How Real Careers Become In-Game Ratings Policy & Terms

Under every player sits a small profile: how many runs they average, how fast they score, how few runs they concede with the ball, and how often they take a wicket. Those come from the real record, normalised across eras so a batter from the 1950s and one from the 2010s can be compared fairly. On top of the profile sits the rating you see, a batting-and-bowling blend on a 0-99 scale, and the rating is what nudges the profile up or down when the match is simulated.

A rating is not a single dial that makes a batter uniformly better. It is tuned to move survival and scoring by different degrees, so that a higher-rated batter genuinely lasts longer at the crease, not merely scores a little quicker. That distinction matters: a rating that only sped up scoring would leave your best batter no harder to dismiss than an average one. Bowlers get the mirror image, becoming both tighter and more penetrative as their rating rises. The point is that class shows up the way it does in real cricket, as time in the middle, not just as boundaries.

A rating is an overall number, which creates a trap: a specialist bowler like a great fast-bowling number nine can be rated in the high nineties on the strength of their bowling. If that full rating were allowed to inflate their batting, the engine would hand the tail centuries. So the batting lift is scaled down hard for players whose rating comes from their bowling, and left at full strength for genuine batsmen. A top-order all-rounder is treated as a real batsman; a bowling all-rounder is not. The result is that a number eleven bats like a number eleven, however high their overall rating.

The same problem appears when the engine picks who bowls: an all-rounder's overall rating is inflated by their batting, so ranking bowling options by rating alone would wrongly favour them over a lower-rated specialist. To avoid that, bowlers are also judged on a pure bowling-quality measure that ignores their batting entirely. A career part-timer with a tiny, noisy bowling record is treated with due caution, so a batter who bowled a bit cannot outrank a real bowler on a lucky handful of wickets.

Those numbers meet on every ball, described in how a delivery is decided. And there is a reason even a 99-rated batter still gets out, covered in why your star still gets out. Browse the real career records behind the ratings in the player database.