The database also sets the customized formation of each team and determines the role of every single player, his exact position on the pitch, the defensive effort and the attacking movement. Furthermore, the playing style of the team is driven from the attack and defense tactics and the build-up play options that are edited in the database.

We currently use 35 attributes, 70 traits and more than 65 additional data fields to describe the characteristics and the abilities of every single player. For the teams it is between 60 and 90, depending on the size of the team. We are constantly evolving our database and game engine to provide our fans with the most realistic playing football experience in the world and I would expect that the way we evaluate players will continue to be refined in the future.

One of the most important aspects of creating an authentic football gameplay experience is to create players that look, move and play like their real-life counterparts. That’s why the database and the overall ability or rating of each player is so important. We use 35 attributes to calculate the overall ability of a player and every position has its own formula. Each attribute is weighted and its importance is based on the player’s position. For example, attributes like Marking, Tackling and Heading are more important to the overall make up of a centre back than a winger.

In most cases this calculation is a mix of physical attributes (Strength, Speed, Stamina, Agility etc.), mental attributes (Positioning, Vision, Tactical Awareness etc.) and the skill attributes (Crossing, Dribbling, Short Passing, Tackling etc.).

When it comes to rating the players, we of course need to set some guidelines for the community: a player from Premiership who is known to be “very good” at heading the ball should have a higher rating than a player from the third division of Norway who is known as a “very good” header in his own league.

These guidelines are very important to make sure that all editors from the different countries (and with different football philosophies) are on the same page when it comes to the final ratings of the players and the teams. This is where the multinational database team in Canada comes in. The database producers are constantly monitoring and managing the updates and changes made by the community and we act as a filter to make sure that players are accurately evaluated. We also can react immediately to correct a player rating if we spot an overrated or underrated player.

Hopefully this gives you some insight into how we develop our player ratings and its impact on the game.

Want more FIFA info? Head over to the Developer Blog landing page.