Glossary
The words on these screens.
The Atlas is precise about its vocabulary, because most of these words are used loosely elsewhere. Each definition below is the one the product actually computes against.
The Atlas metrics
- Atlas Rating
- A player’s season on a 0–100 scale: output, match rating, availability and the level played at, regressed toward 50 in proportion to minutes played.
- Atlas Club Rating
- A club on the same scale, folded from the Atlas Ratings of its players and the strength of its competition.
- Atlas League Rating
- The published 0–100 measure of a competition, computed over its refined strength.
- League Strength
- How hard a competition is to perform in. Seeded from provider facts and a curated prior, it is the level every player in that competition is rated against.
- Country Index
- A nation on 0–100: the quality of its best players, the reach of its diaspora, and its depth. The ranking on this site is ordered by it.
- Development score
- A nation’s youth pipeline: the share of U21 and U23 players, the minutes they are given, first-export age and retention.
Reading a number
- Neutral point
- 50. Every Atlas metric sits there when there is no evidence behind it, so a score below 50 means poor evidence rather than missing evidence.
- Delta
- The change in a score since the previous snapshot, always signed: +3.2, −0.8. The minus is a true minus sign, never a hyphen.
- Movement
- The change in rank, written ▲ 4 or ▼ 2 — places gained or lost, not the new position. An em dash means no change.
- Cohort
- The named population a percentile was measured against: a position group, a band of league strength and a minutes floor, with its size printed beside it.
- Percentile
- The share of a cohort a player is at or above on one measurement. It is never shown without the cohort it belongs to.
- Minutes floor
- The minimum minutes a player must have played to enter a cohort, so a ranking is not topped by a substitute’s single appearance.
Players and nations
- Tracked player
- A player with at least one recorded appearance in a competition the Atlas ingests this season. Everything published about a nation is folded from its tracked players.
- Players abroad
- Tracked players of a nation registered with a club outside that nation. The complement is domestic players.
- Elite players
- Players of a nation whose Atlas Rating clears the elite threshold this season.
- Leagues represented
- The number of distinct tracked competitions a nation’s players appear in.
- Top-league participation
- The share of a nation’s players in the strongest band of competitions — the five European leagues at the top of the curated strength priors — not a tier count.
- Season
- A single ingested season, written in its European form (2025/26). Every figure on a screen belongs to the season named on it.
How each metric is computed, and in what order, is set out in the methodology.