The rating is the claim. The grade is the check.
A rating says what a player or a team is worth. A match grade says what they actually did in one game, on the same universal scale, so the two sit side by side and the gap between them is legible. KPG is the player grade, KTG the team grade, and both are role-weighted, context-adjusted, and level-normalised so they read the performance and not the circumstances. A single match is a wide-confidence point estimate; the trend is the signal. When the grade and the rating disagree over a run, the engine flags it to investigate. It never quietly rewrites the rating.
What you are rated, and what you did, measured the same way.
KR is the standing rating, the claim about a player's ability. KPG is how he actually performed in a match, computed on the exact same universal scale so the two are directly comparable. A single match is high-variance, so it is read with its confidence band; the trend across a run is the real signal, and that trend against the standing rating is the honesty check the whole metric exists for.
Because the grade lives on the same scale as the rating, the divergence is not a vibe, it is a number: this composite player is rated 85 but grades around 78 across a run, so either the rating is high or the role is wrong, and the engine says which to check rather than silently moving the number. A rating you can never check against performance is a claim with no receipt.
Illustrative engine read on the real KR-KPG cross-reference (KPG on the universal KR scale, the trend as the signal, convergence versus sustained divergence, no auto-mutation of KR). Composite player, demonstration figures.
It rewards doing your job well, not filling a stat line.
A match grade is not raw involvement and not a box score. It is role-weighted by the same position and archetype framework the rating uses, reads quality against difficulty rather than volume, and is corrected for the team around the player and the state of the match, so it reflects the player and not his circumstances.
The grade is tuned to be right rather than flattering. A player who did his specific job well in a hard, live game scores well even with modest counting numbers, and a player padding a stat line in a dead one does not. That is what separates a grade from a highlight reel: it reads the contribution the role existed to make, at the difficulty it was made. Believable over impressive, one match at a time.
Illustrative engine read on the real KPG stages (possession-value action base weighted by position and archetype, quality scaling the base, supporting-cast and game-state adjustment, minutes credibility, level normalisation). Composite players, demonstration figures.
Players roll up into the team grade. They do not add up to it.
KTG grades the team's performance against its own intent, not against a generic standard, from four components. The players' individual grades roll up into it as one input, because the players drove the performance, but the team grade is more than their sum, and neither number overwrites the other.
A team is graded against what it was trying to do, corrected for the opponent and the stakes, on the process as much as the result, so a side that dominates and loses and a side that wins against the run of play both read honestly. And the seam back to the players stays open: one bright individual performance in a poor team result is preserved as the true, useful thing it is. The team grade explains who drove it without ever erasing what they did.
Illustrative engine read on the real KTG structure (the four components Result-vs-Expectation, Efficiency Margin, Control Factors, Context Stakes, and the KPG roll-up that is not a sum). Composite team, demonstration figures.
A rating is a standing claim about how good a player or a team is; a grade is what they actually did in one match, measured on the same scale so the two can be held up against each other. The grade reads the job the role existed to do, at the difficulty it was done, corrected for the team and the game state, tuned to be believable rather than impressive. A single match is noise; the trend is the signal, and the trend against the standing rating is the honesty check the whole thing exists for. When they disagree over a run, the engine flags it to investigate on the proper evidence, and never once reaches back to quietly rewrite the rating. The claim and the check are two different objects, kept separate on purpose, because a rating nobody ever checks is just an opinion that stopped listening.
Rate what they are. Grade what they did.
Match Grades put a single-match performance on the same scale as the standing rating, so the gap between claim and check is legible and always investigated, never buried.