Every player is not a score — every player is a curve

Step one: grow the snapshots. A player is not a score, he is a curve — what the peak season was worth, what the valley looked like, all of it into the archive. Every new file adds another curve.

Step two: open the Arena. Once there are enough curves, the Cross-Era Arena opens: Ronaldo 1998 versus Messi 2011, attribute by attribute; put them in the same squad, play a home-and-away series, and let the data simulation settle it. Even Ronaldinho at 39 against an 18-year-old academy kid, one on one — and let the ledger rule.

This database didn't start with some grand narrative. It started with a ten-year-old kid memorising a player he knew nothing about from an old game called FSM97 — Marek Citko, rated 85, higher than Raúl. Three decades later the kid finally learned who Citko was, and learned something else too: the feeling of "not belonging to that era, yet coming to know it through one channel" — that feeling follows you for life.

So this database is repayment: leaving a channel for the next generation, so they can collide with their own Citko, their own Baresi. This era is busy writing Haaland and Mbappé, and doesn't need my bricks. But the retired ones, the ones with lined faces, the wind-chasing boys who are already in heaven — somebody has to keep the books on their curves.