How we rate players
Every score on this site is explained here — what it measures, how it is weighted, who qualifies, and where it falls short.
A rating nobody can interrogate is just an opinion with a number attached. These pages exist so that any figure on TackleZone can be traced back to the football it came from, and so you can decide for yourself whether you agree with how we weighted it.
Why one number cannot cover four positions
The most common mistake in football statistics is comparing players who are not doing the same job. A holding midfielder’s goal count next to a striker’s tells you nothing except which one is a striker. Rank a squad by goals and you have ranked it by position.
So we do not produce one score. There are four, one per position, each with its own components and its own weights, and each normalised inside its own pool of players. A defender scoring 80 means near the top of the defenders — not 80% of a striker. The two numbers are not on the same scale and are not meant to be compared.
Who qualifies, and why we leave players out
A player needs 900+ minutes in the season block and a match rating of at least 6.8 to be scored at all.
That is strict on purpose, and it is why a player you expect to see is sometimes missing. Over a few hundred minutes, two good afternoons move a per-90 figure further than a month of steady form — a substitute who scores twice in 200 minutes would sit above every established forward in Europe on goals per 90. We would rather leave a player out than rank him on noise.
Scores are also relative to whoever qualified this season, so they move as the season moves. Read them as where a player stands among his peers now, not as a permanent grade.
How normalisation works
Each component is scaled from 0 to 100 across the qualifying pool for that position, then combined using the weights on each metric’s page. Because the scale is set by the pool, the same raw numbers can produce a different score in a different season — a 15-goal return means more in a low-scoring league year than a high-scoring one.
One score, TAS, additionally clips each component to its 5th and 95th percentile before scaling. Without that, a single extreme season stretches the whole scale and pushes everybody else into the middle of it.
The four scores
TAS · Attacker
TackleZone Attacker Score
Rates attackers on rating, scoring rate, threat volume and finishing, normalised against other attackers.
TMS · Midfielder
TackleZone Midfielder Score
Balances creation, defensive work and goal threat, because midfield is the position where one number explains least.
TGS · Goalkeeper
TackleZone Goalkeeper Score
Rates goalkeepers on rating, save percentage and goals conceded — with an honest caveat about how much of that is the defence.
TDS · Defender
TackleZone Defender Score
Rating-led, with duels, interceptions and aerials — built for the position where doing your job well means the stats stay quiet.
What our data cannot do
Worth stating plainly, because it shapes every score above. Our provider reports no expected goals at player level and no shot-level expected goals at all, at any price tier. So we cannot tell you whether a forward was wasteful or unlucky, and we cannot draw a true momentum curve for a match — only the moments that actually happened. Team-level expected goals per fixture is available, and we use it.
Where a competition does not report a statistic, we leave it out rather than record it as zero. A blank and a nil are different things, and treating them alike is how a site ends up claiming a team had no shots on target in a match where nobody counted them.