About Legends XI

1. What Legends XI is

Legends XI is a football draft and simulation game. You pick a competition and a formation, the game draws real clubs and real seasons from that competition, and you keep one player from each draw until you have an eleven. Then you simulate the campaign, from the first game to the final.

One rule shapes everything else: only players who actually played that campaign can join your eleven, for that club or that national team. There are no imaginary transfers and no dream teams out of time. The Real Madrid of 2013-14 is the squad Real Madrid actually had in 2013-14, and that is where the card comes from.

Winning every single game of a competition, from the first to the final, is the perfect campaign — the rarest feat in the game.

2. The catalogue is open

Besides the game, the site has a catalogue you can browse with no account at all: the competitions, the seasons, the squads of each season, and a page for every player with the rating he holds in each competition he appeared in.

The catalogue exists because the cards are not a detail of the game — they are the whole work. If you only want to see who played what, and with what rating, you should not have to play a campaign to get there.

3. Where the squads and the ratings come from

This is the question that matters, and the answer has two halves, because they are two different things and should not be confused.

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

The ratings are something else. They are not official statistics and they were not imported from anywhere. They are the author's editorial judgement about what each player did in that competition, applied through rules that are written down and that anyone can read.

Put plainly: a card's rating is an argued opinion, not a measured fact. Saying so out loud is a strength and not a weakness — it is what separates a reasoned choice from a number that shows up with no owner. The rules are written precisely so that you can disagree with them accurately.

Read how the ratings are made — the five criteria in order, the rating ladder, each competition's 100 and its eleven 99-rated icons.

4. The rating belongs to the competition, not to the career

One rule governs every card in the game: 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.

A player who was ordinary throughout his career but happens to be the greatest in the history of one competition — more goals, more titles, more games decided — gets, in that competition, the rating that competition owes him. And a huge name who spent one season there doing nothing does not go up for being who he is.

• Every competition has one 100, and only one: the player who dominates that competition's history.
• Every competition has eleven 99-rated icons: the best ever in each position, with two centre-backs because every formation in the game needs at least two.
• The same player can hold different ratings in different competitions. That is not an inconsistency — it is the rule working.

5. What Legends XI is not

Legends XI is a fan project with no official connection to any federation, league, club, competition, player or brand. The names on this site are factual references to sporting facts, and every trademark belongs to its respective holder.

• It is not a transfer database, and it is not a statistics site. The numbers you see here are game ratings, assigned by a person.
• It is not a source to quote as fact. If you need an official record, go to the official source.
• It is not a company. There is no team, no newsroom and no investors.

6. Who makes this

Legends XI is a personal project by Guilherme Abrantes, made in Portugal. It is one person compiling squads, writing the ratings and the argument behind each one, and fixing whatever turns out to be wrong.

And something will be wrong: there are thousands of cards. If you find a player who does not belong to that squad, a season swapped, a misspelt name or a rating that does not hold up, write in. Corrections are the most useful mail this site gets.