Work-Permit Eligibility

Work-permit eligibility answers a hard yes/no every English club must ask before signing a foreign player: can he actually get a work permit? Post-Brexit, a non-UK/Irish footballer needs a Governing Body Endorsement (GBE) — a points test run by The FA — or, failing that, a discretionary Elite Significant Contribution (ESC) route. A brilliant player who can't be registered isn't a realistic signing, so Oraca computes both for every player, faithfully to the published criteria.

In one line: this is a regulatory calculator, not a model — it transcribes the FA's current GBE points tables verbatim, sums the scoring categories, auto-passes at 15 points, and adds the four-route ESC fallback. The maths is the easy part; the hard part is the data — getting complete, dated international appearances for every nation on earth — and that's where the honest limits are.

What GBE and ESC are

• Exempt — UK and Irish nationals (and the associated territories) need no endorsement at all; they short-circuit the whole calculation.
• GBE auto-pass — a non-exempt player who scores 15 points or more across the FA's criteria is auto-endorsed.
• ESC — a player below 15 can still be signed if he clears any one of four discretionary "elite significant contribution" tests, which approximate the FA's Exceptions Panel.

The points engine

A non-exempt player's score is summed across the FA's scoring categories, measured over an age-scaled recent window (a shorter window for the youngest players, longer for the rest):

Category	Rewards
International appearances	share of the nation's competitive senior matches played, scaled by the nation's FIFA band — enough of these is an outright auto-pass
Domestic minutes	share of league minutes played, scaled by the league's strength band
Continental minutes	minutes in continental club competition, scaled by its band
League finish	the club's last-season finish — title, continental qualification, promotion
Continental progression	how far the club went in continental competition
League quality	a base score just for featuring in the league at its band
+ Youth & debut routes	youth international caps, and a teenager's senior debut

The standout is international appearances: enough competitive caps for a strong nation is an outright auto-pass, regardless of the running total. It's read as the share of the nation's available competitive matches the player featured in, crossed with the nation's FIFA ranking band — so a regular for a top-50 nation scores heavily, a fringe player for a lower-ranked one scores little. Every table — the category matrices, the league and continental bands, the injection routes — is transcribed verbatim from the FA's published criteria for the current season.

The ESC fallback

For players who miss 15, a deterministic four-route test — clearing any one makes a player eligible — over the same age-scaled window:

• a recent competitive senior cap for a top-50 nation;
• several recent competitive senior caps for a lower-ranked nation;
• a continental club appearance for a club in a top-tier domestic league;
• several domestic appearances in a top-tier league.

How we keep it honest

This is a transcription of a regulatory spec, so "correctness" means faithfulness to the FA criteria, not predictive accuracy:

• Source of truth — the FA's published GBE criteria, captured as the current season's tables. The FA republishes annually, and the tables are re-transcribed each time.
• Documented approximations — where the underlying data can't express a criterion exactly, we approximate conservatively and say so: "named on the matchday squad" is approximated by minutes played, since unused substitutes aren't recorded; and a couple of the finer club-history criteria use the player's current club where a per-match history isn't available.
• Checked, not guessed — the band cut-offs, the auto-pass thresholds, and each ESC route (in isolation and in combination) are covered by tests against a curated set of players — an exempt player, and one for each ESC route.

What it can't do

The maths is faithful; the international-appearance data is the genuine weak point, and it's worth stating plainly because it moves verdicts:

• A nation's caps must be complete and dated. The international categories ask "how many competitive caps in the recent window", which needs every cap, with its date. A gap in a nation's coverage understates a player's score — we once found a set of competitions missing that left around 1,500 players across 141 nations reading zero caps (Mohamed Salah among them); we found it, backfilled it, and added a self-healing reconciliation, but the lesson is that this category is only ever as good as international-match coverage.
• Pre-arrival history can be thin. A player who earned caps before entering a league we cover may have them recorded without per-match dates, so he can under-count on the date-windowed categories.
• Annual spec drift. The tables are a snapshot of the current FA criteria; until re-transcribed each year they can lag a newly published matrix.
• It informs, it doesn't decide. Eligibility feeds the recommendation ranking as a soft penalty and the signing shortlist as a filter for English clubs — but the FA's Exceptions Panel is discretionary, so the ESC routes are a faithful approximation of it, not a guarantee.

The research behind it

Unlike most of the platform, this isn't a statistical model — it's a faithful implementation of a published regulatory framework (the FA's GBE and ESC criteria), with the engineering care going into transcription fidelity, conservative and documented approximations where the data can't express a rule exactly, and the data pipeline that assembles complete, dated international and club appearances for every player.