No photos. No badges. No nostalgia tax. Only the record.
BallFact is a fact archive for football history. We rebuild rankings from primary sources, excavate Football Manager databases as time-capsules of scouting opinion, and reopen the cases that history misquoted. Every verdict is signed, every number is reproducible.
Primary sources first
Every claim in this archive traces back to a ballot, a match report, a club annual, an official tournament publication or a database dump. If it cannot be cited, it does not get published.
Where a number cannot be traced, we mark it UNVERIFIED and keep it out of composite scores. Folklore is allowed on this site — but only when it is labeled as folklore, tracked separately, with the verified figure printed next to it.
Our standing source hierarchy: official federation & FIFA documents → contemporary match reports → contemporary press ratings → later compilations → memory. Memory is never a source; it is a hypothesis to be tested.
Human judgment, disclosed
Football needs subjective verdicts — we do not pretend otherwise. What we refuse is anonymous subjectivity. Every dossier carries the name of the editor who signed it, the weights applied, and any dissenting opinion recorded during peer review.
An archive with no humans behind it is a content farm. An archive with humans who hide behind it is advertising. We aim for neither.
Reproducible numbers
Every composite score ships with its formula and its input data. Run it yourself, disagree with the weights, fork the dataset. The archive improves when it is challenged — and every accepted correction is published with the challenger's name.
This is the v2.6 house formula. It is not sacred; it is versioned. Proposals for v3 are open.
What we do not do
No photos of players. The record does not need a face, and licensing turns faces into liabilities.
No badges and trophies as evidence. A medal is an outcome, not an argument. We audit the argument.
No nostalgia tax. "He was magic in person" is not a rating input. If the magic cannot be located in a source, it stays in the stands where it belongs.
No undisclosed partnerships. If a dataset or tool mentioned here was provided by a third party, the dossier says so in the appendix.
How a verdict changes
Any reader may challenge any dossier with a primary source. Challenges are reviewed by at least two editors. If the verdict changes, we do not quietly edit: the old verdict stays visible, struck through, with the correction dated and signed. An archive that hides its mistakes is not an archive.
Data over myth. Record over rumor. If we get it wrong, we say so — in the same font size.