# Methodology ## Unit of comparison The product compares documented football records through user-selected named competition families. Every record has a team context, named competition, mapped competition family, seniority, source, and source granularity. Users construct their comparison universe by selecting families. The national-team choices are World Cup finals, World Cup qualification, continental championship finals, continental championship qualification, intercontinental championship finals, continental Nations League, Olympic, age-limited youth national teams, friendlies, and other. “Intercontinental championship finals” includes the FIFA Confederations Cup, Finalissima, Artemio Franchi Cup, and comparable senior competitions between continental champions. The club choices are national league, lower-division clubs, continental federation cup, intercontinental federation cup, regional league, and all other club matches. Domestic cups and super cups are retained internally and roll up to “all other” unless the interface exposes the finer controls. ## Metrics - Goals per game = selected goals / selected appearances. - Marginal average goals per game = goals in the current dated observation period / appearances in that period. The period is a season for historical club aggregates and a calendar year for the national-team ledger. - Cumulative average goals per game = all selected goals through the plotted point / all selected appearances through that point. - Cumulative rate at appearance *n* = goals through appearance *n* / *n*. - Cumulative rate by age is plotted at calendar-year or season endpoints in the published web bundle. The underlying canonical national ledger retains exact dates; historical club aggregates cannot support match-by-match age curves. - Cumulative titles = selected championship editions listed in the honours source through that age or career season. Penalty-shootout kicks are not player goals. A match result retains regulation or extra-time W/D/L separately from shootout advancement when the source offers both. Own goals are not attributed to the compared player. ## Titles The current `titles.csv` records championship editions listed in public player honours. Runner-up finishes and individual awards are excluded. A competition edition is counted as played only when the player has a documented appearance or is named on the bench. Generic career-table columns such as “National cup”, “Continental”, and “Other” are resolved to the named competitions stated by the table definitions and row footnotes; unresolved aggregates do not enter the denominator. Friendlies and tours are excluded. A win enters the numerator only when a participated edition reconciles to the player's honours. Reported honours without participation evidence are disclosed and excluded. Competition and team names are canonicalized before edition IDs are built, so source spelling and punctuation variants cannot create duplicate editions. Reconciliation is marked complete only when both unmatched honours and unresolved aggregate rows are zero. - Cumulative average win rate = editions won through the point / editions played through the point. ## Common support When normalizing by age, appearances, or career season, the default chart ends at the greatest point observed for every selected player under the same filters. Users may opt into full-career lines, but unmatched tails must be visually marked. The goals/games chart and the competition-edition chart maintain independent bucket selections. Changing one comparison universe never changes the other. ## Provenance and uncertainty Season aggregates, goal events, appearance ledgers, and title lists are not summed merely because they share a player. They overlap and represent different views. The generated web bundle combines non-overlapping club aggregates, senior national-team ledgers, and youth/Olympic aggregates. Pelé's explicitly documented assertions reconcile the detailed table to RSSSF's broader 1,413-match/1,324-goal universe and are marked `aggregate_only`. They remain in the dataset for provenance and career-total reconciliation, but are excluded from timelines because RSSSF does not allocate those multi-year totals by date or season. Assigning them to the last year of the span would create a fictitious 1974 jump. Every canonical output row retains a URL and granularity. The nine-player expansion uses public career-spanning club season tables and complete senior national-team match ledgers. RSSSF supplies Cruyff, Baggio, Neymar, Lewandowski, Suárez, Puskás and Romário; Transfermarkt's public performance feed supplies Mbappé and Haaland and provides modern match-ledger cross-checks. Each cap is classified before the match rows are grouped for the browser chart. Every expansion `Other` cell has now been decomposed into named editions, parent-edition playoffs, or an explicit source-level exclusion. All reported honours are matched to participation evidence or explicitly excluded with a reason. Thus every player has zero unmatched honours and zero unresolved aggregate rows. Two historical source cells remain transparently excluded from the denominator because their cited tables do not name a competition: Cruyff's one Ajax match in 1968-69 and Puskás's four Honvéd matches in 1953. The 2025-26 rows cannot be used whole because they cross the 31 December 2025 cutoff. The browser bundle therefore retains completed-season tables and adds only the dated, non-overlapping post-table segments: Cristiano Ronaldo 15 appearances/14 goals, Mbappé 24/29, Haaland 24/25, and Lewandowski 18/8. Haaland's Bryne 2 and Molde 2 records remain available under the separate lower-division club selector. For the plotted Pelé “all other club goals” curve, Santos friendly and tour matches are allocated by calendar year using the public match-by-match ledger at `pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estatísticas_de_Pelé`. Its Santos friendly series has 450 matches and 449 goals from 1956–1974. The separate RSSSF 451/449 aggregate is retained as a source assertion, not added to this series, because the two records overlap and differ by one appearance.