How to run a Premier League prediction league

The season in numbers

Twenty clubs each play the other nineteen home and away. That makes 38 rounds of 10 matches, 380 in all, from mid-August to late May. Someone who predicts everything makes 380 calls, so the table takes a while to settle and a bad September is easy to recover from. Tell that to whoever is bottom after week three.

With 10 matches a round, each player's Golden Pick doubles one match in ten. Choosing it well is worth a lot over a season.

When the matches are

A round usually runs from Friday or Saturday through to Sunday or Monday, with kick-offs at several different times. On PrediSportsHQ each match stays open until its own kick-off, so nobody has to guess Monday night's game on a Friday, and the people who wait for the team sheets can.

A few rounds each season are played midweek. Those are the ones people miss, because they aren't expecting a Tuesday deadline. The phone reminder a couple of hours before each kick-off is what catches them, so ask everyone to switch alerts on the day they join.

Christmas and New Year

The Premier League has no winter break. There is a full programme around Boxing Day, and rounds can come two or three days apart over New Year. That means a lot of points in a short time, at exactly the moment your players are travelling, busy or out.

Send a short announcement before the first festive round with the dates on it (Admin, then Messages). If your league takes points off for a missed prediction, decide in early December whether to ease it. It's the one number you can change mid-season, and a change only counts from then on, so you can lower it for the holidays and put it back in January. Tell the group either way.

International breaks

The league stops for international matches in September, October, November and March. For a fortnight there is nothing to predict, and that is when people forget to come back. On the Friday before the league restarts, post the title-race picture from Admin, then Stats, with one line saying when the next deadline is.

Which points to choose

For a group of casual fans, Simple 3-1-0 is the easiest to explain. For a group that watches every game and argues about it, bullseye scoring spreads the table out and makes a draw worth calling: a 1-1 bullseye is worth 44 against 31 for a 1-0. Whatever you pick, settle it before the first match is scored, because after that it is fixed for the season. The worked examples are in how the points work.

The real table and the AI

Your league's Table page has a second view with the real Premier League table, so players can check the standings without leaving. The AI's call on every Premier League match, and how it did, is on the Premier League predictions page.

PrediSportsHQ has no connection with the Premier League or any of its clubs. It's a free tool for running your own prediction league.