World, rankings and records

National leagues form local pyramids inside the same world. Country pages expose their divisions and clubs; cup competition connects those pyramids internationally. Public club pages let every manager follow form, fixtures and honours.

The public club profile and World table compare every club through three separate values. Strength Rating (SR) values the current senior squad. Tactical Rating (TR) records whether official results were better or worse than that squad strength led the game to expect. Combined Rating (CWR) joins them into the number that orders the live World Rank.

These are sporting comparison ratings, not economic reputations. Popularity, Fun Factor, league points, cash, stadium size and trophies do not enter the Combined formula. They may describe other parts of the club, but they cannot buy or decorate a higher World Rank.

Strength Rating does not copy the XI from the last match. The game finds the best one-to-one assignment of the whole senior squad across a conventional eleven — GK, LB, two CBs, RB, LM, two CMs, RM and two forwards — plus three substitutes. All fourteen places have equal weight in the final average.

Each player is scored in the role being filled. Constitution then preserves between 85% and 100% of that positional score: low Constitution can discount quality by at most 15%, but high Constitution cannot manufacture skill that is not there. A missing or legally uncovered place contributes zero, so a thin or badly unbalanced squad is visible in SR.

Training, transfers, retirement and senior-squad changes can move SR without a match result. The World order is refreshed after those squad-strength updates; selecting a weaker matchday XI does not by itself rewrite the club’s full-squad SR.

Every club starts on TR 50. After an official senior match, the game compares the result with an expectation built only from the two clubs’ current Strength Ratings. A win is worth 1, a draw 0.5 and a defeat 0. The further the actual result sits above expectation, the more TR the club gains; the opponent loses the same amount.

Venue does not enter this comparison. The same Strength gap and the same result produce the same TR movement whether the club plays at home or away. This mirrors the match engine, which gives neither side a venue bonus. Goal margin is irrelevant, so 1–0 and 5–0 produce the same TR movement against the same opponent.

If a side had at least a 90% expected chance and then wins, neither club moves. The obvious favourite merely did its job. An upset or draw still moves the ratings because it contradicted the expected result. TR is clamped to 0–100 and stored with the club.

Combined Rating gives squad quality the larger voice while preserving a meaningful reward for sustained over-performance: CWR = 0.70 × SR + 0.30 × TR. For example, SR 80 and TR 50 produce CWR 71. A one-point change in SR moves CWR by 0.7; a one-point change in TR moves it by 0.3.

World Rank is then a simple ordered position, not a second hidden score. Every club in the world is sorted from highest to lowest CWR. Exact ties are resolved by higher SR, then higher TR, then the lower internal club ID so the order is stable and reproducible.

The live order can move after official senior results, training or transfer activity. It is distinct from the immutable season-start snapshot already used to draw cups: improving today changes the live table and may help next season, but it never rewrites an existing draw.

At the start of each season, the game freezes every club’s SR, TR, CWR and World Rank exactly once. International Cup membership, pots and stored seeds read that snapshot. There is no separate International Cup qualifying playoff: the cutoff is the season-start World Rank.

The main International Cup takes the highest-ranked eligible clubs up to 4,096, while keeping complete groups of four. Eligibility covers the world or the edition’s confederation. With a smaller eligible pool, every club that completes a group enters the main cup; any remainder of one to three clubs enters a Shadow Cup. With a larger eligible pool, clubs below the first 4,096 enter Shadow Cups. Main-cup entrants are split into four World-Rank pots, with one club from each pot in every group.

The snapshot continues to matter inside the competition. World Rank is the last sporting tie-break in a group after points, goal difference and goals scored, and higher original seeds receive available byes in later uneven knockout brackets. The national League Cup derives a country-only order from the same snapshot and gives its available opening byes to the higher-ranked clubs.

None of this multiplies money directly. TR and CWR do not change attendance, ticket yield, sponsor-offer size, wages, transfer prices, Popularity or Fun Factor. Their economic route is indirect: a better season-start seed can place a club in the main International Cup or a more favourable cup path, creating more opportunities to play income-producing matches. Strength Rating has one extra direct touch: a squad more than eight SR points stronger than its opponent caps that matchday’s Fun Factor gain.

Trophies and league honours are added only from finished competitions. Player career appearances, minutes, goals, assists, cards and other totals aggregate frozen MatchPlayerStat rows created at match completion.

• Departed players keep their historical contribution.
• Deleted identities are omitted instead of replaced by a current player.
• No synthetic backfill invents statistics for matches that were never persisted.
• A world reset deletes only the history owned by that world.