About GolVote: how the fan ranking works

What is GolVote

GolVote is an independent fan-voting site. Fans compare two footballers head to head and pick the better one. Every vote updates a live ranking of more than 570 current players and legends, in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

How the ranking works

Each vote is a duel. Ratings use the Elo system from chess: the winner takes points from the loser, and beating a higher-rated player is worth more (K-factor 24). Before the first votes, each player starts from a rating based on how widely they are covered on Wikipedia, and legends get a small bonus. Fan votes quickly replace this starting point.

Fair voting

Each connection can vote once per duel per day. Cloudflare Turnstile checks that votes come from people, not bots. Results are never edited by hand.

Where the data comes from

Player facts (date and place of birth, height, clubs, national team, honours) come from Wikidata, published under CC0. Photos come from Wikimedia Commons and are used only under free licences (CC0, public domain, CC BY, CC BY-SA); the author and licence are shown next to every photo. Ballon d'Or counts are checked against the official list of winners. Player bios are written automatically from these facts by a template, not by a human editor.

Independence

GolVote is not affiliated with any player, club, league, FIFA or UEFA. Rankings show what fans think, not official ratings.

Corrections

Most player data comes from Wikidata. If you spot a wrong club or fact, correcting it on Wikidata is the fastest fix: GolVote refreshes its data regularly.