How our predictions work
Every prediction on OptimaGoal comes from data, not opinion. Here is the idea behind it, step by step.
-
How strong is each club?
Every club gets a strength rating that goes up when it wins and down when it loses, a little more when the opponent was strong or the margin was wide. Continental cup matches connect the leagues, and the Club World Cup links Europe with the Americas, so a club from Brazil and one from England can be compared on the same scale.
-
How well are they playing right now?
Results can flatter or hide a team. So we also look at the quality of the chances each side has created and allowed in recent matches, and we give more credit for doing it against good opposition.
-
What else matters for this match?
Home or away, how many days of rest each team has had, a busy run of fixtures, and for knockout ties the score from the first leg.
-
From all of that to three numbers
A model that has learned from thousands of past matches weighs these factors and gives the chance of a home win, a draw and an away win.
Reading a prediction
- The three percentages are the chances of a home win, a draw and an away win after 90 minutes.
- Our pick is simply the most likely of the three. A 55% pick still goes the other way almost half the time.
- Predictions are made and published 48 hours before kick-off, or later if one of the teams still has another match to play before then, and are never changed afterwards: the picks free for everyone, and the full prediction with every percentage, over/under goals, yellow cards and corners for members. Everyone sees the result percentages 2 hours before kick-off, and the rest once the match is over.
- Our Top 5 lists collect the predictions we are surest about, with every result kept public.
- After the match, a green mark means our pick was right and a red one means it was wrong.
How good is it?
Football is full of draws and upsets, so no honest model is right most of the time by a wide margin. We tested ours on thousands of recent matches that it had never seen while it was being built, and its pick was right in just over half of them. That is why we show chances rather than certainties.
The match texts
The summary at the top of each match page and the reasons for our picks are written by an AI language model from the facts on that page and our model's own reasons for the pick, which it gets in words, never as numbers. The texts are checked automatically before they are published: a text that adds anything not in that data, uses betting language, gives percentages or repeats the wording of another match page is not published. One request writes all four languages, each in its own words.
We only show a both-teams-to-score pick when our model has a clear view either way. In our tests, when it did not, it was hardly better than always saying yes.
What the model does not know
Injuries, suspensions, line-ups, late transfers, the weather and motivation are not part of it. If a key player is ruled out on the morning of the match, the numbers will not reflect that.