How the numbers are made
Everything on Circular Brackets — every bracket, goal count, and probability — comes from a documented pipeline. This page explains what's covered, where the data comes from, how each number is counted, and where the honest gaps are.
What's covered
Circular Brackets maps the knockout stages of four competitions. Group stages aren't drawn — a circular bracket is a story of elimination.
A few editions can't be drawn as brackets and are deliberately absent: the 1942 and 1946 World Cups were never played, the 1950 World Cup was decided by a final group rather than knockout rounds, Euro 1980 sent group winners straight to the final, and the 1992–94 Champions League seasons used group stages in place of most knockout rounds.
Where the data comes from
- ESPN — match results, scorers, and player identities for the modern era, plus player biographies and photos where available.
- Wikipedia match archives — line-by-line match detail for historical tournaments (1930s onward), parsed from the same footballbox records that back each tournament's article.
- Wikidata — career histories (clubs, national teams, years, appearances), player photographs, and the cross-referencing that keeps identities straight across sources.
- World Football Elo & ClubElo — the rating systems behind the Improbability and Path Difficulty indices.
- StatsBomb open data — the xG overlay on some player pages. This layer is partial by design: it exists only for tournaments StatsBomb has released (recent World Cups and Euros, older World Cups 1970–90, and Champions League finals 2004–2019).
When things update
During a live tournament, its bracket refreshes from a live feed roughly every 30 seconds — scores, scorers, and advancement lines move on their own. When a tournament ends it is archived into the permanent dataset, its players join the goalscorer registry, and its runs become eligible for the indices. Historical pages are static; they change only when the underlying data improves, and each bracket page shows its own "updated" stamp.
How knockout goals are counted
A player's knockout-goal total is the number of goals they scored in knockout-round matches across all covered competitions — from the first knockout round (Round of 32/16) through the final. The exact rules:
- In-play penalties count. A penalty scored during the match (marked "P") is a goal.
- Shootout kicks don't count. Penalty shootouts decide ties; they aren't goals.
- Own goals aren't credited to any player's total.
- Both legs of two-legged Champions League and Europa League ties count.
- Third-place matches don't count. They sit outside the road to the trophy, so they're excluded from goal totals and from the indices alike.
- Extra-time goals count — they're part of the match.
The same total appears everywhere a player is shown — directory, profile, club pages — because all of them read from one registry.
How club affiliations work
Club and national-team pages are built from Wikidata career records: a player appears on a club's page if their career includes a recorded stint there. Two consequences worth knowing:
- "Alumni KO goals" is a career number. It sums the knockout goals of everyone who wore the shirt, scored across all their clubs and competitions — a measure of the knockout pedigree that passed through a club, not of goals scored for it.
- Appearances and goals per stint follow Wikidata's infobox convention (domestic league matches only), so they will read lower than a player's all-competition totals.
Players whose career data hasn't been resolved yet simply aren't listed on club pages — coverage grows as records resolve.
The Elo indices, in plain language
The Improbability Index asks: how unlikely was this run for this team? Each team carries an Elo rating into the tournament (clubs: into the knockout phase). That rating sets a win probability for every knockout victory they actually achieved; multiplying those probabilities together gives the odds of the whole run. Penalty shootouts are counted as the near coin-flips they are.
The Path Difficulty Index asks the mirror question: how hard was this road for anyone? For each knockout win we compute the chance that a fixed benchmark contender (Elo 1900 — strong but not elite) would have beaten that opponent, and multiply across the run. Using one reference team measures the road itself, rewarding both the quality and the number of tough opponents.
National-team ratings come from World Football Elo, club ratings from ClubElo — the two systems sit on the same ~1500–2100 scale, so combined rankings are fair. Knockout rounds only; third-place matches excluded.
Known limitations
- Old reporting is thinner. For pre-war tournaments some scorer minutes are approximate and contemporary sources occasionally disagree; we follow the consensus record.
- Identity resolution isn't perfect. Most players link to a verified identity; a small share from early tournaments are tracked by name only until a confident match exists.
- Some historical clubs lack crests and some early players lack photographs — those simply render without images rather than with wrong ones.
- Career data depends on Wikidata. Where a player's record there is incomplete, their club affiliations and stint numbers are too.
- The formats named under "What's covered" (1950 World Cup, Euro 1980, Champions League 1992–94) are structural gaps, not missing data.
Complete vs partial player coverage
Every listed player appeared in a covered knockout stage — that's the entry ticket to the archive. Scorers carry their verified knockout-goal totals; players who featured without scoring stand at zero rather than being padded or excluded. On top of that, coverage varies by era:
- Modern players (roughly 2010 onward) typically have the full set: biography, photo, season-by-season career history, per-tournament breakdowns, and — where StatsBomb data exists — an xG layer.
- Historical players always have their goals and tournaments; biography, photo, and career history appear where the sources support them.
A missing section on a player page means the data wasn't available at sufficient confidence — never that it was estimated.
Counts on this page are computed from the live dataset at every site build. Last built 2026-07-27. Questions or corrections: @circbrackets.