Why we changed it
Player ratings on ScoutingStats are produced from a position-weighted aggregation of FM-style attributes, a peak-performance bonus for elite individual qualities, and a league-strength adjustment. That gets you an adjusted rating on roughly a 1–20 scale. The old system then mapped that single number to a 0.5–5.0 star value.
The shape was wrong. With one absolute scale across every player in the world, the bottom of the curve got hopelessly compressed:
Old · 1.0 stars or fewer
Old · just 0.5 stars
A Premier League fringe player and a sixth-tier defender would both come out as “0.5 stars”. That's not useful, even if it's technically correct on an absolute scale. The fix is to break the population into three tiers and re-distribute stars within each tier.
The three tiers
Tier is set by the absolute adjusted rating. The cut points were chosen to mirror the natural breakpoints in the rating distribution — Gold is the genuinely top end, Silver covers the bulk of professional starters, Bronze is everything below that.
Top of the game
Adjusted rating ≥ 14.0
Top-five-league regulars, internationals, the kind of names a recruitment director already knows. Scarce on purpose — Gold should mean Gold.
Solid professionals
Adjusted rating 10.0 – 13.99
Established starters in mid-tier leagues, rotation players in stronger ones. The pool where most recruitment activity actually happens.
Developing & lower tier
Adjusted rating < 10.0
Youth players still developing, lower-division squad members, fringe talent. Star differentiation inside this tier is where the new system earns its keep.
Stars within a tier
Once a player's tier is set, their 0.5–5.0 star value is assigned by their percentile rank inside that tier. The same distribution shape applies to every tier — top 2% of Gold get 5.0★ Gold, top 2% of Bronze get 5.0★ Bronze. Identical rule, different pool.
| Stars | Top % within tier | Bucket size |
|---|---|---|
| 5.0★ | Top 2% | 2% |
| 4.5★ | Top 5% | 3% |
| 4.0★ | Top 10% | 5% |
| 3.5★ | Top 20% | 10% |
| 3.0★ | Top 35% | 15% |
| 2.5★ | Top 50% | 15% |
| 2.0★ | Top 70% | 20% |
| 1.5★ | Top 85% | 15% |
| 1.0★ | Top 95% | 10% |
| 0.5★ | Bottom 5% | 5% |
Multiplying out, that's three tiers × ten stars = 30 effective levels. Every player sits in exactly one of them, and there's no longer a single bucket holding 16,000 people.
The 5★ Gold ceiling. A 5-star Gold rating means the top 2% of Gold (which is itself the top ~4% of the player population). It's the absolute top of the game — around 33 players globally at any given time. The semantics of “5 stars” haven't changed; we've just made the rest of the scale meaningful.
Reading the badge
On every player profile you'll see the star widget plus a small tier pill. The stars take the colour of the tier; the pill spells it out. Two players with the same number of stars but different tiers are not the same level.
How the population fits together
Each tier holds a consistent shape: ~5% of the tier sit at 0.5★, ~5% at the very top with 5.0★, and the rest spread across the middle. The tiers themselves are sized very differently — most of the population is Bronze, very few are Gold.
What didn't change
The underlying rating calculation is the same — same attribute weighting, same peak bonus, same league multiplier. The 1–8 player_level integer used by recruitment-fit and similar-players logic is also unchanged; it still maps absolute rating to one of eight broad buckets. What's new is purely how we surface the result to you in the UI: a tier badge, and stars that mean something within that tier.
For the full description of how the underlying rating itself is computed — the attributes, the peak bonus, the league adjustment — see the player ratings methodology.
Have feedback or want to dig into the data? Get in touch.