Guide · Football knowledge
How Football Player Ratings Actually Work
An 85-rated player and another 85-rated player can feel like they belong to different sports. One is a towering centre-back who wins everything in the air; the other is a five-foot-seven winger who cannot head a ball but will take three defenders out of the game with one touch. Same number. Nothing else in common.
That gap between the number and the reality is worth understanding — partly because it makes you better at Footle and Tier Drop, and partly because it explains most of the arguments people have about ratings in the first place.
What an overall rating actually is
An overall rating is a weighted average of a player's individual attributes, where the weights depend on their position. That last part is the bit everyone forgets, and it is the source of nearly all the confusion.
A striker's overall is dominated by finishing, positioning, pace and composure. Their tackling barely registers. A centre-back's overall is dominated by marking, heading, strength and defensive awareness — and their finishing is essentially ignored. The two players are being scored on different exams, and then the results are printed in the same units as though they were comparable.
So when you see two 85s, you are not looking at two players of equal quality in any absolute sense. You are looking at two players who each scored 85 on their own position's exam. A goalkeeper rated 85 has excellent reflexes and handling. A striker rated 85 scores goals. Asking which is "better" is asking whether a good exam result in French beats a good one in chemistry.
Why two 85s feel worlds apart
Beyond the position weighting, three things make identical ratings feel different.
Distribution matters more than the average. One 85 might be built from a flat spread — everything in the low 80s, no weakness anywhere. Another might be 95 pace, 92 dribbling and 60 strength. The averages match; the experience of playing against them does not. The balanced player is reliable. The spiky player is a specialist who is devastating in the situations that suit them and invisible in the ones that do not.
Some attributes matter far more than their weight suggests. Pace is the obvious one. A quick player with mediocre everything else can still be effective, because pace creates the situations in which their other attributes get used. A slow player with excellent technique may never get the chance to show it. Ratings systems know this and weight pace heavily, but even so, the real-world effect tends to outrun the number.
Role fit is invisible in the rating. A rating describes a player in isolation. Football does not happen in isolation. A brilliant target man in a team that plays short passes along the ground is a wasted 85. The number cannot see the system around the player, and the system is often what determines whether they look world class or ordinary.
Where the numbers come from
It is worth being clear-eyed about this: player ratings are estimates, produced by people, informed by data and scouting and judgement. They are not measurements in the way that a height or a goal tally is a measurement.
Attribute values are assembled from a mix of performance data, scout reports and editorial review, then adjusted over a season as form changes. This means ratings are always slightly behind reality. A player who explodes in October will not have that fully reflected for a while, and a player in decline often keeps a generous number for longer than their performances justify. Ratings are a lagging indicator, and knowing that tells you when to trust them and when not to.
It also means ratings compress at the top. The gap between an 89 and a 91 is enormous in practice — those two points cover most of the difference between a very good player and a generational one — while the gap between a 63 and a 65 is almost meaningless. The scale is not linear, even though it looks like it should be.
How to use ratings in Footle
In Footle, the rating tile gives you an arrow: the mystery player is rated higher or lower than your guess. That makes rating the most mathematically efficient clue on the board, because it is the only one that lets you run a binary search.
The practical advice: guess a player in the mid-80s early. That is roughly the middle of the range Footle draws from, so whichever way the arrow points, you have cut the pool close to in half. Then keep splitting. Do not creep — if you know the answer is below 85, guessing 84 eliminates one point and wastes a turn. Guess 78 and split again.
Understanding the compression helps too. Because the top of the scale is thin, an arrow pointing up from 88 leaves very few candidates — possibly a dozen players in the world. An arrow pointing down from 88 leaves almost everyone. High ratings are far more informative than low ones.
How to use ratings in Tier Drop
Tier Drop asks you to place players into tiers, and here ratings are a starting point rather than an answer. If you sort purely by overall, you will do reasonably well and you will feel vaguely dissatisfied, because you will find yourself putting a rock-solid full-back above a winger who changes games.
The better approach is to use the rating as a prior and then adjust for the things it cannot see: peak versus current level, impact in big matches, whether the player elevates teammates, and how well their strengths travel across different teams and leagues. A player whose value is entirely dependent on one specific system belongs lower than their number suggests. A player who would improve any team on earth belongs higher.
The honest summary
Ratings are useful and they are not truth. They are a compressed, position-relative, slightly out-of-date estimate of a player's ability in a vacuum, expressed with a precision the underlying judgement does not really support. That is not a criticism — it is remarkable that a single number works as well as it does. It just means you should treat an overall rating as the opening line of an argument rather than the end of one.
Which, conveniently, is exactly what makes these games worth playing. If the number settled everything, there would be nothing to discuss.
Put it to work: play Footle, try Tier Drop, or read more on what makes a player world class.