Self-reported is not evidence, and pretending otherwise is how recruitment departments get burned
Amateur football data is mostly claims. PlayMaker labels every figure with who stands behind it, discounts the ones nobody has checked, and publishes how much of its own database is unchecked.
David Avramovic 3 min
A goal tally typed in by a seventeen-year-old is not evidence. It is a claim. It may well be an accurate claim — most of them are — but the difference between a claim and evidence is not accuracy, it is whether anybody other than the interested party has stood behind it. Treating the two as the same thing is how a recruitment department ends up defending a signing on the strength of a number nobody checked.
Every performance figure on PlayMaker carries a tier saying where it came from. There are four, and they are ordered by how much independence sits behind them rather than by how precise the measurement is.
- Self-reported. Entered by the player. Nobody independent has checked it.
- Device-measured. A camera or a GPS vest recorded it. Not a claim — but nothing has reconciled it against a fixture record, and the vendor’s model is not ours to audit.
- Club-confirmed. Somebody at the player’s own club pressed confirm. Real evidence, and also an interested party.
- Verified. Reconciled against an official record.
The tier changes the number, not just the badge
This is the part that separates a provenance system from a decoration. A badge that sits beside a rating without affecting it is a badge nobody reads twice. On PlayMaker the tier feeds directly into how much football is required before a rate is taken at face value: a verified season is believed at roughly 1,350 minutes, a self-reported one needs 3,400. So an unchecked profile approaches the middle of the scale and does not reach the top of it, and the fix is one action by one person at the club rather than another season of football.
A green tick beside a number nobody checked is worse than no tick at all. It converts a claim into the appearance of evidence, which is exactly the transformation the reader was relying on you not to make.
We keep that rule tight enough that it constrains the design language. Green plus the word "verified" belongs to the provenance tier and to nothing else on the platform. A visibility setting or a completed sync may use the accent colour, but never with that word — a rule written down after a card was found rendering "VERIFIED PLAYER" off a flag that only meant "findable", above statistics labelled self-reported.
What confirming actually costs a club
About four minutes. A club account opens on its own squad — the players registered to it, unconfirmed ones first, one button each. There is deliberately no "confirm all", because thirty confirmations nobody read are the self-reported tier wearing a badge.
It is free, it stays free, and it is worth being blunt about why we want it: the confirmed tier is the thing that makes the whole platform worth reading, and clubs are the only people who can produce it. What the club gets back is its own squad view — the roster, including players with no PlayMaker profile at all, and the gap map that produces: which positions are thin, which are exposed because somebody is out of contract in June, and the search that fills each one.
We publish our own unchecked share
The share of performance data on this platform that somebody other than the player stands behind is on the insights page, per competition, updated as clubs confirm. It is not a flattering number and it is not supposed to be. It is the honest state of amateur football data everywhere, including here, and a platform that hid it would be asking you to trust exactly the thing it was hiding.
There is one more reason to publish it. A rating derived from unchecked figures is discounted by the engine, so the unchecked share is also the size of the discount the whole database is carrying. That is a more useful number for a sporting director than any individual player’s rating, and it is the one that improves every time a coach spends four minutes.