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Furbol — How It Works

Your Level

Your Level

Your level is the number on your profile that says how good you are compared with every other Furbol player. It runs on a 0-to-100 scale, and the honest way to read it is as a position in a crowd: a level of 80 means that if you lined up 100 Furbol players, you’d stand ahead of 80 of them. It’s not a school grade and it’s not a count of points you collect. It’s a ranking — your place among everyone who plays.

This page explains the whole machine: where the level comes from, why it sometimes moves on days you didn’t even play, and why trying to game it is a waste of a perfectly good evening.

Level is not the same as your stats

Your stats — grit, fair play, solidity, punctuality, performance — describe how you play: whether you show up, whether you’re pleasant, whether you’re on time. Your level describes how good you are. A reliable, cheerful player can have a low level; a brilliant-but-flakey one can have a high level. Different questions, different numbers.

The science under the number

Your level isn’t a house recipe — it stands on sixty years of rating science.

In 1960, a Hungarian-American physics professor and chess master named Arpad Elo invented a formula to rate chess players. Its core idea is disarmingly simple: a result means more or less depending on who it came against. Beating a strong player says a lot about you; beating a beginner says little. Elo’s formula weighs every result by the strength of the opposition and keeps re-estimating everyone, game after game. It worked so well that world chess adopted it — when you hear that a chess champion is “rated 2800”, that’s an Elo number — and its descendants now rank online gamers, table-tennis players and even national football teams.

Furbol’s rating engine is a modern member of that family. The founding logic is identical — your number rises or falls according to how strong the people around you were. But it’s rebuilt for how your football actually happens: it’s fed by teammates’ votes rather than wins and losses, it listens to how far apart the votes place players rather than just who came out ahead, and — as this page explains further down — it re-reads your entire history every night rather than nudging a tally game by game.

Inside the engine, your ability is a value on an open-ended scale, like those chess numbers — a figure that means nothing on its own and everything in comparison. You never see that value. What Furbol shows you is its translation: it lines up every ranked player by that inner value and reads off your position. Out of every 100 Furbol players, how many stand below you? That is your level. The engine speaks mathematics; the level speaks human.

And Furbol does one thing the chess world never did: it points the same engine at the voters. Alongside your level as a player, you carry a second, invisible rating as a judge — a measure of how well your votes track what everyone else keeps seeing, built by the very same machinery. Sharp, honest eyes earn a bit more say in other players’ levels; careless ones quietly earn less. It’s the same principle international sports federations use to evaluate their own judges — applied, silently, to all of us.

It all starts with the votes

After every game, the players on the pitch rate each other’s performance — anonymously, and only if they want to. (How that works, what the scale looks like, and what the rated player can and can’t see is all in Rating and Feedback.)

Your level is built entirely out of those votes. Nothing else goes in. Furbol doesn’t ask who won — a football genius on a losing five-a-side team is still a football genius, and their teammates’ votes will say so. The referee of your level is not the scoreboard. It’s the eyes of the people you play with.

Every voter speaks their own dialect

Here’s a problem every voting system has to face. Marco is generous — he gives everyone high marks, always. Sofia is tough — nobody has ever gotten her top mark. Diego is dramatic — his best player gets the maximum, his worst gets the minimum, every single game.

If Furbol simply averaged the raw votes, playing with Marco would inflate your level and playing with Sofia would sink it. That would be absurd — your level would depend on who voted, not how you played.

So Furbol translates. Before any vote counts, each voter’s ratings for that game are converted into a common language. What survives the translation is the part that actually means something: who you placed above whom, and by how much — compared with how you usually vote. Marco’s “very good, among my usual very-goods” and Sofia’s “decent, by my harsh standards” can turn out to be the exact same statement, and after translation, they are.

The translation has a second effect, and it’s a beautiful one: every voter ends up with the same total influence in every game. Nobody can shout. Giving your friend the maximum and everyone else the minimum doesn’t make your voice louder — it just spends your fixed influence in an obvious pattern, which the other voters’ ballots then wash out. More on that below.

Distances count, not just the order

Furbol doesn’t only look at who finished first, second and third in a game’s votes. It keeps the distances. Standing clearly above your group’s average that night says something much stronger than barely edging it. Two games can produce the same finishing order and still mean very different things — and Furbol hears the difference.

Keep this detail in mind. It looks small. It’s about to become the hero of this page.

Every night, Furbol re-reads every game ever played

This is the part that makes Furbol’s level different from almost any ranking you’ve met before.

Your level is not a running tally that goes up or down a few points after each game and drags its whole history behind it. Instead, every night while you sleep, Furbol takes every game ever played — all of them, back to the very first — and works out, from scratch, the set of levels that best explains everything it has ever seen.

Why go to all that trouble? Because new games change the meaning of old ones. Say six months ago you clearly outplayed a quiet newcomer. Back then that was worth little — who was he, after all? Today that newcomer is one of the strongest players in your area. Your six-month-old game just became evidence that you’re better than anyone realised — and tonight’s re-read gives you that credit, automatically, without you kicking a ball.

That’s also why your level can move on a day you didn’t play. It’s not noise, and nobody touched your number. It’s Furbol understanding the past a little better than it did yesterday.

Maradona, Pelé, and the group that never leaves its pitch

Football fans in Naples used to sing that Maradona was better than Pelé. The debate is still open half a century later, and it’s unresolvable for one simple reason: Pelé played his whole club career in Brazil. The two never faced the same opponents. There was no bridge between their worlds — so there’s no honest way to compare them.

Your neighbourhood has the same problem. Your Tuesday group has been playing together for years. Across town there’s a Thursday group doing the same. Within each group, the votes sort everyone out beautifully. But is your Tuesday best better than their Thursday best? As long as the groups never mix, nobody can know — and Furbol is honest about that: it doesn’t guess.

Then one of you goes and plays a Thursday game.

Those votes — especially the distances in them — carry the missing information. If your friend dominates the Thursday group by a much wider margin than he ever managed on Tuesdays, that says something about both groups, not just about him. And because Furbol re-reads all history every night, the news travels backwards: through your friend’s old Tuesday games, into yours, across the whole group. Everybody’s level adjusts — including players who never met the other group at all.

One shared game, and two previously incomparable worlds snap into the same ruler. The debate the stadiums of Naples couldn’t settle, your neighbourhood settles routinely — one crossover game at a time.

Your level follows your form

You are not a fixed number. Players get sharper, get older, get injured, get fit again. Furbol treats your ability as something that moves through time: your recent games say the most about who you are today, and old games gently fade into being history rather than description. Come back after a long break and Furbol holds your level a little more loosely — ready to believe the new you, whichever direction the new you points.

New players

Every new account shows the starting level of 50 — the middle of the scale. You keep it until you’ve played more than three games; before that, Furbol simply doesn’t have enough to rank you against the crowd, and it refuses to pretend otherwise.

Once you cross that line, expect your first games to move your level fast. That’s deliberate: while Furbol knows little about you, it holds your level loosely and lets the evidence swing it. Within a handful of games it firms up — and from then on it behaves like a veteran’s level, moving slowly and only for good reasons. One unusual night, good or bad, will never define you.

Built to resist cheating

Votes are anonymous and levels matter, so of course someone will try to bend them. Here is why it doesn’t work.

  • Nobody’s vote shouts. Every voter’s game ratings carry the same fixed influence — the translation guarantees it. Extreme votes don’t weigh more; they’re just extreme.
  • Pumping a friend costs you everyone else. Because your influence in a game is fixed, rating your friend sky-high necessarily rates the rest of the group lower — and their real performance, seen by every other voter, pushes right back. The net effect of a friend-pumping campaign on an actual level is close to nothing.
  • The judge rating settles the rest. Remember the second, invisible rating from the science section above: Furbol rates the raters with the same engine it rates the players. Votes that prove consistently disconnected from what everyone else keeps seeing gradually count for less; votes with a track record of seeing clearly count a little more. There’s no badge, no warning, no drama — it happens silently, in the same nightly re-read as everything else.

None of this needs a report button. It’s not a rulebook bolted on top; it’s how the machine is shaped.

When your level updates

Votes for a game are collected and sealed within the feedback window — the three hours after the game ends. Levels then refresh overnight: every night Furbol re-reads all history, votes included, and by morning every level on Furbol reflects everything that’s ever happened, up to and including yesterday evening’s games.

So: play tonight, see the effect tomorrow morning. And some mornings your level will have shifted a point without you playing at all — that’s the re-read at work, sharpening the picture.

Where level matters

A host can set a minimum level when creating a game. If your level doesn’t clear it, that game’s book button is off — it’s a property of that game, not a personal blocklist. See Playing Requirements. There’s no maximum: a game never becomes harder to join because you’re too good.

What you can’t do

  • You can’t see the inner numbers behind your level — only the level itself. The same goes for your judge rating: nobody sees it, including you.
  • You can’t edit it, buy it, or transfer it. It’s computed from votes, entirely.
  • You can’t see who rated you what, and nobody can see your votes. See Rating and Feedback.
  • You can’t appeal a vote. Individual votes are drops in a nightly ocean; the ocean is the answer.