Board Game Arena

If you go to any Arena page for the current season you will frequently find that the number of "Players" shown in top middle is greater than the sum of players with bronze through elite status. Who are those other players?

I just looked at some of my Arena rankings. In one Arena I have 0 bronze points (I started with one and lost a few games) and in the area where it usually shows your Arena rank it says "Challenge the best players in the world" like it does when you've played zero games in a season.

In a different game, I have one bronze point (the one you start with), but I've played zero games, so once again it says "Challenge the best players in the world."

So are the phantom players counted in the "Players" number who don't have bronze through elite status:
1) players who have played in Arena but have fallen to 0 bronze points,
2) people eligible for Arena who haven't played this season,
3) a sum of these two, or
4) something else entirely?

Interestingly, for past seasons that already finished, the sum of player counts from individual leagues is the player count shown at the top.

It could be people who have been grandfathered from the previous Arena season but haven't played in this one.

So I now know the answer to the thread title. The "Players" count at the top appears to be everyone who is listed in the rankings in that Arena for that season. I did this by scrolling all the way through the Verso arena rankings and it ends at 215 (as of this post), and the "Players" number on the current season's arena page is 215. So they are not phantom players as I originally thought (two years ago).

But...if you sum all the numbers for elite, gold, silver, and bronze you only get 165?!? A discrepancy of 50 players. So that aspect is still a mystery. But now it seems to be the case that the numbers for elite, gold, silver, and bronze are wrong, not the Players count at the top. I thought maybe the number of people with 0 points in their arena tier aren't being counted, but that doesn't explain the 50-player discrepancy because there are more than 50 players with 0 points in their tier.

However, if as Jellby suggests people who rolled over from the previous season don't get counted in their tier until they actually play in the current season, then that could explain it.

I have not been clinically diagnosed with a compulsive disorder, but these kinds of things definitely trigger me.