Catalogue — every competition, season and squad

1. What this catalogue is

This is the Legends XI archive: the squads that played each competition, season by season, from the oldest editions it was possible to reconstruct down to the most recent ones.

Every player who took part in one of those campaigns has a card here, and a card is always the same thing: the name, the nationality, the position he played in that side, the shirt number and a rating.

The squads and the line-ups were compiled by hand from public sources. This is not an imported database and not an automated scrape — each edition was put together one at a time, which is why the archive grows slowly rather than all at once.

And it is not an archive sitting next to the game: these are the cards the game is played with. What you see here is the material of the draft and of the campaigns, read a different way.

The three numbers at the top of this page — editions, squads and cards — are counted from the archive on every visit. None of them is written by hand, which is why none of them goes stale.

2. How it is organised

Below this page the archive has four levels, and you go down from one to the next by clicking. Each level answers a different question:

• The competition. Every edition of that competition, newest first, with the winner and the runner-up of each one. Underneath the list sits the competition's icon eleven — the greatest of all time in each position, with a paragraph saying why.
• The edition. One particular season: the sides that played it, ordered by squad strength, with the winner and the runner-up marked.
• The squad. The cards of one side in that season, read from the goalkeeper forward — keepers, defenders, midfielders, forwards — each with its position, number, nationality and rating.
• The player page. Everything one person did, competition by competition and season by season, with the best rating he reached in each one.

There is also a search box at the top of every catalogue page, which finds players and clubs by name from two letters onwards. A club has no page of its own: the search takes you to the most recent edition it appears in.

When the same name belongs to more than one person, the page shows them separately rather than adding up careers that are not the same person's. That is a deliberate decision, and it shows most on very common names.

3. What the competitions share, and where they differ

Every competition is read the same way, but they are not all played the same way — and that difference explains much of what you see on each one's pages.

Some are for clubs and some for national teams. Some open with a group stage and only then go into the knockout; others are cups, and start in the knockout straight away. And there is a shape with no knockout at all, where the champion is simply whoever finishes top of the table after every round has been played.

Inside the knockout there are further differences, and they matter when you look at an edition: some rounds are played over two legs, home and away, and some are settled in a single match; and there are whole competitions played on neutral ground, in a host country, where neither side is at home.

The difference has one consequence visible all over the site: the perfect run. It is the feat of winning every match of a competition, from the first game to the final, and its number is the full path to the title — which is why it changes from competition to competition.

It only exists where there is a group stage. A cup won in a handful of matches is a title, not a feat: counting it alongside a long competition would give both the same weight, and it is not the same effort.

The table below is read from the archive on every visit — it is not written by hand, and it takes on any new competition by itself:

4. What a card's rating means

There is one sentence that explains every card in this archive: the rating belongs to the competition, not to the career. It measures what that player did in that competition — not his standing in football at large, not a career average, and not fame.

Which is why the same player can hold different ratings in different competitions with no contradiction at all: they are separate records, with separate stories. And why whoever won a competition six times sits above the star who passed through it for one season.

At the top of each competition there is a card rated 100 — the greatest of all time in that competition, one and only one — and an icon eleven rated 99, the greatest of all time in each position. These are not decorative honours: they are the highest place on that competition's scale, and nobody else reaches it.

And it is worth saying plainly: the ratings are not official statistics and were not imported from anywhere. They are an editorial judgement, awarded according to written criteria — written precisely so that disagreeing with them can be possible and precise.

5. How to use it

There are three ways in, and none of them asks for an account:

• By competition, to walk the history of one tournament end to end. The list is at the top of this page.
• By season, when you are after one particular squad: pick the competition, then the year.
• By name, when you are after a person or a club: the search box at the top gets there in two letters.

The catalogue is read-only. Anyone who wants to do something with these cards will find the game from the bottom of this page: you build a side of your own and take it through a competition, from the first match to the final.

Legends XI is a fan project. The names of clubs, competitions and players used in this archive are factual references and belong to their respective holders — this site has no relationship with any of them.