The four forces behind an Opportunity Score

Every card on Xportive carries an Opportunity Score from 0 to 100 and a signal: Strong, Moderate or Weak. No gut feeling goes into that number. It is a weighted sum of four forces, each measured from data, and understanding them makes the score far more useful.

1. Performance (the heaviest weight)

What is the player actually doing on the pitch? We look at the current season: minutes played, goals and assists per 90 minutes, and match ratings. Minutes matter more than most collectors expect. A striker with 27 goals across a full season of minutes is a different story from one with 5 goals in 400 minutes, even if the highlight reels look similar. Early in a new season, when everyone has played only a match or two, we deliberately keep weighing the previous season until the new one has enough minutes to mean something.

2. Attention

Cards move when people talk. As a clean, measurable proxy for attention we track how often a player's Wikipedia page is viewed, comparing the recent period against the months before. A breakout performance, a transfer rumour or a first international call-up shows up in that curve within days. Attention says nothing about whether the talk is positive; it measures how many eyes are on the player, which is what card demand responds to first.

3. Scarcity

The print run. A card numbered /99 sits in a different universe from an unnumbered base card, and the score reflects that on a curve: the smaller the run, the higher the scarcity force. This is the most stable of the four forces; it never changes after printing, but its effect on price grows when the other three heat up.

4. Price trend

Has the move already happened? We compare recent prices against the reference period before. Counter-intuitively, a card that has already jumped scores lower on this force: the opportunity was yesterday. A card whose fundamentals are improving while its price has barely moved is exactly the pattern the engine is built to surface.

Why weights, not vibes

The four forces are combined with fixed weights, with performance counting heaviest and every calculation reproducible: the same inputs always produce the same score. When any force lacks reliable data, it falls back to a neutral value and we record that honestly rather than guessing.

The score is the start of your research, not the end of it. Strong, Moderate and Weak are estimates built from data, not recommendations; two collectors can see the same 78 and reach different conclusions, and that is how it should be.