What FootballerAtlas is.
Most football data is organised around competitions. This one is organised around nations — every player the Atlas tracks belongs to a country, and every country is read through where its players compete, how much they play, and how well.
The question the Atlas answers
A league table tells you who is winning a competition. It tells you nothing about where the players in it came from, which nations are exporting talent and which are keeping it, or how a country's footballing standing changes from one season to the next. The Atlas is built to answer that second question, and the whole product follows from it: countries first, then the players, competitions and clubs that give a country its shape.
The standards it holds
- Nothing is estimated to fill a gap. Where a figure the design calls for cannot be computed from the data the Atlas holds, the element is dropped or replaced with the nearest thing that is genuinely measured, and the substitution is written down. No number on this site is invented to make a screen look complete.
- Every metric is explained in full. The six Atlas indices are proprietary, not secret. What goes into each of them, and the order they are computed in, is set out on the methodology page.
- The same input always gives the same score. The metrics engine is deterministic: no clock, no randomness, no feedback loop between a league's rating and the players it is computed from.
- A thin sample is treated as a thin sample. Twenty good minutes do not make a great season, and the ratings say so.
- Provenance is stated. Everything the Atlas ingests, and everything it computes itself, is listed under data sources.
Where it stands
The Atlas is in active development against a single ingested season. The coefficients behind the indices are calibrated but not yet re-fitted on a completed season, and season-over-season history — trends, career arcs, movement over years — needs more of the archive than has been ingested so far. Screens that would need it say so rather than drawing a line through two points.
Terms used across the site are defined in the glossary.