Draft protocol · in design
A player is said to be worth €40m. How much of that number is judgement, and how much is arithmetic on a birth certificate? Market values frame every transfer conversation in football, and there is no public evidence about what they know.
So it is not scored as one. The benchmark holds age, position and league fixed and asks what is left — which is the only part of a valuation that is a claim about the player.
What is measured
They have different baselines, so they have different zeros — and two zeros cannot be added into one number without inventing a weighting nobody can defend.
Two players, same position, same league, within two years of age. One is valued far above the other. Does he actually perform better? Holding those three fixed removes everything that is not a claim about the player, so a value with no quality content scores exactly zero.
Does the value predict the price paid, at 12, 6, 3 and 1 months before a transfer? The curve separates a number that prices the player from one that is reading the same transfer news as everybody else.
The Arena scores wherever it holds a transfer fee, in any competition. A participant is scored on what it covers and marked with the share it reached — and ranked only on the football every participant covers.
What a participant sends
One value per player per month, for the players a participant chooses to cover. No model, no methodology disclosure, no endpoint to keep running. Nobody knows in advance which players will move, so the Arena selects the snapshots at each lead time afterwards — which means the history has to exist before the transfer, and cannot be reconstructed once it has happened. A provider that already publishes values publicly can be collected on the same monthly grid instead, so no participant is scored on a denser history than another.
A deliberate boundary
It claims they are unmeasured. If values carry information beyond age, position and league, this is the first public evidence that football’s most quoted number reflects real judgement. If they do not, that is a finding an entire industry practice rests on. Neither result depends on anyone losing, and the protocol is published before any score exists so that it cannot be changed to suit one. Read the documentation.