R9 Across Seven Engines — A Rating Drift Excavation
Every Football Manager database is a frozen time-capsule of scouting opinion. We pulled Ronaldo Nazário's ability profile from seven engines spanning two decades and charted how the game's memory of him bent, peaked and decayed.
How did the game remember Ronaldo — and when did the memory distort?
Ronaldo Nazário is the perfect excavation subject: a career with a dramatic arc, universally witnessed, and long enough to outlive multiple scouting generations. If an engine's rating of him swings wildly between editions while his actual career is stable, the swing belongs to the scouts — not the player.
The drift table
| Engine | Year | CA | Δ vs prev | Reading |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CM 01/02 | 2001 | 176 | — | Baseline: prime intact in scout memory |
| FM 2005 | 2005 | 180 | +4 | Galáctico era premium |
| FM 2006 | 2006 | 193 | +13 | PEAK — the database's love letter |
| FM 2008 | 2008 | 187 | −6 | Injury seasons start to register |
| FM 2012 | 2012 | 164 | −23 | Retirement write-down |
| FM 2016 | 2016 | 132 | −32 | Nadir: legend as stub data |
| FM 2024 | 2024 | 157 | +25 | Restoration — history re-asserts |
Note the asymmetry: the climb to the 2006 peak took five editions; the fall to the 2016 nadir took four. Nostalgia compounds slower than forgetting — a pattern we now test on every legendary profile we excavate.
Excavation protocol
Each engine's database dump is checksum-verified against community archives before use. Current Ability (CA) is read on the native /200 scale; where an edition uses a different internal range, we normalize and mark the conversion in the appendix. Player identity is matched on full name + birth date — never on name alone (the database contains at least three other "Ronaldo" entries).
The engines rated the story, not the player
R9's in-game profile tracks media narrative more closely than match output: the 2006 peak coincides with peak coverage, not peak performance, and the 2016 nadir postdates his retirement by five years. For cross-era rating work, we therefore treat FM data as evidence of perception, and pair it with match-report evidence of performance.
Sources & data
- S1Seven community-preserved database dumps (CM 01/02, FM 2005, FM 2006, FM 2008, FM 2012, FM 2016, FM 2024), checksums in the dataset file.
- S2CA normalization table for editions using non-200 internal scales.
- S3Identity-matching log: all "Ronaldo" entries per edition, with resolution notes.