate the solution to the live site.