Ratings in football video games rarely match how a player is performing when someone sits down to play. The gap is a product of the production timetable rather than carelessness.
Ratings are locked long before release
A game ships months after its content is finalised, and ratings must be settled early enough for balancing and testing to happen around them. Changing a rating late means retesting everything that depends on it.
That means the numbers reflect form as it looked at a cut-off point well before the season the game is played in.
A player who improves sharply after that cut-off carries an outdated rating into launch through no fault of the process.
The rating is a design value, not a measurement
Attributes have to produce playable behaviour, so they are tuned as much for how a player feels to control as for what he did last season. A defender who reads danger well in reality needs attributes that translate into something a controller can express.
Two players with similar output may receive different attribute spreads because they need to behave differently on the pitch.
This makes ratings a compressed description of playing style rather than a ranking of performance.
Live updates only move part of the picture
In-season revisions typically adjust a limited set of attributes and only for players whose form has changed conspicuously. The threshold for a change is high, because each one ripples through squads people have already built.
Wholesale revision would destabilise competitive modes where players build squads around known values.
The update cadence is therefore a compromise between reflecting reality and protecting the economy that has grown around the ratings.
Competitive modes create pressure against accuracy
Where cards are traded or collected, a rating change has direct value implications for people who acquired that card. The rating stops being a description at that point and becomes an input to a price.
Frequent downgrades would function as confiscation, so downward revisions tend to be rarer and smaller than upward ones.
The distribution of ratings drifts upward over a game's lifetime as a result, independently of how players are actually performing.
Perception feeds back into the ratings
Publishers face public reaction to individual ratings, and highly visible players attract scrutiny that obscure ones do not. A number that looks low for a famous name becomes a story in a way that an unknown player's never does.
That attention makes some ratings effectively negotiated in public, with reputation acting as a constraint on where the number can sit.
The outcome is a system that tracks a mixture of past output, playability and expectation, which is why it so rarely lines up with current form.