How the ratings are made

1. The rule behind everything

One sentence explains every card on this site: the rating belongs to the competition, not to the career.

A player's rating in a competition measures what he did in that competition. It is not his standing in football at large, it is not a career average, and it is not fame.

If a player was ordinary throughout his career but happened to be the greatest in the history of one competition — more goals, more difference made — then his rating in that competition has to be unique. That is the principle, and everything else follows from it.

This only works because every competition has its own space. The same human being can be an 87 card in one competition and an 80 card in another with no conflict at all: they are separate records, with separate histories.

The case that forced the rule to be written in capital letters was the Portuguese League Cup, where the highest-rated card in the competition belonged to a player with a single appearance in it. He was up there because he was famous, not because he had done anything there. The competition was recalibrated.

2. What the rule forbids

A rule is only worth something if it also says what you do not do. This one says four things:

• Do not copy a rating from one competition to another "because it is the same player".
• Do not rate a superstar highly for passing through the competition once and doing nothing.
• Do not rate someone low who won the competition five times just because he was not famous.
• Do not invent performance. If the source does not confirm it, it does not go in.

3. Where the data comes from, and what the ratings are

These are two different things and they are worth separating clearly.

The squads and the line-ups were compiled by hand from public sources — Wikipedia, zerozero and others. Who played for whom, in which season, in which position, and what happened in that campaign.

The ratings are not official statistics and were not imported from anywhere. They are editorial judgement, assigned according to the criteria on this page. They are an argued opinion, and that is exactly why the criteria are written down: so that disagreement can be precise.

There is a discipline that goes with this: when a competition does not award a prize, no substitute is invented for it. The Portuguese League Cup, for instance, has no final or tournament MVP — so that criterion simply does not count there.

4. How performance is measured, strongest first

The five criteria are in order, and the order is the whole point: the one above wins whenever they disagree.

• Official competition records. Most titles, most appearances, most goals, top scorer of a single edition. These are published facts and are not up for argument.
• Honours within the competition. Titles, finals played, appearances in the final stage.
• Output. Goals and assists in the competition — and goals in finals count for more.
• Prominence. Games played, starts, finals decided.
• The player's actual quality. Only as a tie-breaker, within the same band.

Look at which one comes fifth. General quality is the last criterion and not the first — that inversion is what separates measuring a competition from repeating what everybody already thinks.

5. The rating ladder

The numbers mean the same thing in every competition, but they always measure inside that competition.

The 96 to 98 band is used with tweezers. It is for a season that does not fit inside 95 and cannot have the 99 because someone else already holds the position. The first case was Cristiano Ronaldo in 2007-08 in the Premier League — 31 goals playing off the right, the title, the competition's Player of the Year award and the Ballon d'Or — sitting at 94, below four ordinary Salah seasons. The right-wing 99 belongs to Salah, and the count says it should (4 Golden Boots to 1, 193 goals to 103). The 98 says what it needs to say: icon level, with the position taken.

What the band is not: a step for nudging famous players upwards. A 96 needs the same evidence a 99 needs; the only difference is that someone better holds the position.

6. The 100 — one per competition

Every competition has one 100-rated card, and only one. The criterion is the easiest one to read backwards, so it is worth stating it negatively: it is not whoever had the single best campaign. It is whoever dominates the competition's history — goals, assists, free kicks, finals and semi-finals decided, titles.

The season on the card is only the one that best embodies that, typically the one in which he broke a record. Take that year away and it would still be him.

• Champions League — Cristiano Ronaldo, Real Madrid 2013-14. The competition's all-time top scorer, its top assister, the player with the most free kicks scored, and the one who scored most in finals and semi-finals. The season chosen is the one of the 17 goals, a record for a single edition — but the all-time title does not come from that.
• World Cup — Pelé, Brazil 1970. The only three-time world champion.
• Portuguese League Cup — Paulinho, Sporting 2022-23. The competition's all-time top scorer with 21 goals when the second has 12; 8 in a single edition, which is the record; and three times the competition's top scorer. A modest reputation in European football, the outright king of this cup — the criterion at work.
• European Championship — Cristiano Ronaldo, Portugal 2016. The competition's record holder for goals (14), appearances (30) and editions scored in (5, when nobody else goes beyond 3), and a champion. The year is the one of Portugal's title.

The 100 is not just a colour. The card gets 100 shooting and 100 passing, and the game refuses to seed two 100s in the same competition. Whoever holds the 100 in a competition really is that competition's best player.

The same player can hold the 100 in two different competitions — Cristiano Ronaldo holds it in the Champions League and in the European Championship. Two histories, two independent cards.

7. The eleven 99-rated icons

Below the 100 come the icons, rated 99: the greatest ever in that competition in each position. Same criterion as the 100, applied position by position — honours and impact in the competition, not general fame.

The game has ten position codes, which would mean ten icons. There are eleven, and the reason is arithmetic: no formation lines up with one player per position. Every one of them needs at least two centre-backs, and three of them need three. With a single 99-rated centre-back, an all-blue eleven was impossible.

• A centre-back pairing is a real unit of football, not an invention of the game. Baresi and Maldini. Thiago Silva and Lúcio. Naming both describes the competition more faithfully, not less.
• It sets no precedent. There will be no "second-best attacking midfielder": the criterion is the position every formation in the game repeats.
• A player can be an icon in one competition and the 100 in another, or both in different seasons of the same competition.

What is deliberately left out: formations with three centre-backs still cannot field an all-blue eleven. Covering them would need a third centre-back and a second striker — and at that point the blue card would stop meaning "the greatest ever".

8. At most three versions of each player

A player has at most three distinct ratings per competition. This is not a cosmetic limit: it is what stops one person filling a draw with six near-identical versions of himself.

Because the rating already reflects the player's career inside the competition, the normal case is one rating across every season. The second version is usually the icon card, in the specific season in which he was most decisive. Campaigns from neighbouring years reuse whichever version matches reality.

And it is counted per competition, not per player. The Champions League Zidane and the World Cup Zidane are separate records with their own histories — so each has his own limit of three.

9. The scale has to close at the top

A competition can have every rating in the right order and still be badly calibrated. It happened in several competitions on this site: between the best player without a rarity and the 99-rated icons there was at one point an eleven-point void, with the legend band nearly empty and 97% of the cards below 80.

That ruins two things at once. It ruins the reading — the colours stop meaning anything when everything is grey and then there are eleven gods. And it ruins the draft — with almost every card inside the same ten-point band, the choices are equivalent and whoever draws an icon wins.

The fix could not be to recalculate who is above whom, because the ordering was not wrong: the yardstick was squashed. So the yardstick is stretched with the order kept exactly as it was, by percentile remapping, with three guarantees:

• The order does not change. The map is by value, not by row: ties stay ties and nobody swaps places with anybody.
• The floor does not rise. A bit-part player stays a bit-part player.
• The yardstick is built on the common population. Cards that already carry a rarity sit at the top by construction; letting them into the calculation would eat the top percentiles.

The target is easy to check: between the best player without a rarity and the 99s there should be no more than about five points.

And this is not inflation, for the reason this page opens with: ratings are only comparable inside the same competition. An 85 in the Portuguese League Cup is not an 85 in the Champions League, and never was. Stretching the scale is choosing the yardstick that measures that competition — not claiming its players got better.

10. The perfect campaign

Winning every game of a competition, from the first to the final, is the perfect campaign — the rarest feat in the game. The number changes with the competition, because the road to the title changes: 13-0 in the Champions League, 8-0 in a World Cup.

And it only exists in competitions with a group stage. A cup won in three games is a title, not a feat: if it counted, three games would be worth the same as thirteen.

11. Disagreeing with this

These criteria are written down so that you can disagree with them precisely. If you think a rating does not hold up, say what the player did in that competition and why it does not fit the number he has. One argument like that is worth a hundred opinions, and it is the most useful mail this site gets.

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