A new web toy called GitFut takes your GitHub profile and spits out a World-Cup-style player card, rated out of 99 like a FIFA footballer. It surfaced on Hacker News this week, where it climbed to 172 points, and it’s already generated 178,411 cards. The pitch is simple: your commits, repos, and activity get “scouted” and turned into a scorecard you can share.
Think of it as a vanity mirror for developers. You plug in a username, and GitFut assigns you a position (ST, CM, and so on) plus six familiar football stats. Linus Torvalds, for example, pulls a 96-rated striker card. It’s the kind of thing built to be screenshotted and posted, which is exactly why it spread.
What GitFut actually does
Here’s the breakdown, based on the cards shown in the Hacker News post:
- Turns raw GitHub activity into a single rating. Every profile gets an overall score out of 99, the same headline number FIFA uses. Torvalds sits at 96, which sets the ceiling most of us won’t touch.
- Maps your work to six football stats. Each card shows PAC (pace), DRI (dribbling), SHO (shooting), DEF (defense), PAS (passing), and PHY (physical). GitFut ties these to different signals in your GitHub history, so a prolific committer and a careful reviewer end up with different shapes.
- Assigns you a position. Cards come stamped with a role like ST (striker) or CM (central midfielder). It’s a light way of saying what kind of contributor you are.
- Works on anyone public. The demo cards aren’t limited to coders. PewdiePie and ThePrimeagen both have cards, so any public GitHub handle is fair game.
- Leans on the World Cup 26 hook. The whole thing is branded around next year’s tournament, which gives it a timely reason to exist right now.
Why it caught on
Developer vanity projects are their own little genre. GitHub Wrapped clones, contribution-graph art, README trophy badges, they all tap the same nerve: people like seeing their work turned into a number and a shareable image. What GitFut adds is a format everyone already understands. You don’t need to explain a FIFA card. You look at 96 next to Torvalds and instantly get it.
That familiarity is the clever part. The football-card layout does the storytelling for you, and the out-of-99 rating creates an instant leaderboard in people’s heads. Comparing your card to a friend’s is the entire point, and comparison is what drives sharing.
The catch
A few things worth keeping in mind. The scoring is opaque. The article doesn’t spell out how GitHub activity maps onto pace or physical, so the stats are more entertainment than a real measure of skill. Commit count and repo activity are famously easy to game and famously bad at capturing actual engineering value, so nobody should read too much into a low card.
There’s also the usual privacy footnote. GitFut reads public profile data, and the fact that it can generate a card for anyone with a public handle means you don’t opt in to being scouted. That’s fine for a bit of fun, but it’s the sort of detail that tends to come up in the Hacker News comments on projects like this.
Why it matters
On its own, GitFut is a weekend project. What stands out is how efficiently it borrows an existing mental model to make developer data feel fun. That’s a real lesson for anyone building tools: you don’t always need to invent a new way for people to understand their data. Sometimes you borrow one they already love.
Expect more of these. Tying a niche dataset to a mainstream format, in this case a football tournament millions will be watching, is a cheap and repeatable way to earn attention. GitFut just happened to nail the timing.
Want to see your own rating? The full set of cards and the how-it-works breakdown are over at the original source.