WonderkidThese are not real-world football statistics. They describe how one video game's simulation behaves. Nothing on this page should be read as a measurement of how many real children become professional footballers — that is a question about the world, and this is a question about a model of it.
Wonderkid is a career life sim in which you are the player rather than the manager, and the thing it tunes hardest is the gap between playing carelessly and playing well. That gap only means something if it is measured, so it is — and since we measure it anyway, there is no reason not to publish it.
How this was measured
The simulator (sim_core) is pure Dart with no interface
attached, which means whole lives can be played without a browser. A
harness plays them by the thousand and counts what happened.
- Sample: 1,000 complete lives per profile, 2,000 in total. Birth to death, every year, no early exits.
- Content: the shipped pack of 609 event cards, the same one the closed test is playing.
- Determinism: every life runs from a seeded RNG, so the whole run reproduces exactly. Nothing here is a lucky sample that cannot be re-created.
- Date: 30 July 2026, against the current build.
The two profiles are the honest ends of how people actually play:
- Random — every decision taken at random, training ignored. This is the floor: what the game does to someone tapping through it without a plan.
- Engaged — trains every year and takes the ambitious option wherever one exists. This is a realistic ceiling for a player paying attention, not a perfect-information optimum.
The headline numbers
| Outcome | Random choices | Engaged play |
|---|---|---|
| Never turn professional | 27.1% | 10.8% |
| Turn professional | 72.9% | 89.2% |
| Ever play for a five-star club | 12.7% | 28.0% |
| Retire as Immortal (top legacy tier) | 6.6% | 15.4% |
| Average legacy score | 463 | 984 |
The shape of that table is the design goal, not an accident. Playing properly roughly halves the chance of never making it, doubles the chance of reaching the top tier of clubs, and more than doubles the chance of the best possible ending. What it does not do is guarantee anything: more than one engaged career in ten still never turns professional at all.
Why more than a quarter of careers end in nothing
Because that is the part most football games refuse to simulate. The overwhelming majority of children who join an academy never play professionally, and a game where you turn pro every time has nothing left with which to make the successful lives feel earned.
It is also the number that makes the rest of the game legible. A five-star move means something because 87.3% of random careers never get one. An Immortal retirement means something because 93.4% of them do not end that way.
The second measurement: what the game gets you to do
Balance is not only about outcomes. The same run counts how often the systems that ask something of the player actually fire, because a system that only 6% of lives ever see is a system that is not really shipped.
| Engagement | Random choices | Engaged play |
|---|---|---|
| Lives that make a season pledge | 59.5% | 85.2% |
| Pledges settled per life | 1.89 | 4.71 |
| …of which kept | 43% | 59% |
| …missed narrowly | 14% | 12% |
| …broken outright | 43% | 29% |
| Lives that open a story arc | 96.6% | 96.8% |
| Arcs left unresolved at death | 529 of 3,764 | 475 of 4,275 |
| Feed entries per life | 240 | 387 |
The pledge row is the one worth reading twice. A player choosing at random keeps a promise to themselves 43% of the time — barely better than a coin — while a player actually trying keeps 59%. The system is doing what it was built to do: it is winnable, and it is not free.
The unresolved-arc rows are a deliberate design position rather than a bug. Roughly one story in seven is still open when the player dies, because a life that tied every thread would not feel like a life.
Why this page exists at all
Before it did, these figures lived only in the marketing copy — and they had gone stale without anyone noticing. The numbers on this site had been carried over from a measurement taken a week earlier, on a smaller sample and an older content pack, and three separate balance passes had moved the game underneath them. The Immortal rate was published as 2.2% against a real 6.6%: wrong by a factor of three, in the game's own disfavour.
Nothing catches that except re-measuring and writing the result down where it can be checked. So that is what this is.
Using these numbers
They are free to quote, with two requests that are really the same request: say they are from Wonderkid, and say they describe a simulation. A link back to this page covers both.
If you want the harness itself, or a run at a different sample size or against a different play profile, ask — it takes minutes and we would rather the number you print came from us than from a screenshot.