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Method· 4 min read

A number without a range is a guess

Every valuation on this site ships with a band and a confidence figure, because the single figure is the least honest part of the answer.

The transfer market runs on single numbers. A player is worth £42m, or £18m, or whatever a site with a large enough audience decided he was worth. The figure gets quoted, then re-quoted, and by the third repetition nobody remembers it was an estimate at all.

That is not a criticism of the people producing the figures. It is a criticism of the format. A point estimate has no way to say how sure it is, so it says nothing — and a reader has no way to tell a valuation built on three thousand minutes from one built on ninety.

What the range is actually doing

Each valuation here carries a lower and an upper bound and a confidence percentage. The band is not decoration around the estimate; it is the estimate. Where a player has played a full season at a stable level, the band is tight and the confidence is high. Where he has four appearances off the bench, the band is wide and the number in the middle should be read as roughly nothing.

This is the least flattering way to present a model, which is the argument for it. A wide band is the model admitting it does not know, in the one place a reader will actually see the admission.

The failure it prevents

The specific bad outcome a point estimate invites is a confident comparison between two players whose evidence bases are nothing alike. Put the bands side by side and the comparison answers itself: if they overlap across most of their width, the model is not claiming one is worth more than the other, whatever the midpoints say.

If two bands overlap, the ranking between them is noise. Read the width before you read the number.

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