Every attribute in Stat Thief is stored as a number and shown as a letter. The letter is there so a draft stays readable at speed - you can compare nine values at a glance without doing arithmetic. But the letters hide a detail that matters a lot once you are optimising: the bands are not the same width.
The full scale
| Grade | Range | Band width | What it means in practice |
|---|---|---|---|
| S | 90-99 | 10 | Elite. Defines a build. |
| A+ | 85-89 | 5 | Excellent. Worth a respin to chase. |
| A | 80-84 | 5 | Very strong. |
| A- | 75-79 | 5 | Strong. |
| B+ | 70-74 | 5 | Good, unremarkable. |
| B | 65-69 | 5 | Serviceable. |
| B- | 60-64 | 5 | Below what a strong build wants. |
| C+ | 55-59 | 5 | Filler. |
| C | 50-54 | 5 | Baseline - the same as leaving the slot empty. |
| C- | 45-49 | 5 | Actively worse than an empty slot. |
| D | 35-44 | 10 | Bad. |
| E | 25-34 | 10 | Very bad. |
| F | 0-24 | 25 | The bottom. Common for defending stats on strikers. |
Three consequences worth internalising
An S is worth chasing harder than it looks. The S band is twice as wide as the A+ band, so two attributes both showing S can be ten points apart. You cannot see which one you got. What you can see is that anything reading S is at least 90, which no other grade guarantees.
C is the break-even line. Any attribute you never steal is treated as a 50 - exactly a C. That means stealing a C-, D, E or F attribute is worse than not stealing at all, and you should only ever do it to grab an attached playstyle trait or because the round is otherwise dead.
The bottom of the scale is a cliff, not a slope. F covers a full quarter of the range. A striker's defending and a defender's finishing both routinely sit there, which is why those columns are effectively decoration rather than options.
The eight attributes
Under the hood every player has the same eight values, but they are labelled differently depending on the position you are drafting. This confuses people who switch positions between runs, so here is the mapping in full:
| Slot | Forward | Midfielder | Defender |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pace | Pace | Pace |
| 2 | Finishing | Shooting | Shooting |
| 3 | Key Pass | Passing | Build-up |
| 4 | Dribbling | Technique | Awareness |
| 5 | Pressing | Tackling | Tackling |
| 6 | Power | Stamina | Power |
| 7 | Heading | Aerial | Aerial |
| 8 | Composure | Vision | Leadership |
The renaming is flavour, but it is useful flavour: it tells you what the game thinks that attribute is for in your role. Slot 8 is the clearest example - the same number is Composure in front of goal, Vision in midfield and Leadership at the back, and it is weighted twice as heavily for a midfielder as for a forward.
How grades become an overall rating
Your OVR is not an average. Each of the eight attributes is multiplied by a weight specific to your position, and the weights sum to one. A defender's tackling carries 26% of the rating on its own; a defender's finishing carries 4%. Stealing an S in a 4% attribute moves your OVR by less than two points. Stealing an A- in a 26% attribute moves it by seven.
The complete weighting table for all three positions is in Choosing your position, and it is the single most useful page on this site if you want to break 85.
Where the grades come from
They are assigned by hand. Each player in the pool is given eight numbers based on the qualities that player is popularly remembered for, then those numbers are displayed through the scale above. They are not measured data, not scraped from any provider, and not intended to settle an argument about who was better. They are meant to be recognisable - to feel roughly right to someone who watched the player - and to make a draft fun to read quickly. The about page explains that choice in more detail.
Quick rule of thumb
Before you steal, ask two questions in this order: is this attribute heavily weighted for my position? and only then is this grade high? A B+ in a heavy attribute beats an S in a light one, almost every time.