Which football matches are hardest to predict?

Some fixtures write themselves and some are a coin flip with extra steps. We had to answer this precisely, because our scoring multiplies every match by how hard it is to call, and that number has to be defensible to the people playing. Here is what actually makes a match difficult.

1. The teams are close on the table

The single biggest factor, and it is not close. First against eighteenth has an obvious answer. Eighth against tenth does not, because two sides separated by two places and three points are, on the evidence available, the same team.

Our engine scores this as evenness: the gap between the two positions measured against the size of the league. A gap of two in a twenty-team league is close to maximum difficulty. A gap of fifteen is close to none.

2. The away side is the better team

A fixture where the visitors sit higher up the table is genuinely harder than the same gap the other way round, because home advantage is pulling against quality instead of adding to it. The two effects partly cancel, and matches where things cancel are the ones nobody can call.

3. Recent form contradicts the table

The table is the season. Form is the last five games. When the lower-placed side is the one in form, you have two honest sources of information pointing in opposite directions, and no principled way to choose between them.

This is the case people most often get wrong, in both directions. Some players ignore form entirely and back the table. Others treat five matches as though they overturn thirty. The correct answer is that the fixture is hard and should be treated as such.

4. It is a derby

Every football cliche about the form book going out of the window in a derby happens to be supported by the results. Derbies are tighter, more cautious, more prone to a red card and a strange scoreline, and less related to the two league positions than any other kind of fixture.

We keep a list of the real ones and add difficulty when a coupon match is on it. A local rivalry is a genuinely different sporting event, not a normal match between neighbours.

5. Big clubs are involved

Two giants meeting is hard for reasons that have nothing to do with this week's table. Both squads are deep enough to win from any position, both are used to the occasion, and neither is going to be intimidated. The bigger the two clubs, the less the standings tell you.

How we turn that into a number

Every match on the coupon gets a multiplier between 1.00 and 2.50, printed on the card as a stamp before you pick. It is built like this:

Two details matter. Early in a season, when nobody has played enough matches for a table to mean anything, the table terms fade out and the multiplier sits near the middle of the range: an unreadable table means we do not know, which is 1.50, not the 1.00 floor. And the number is frozen when the round opens, so it can never move after you have picked.

The multiplier is a measure of uncertainty, not of importance. A title decider between two sides thirty points apart can carry a light stamp. A meaningless mid-table game in April can carry a heavy one.

What that means for your round

Points on a heavy stamp are worth roughly two and a half times the same points on a light one, which changes where your attention should go. Ten minutes of thought about the 2.40 fixture is worth more than an hour spread evenly across the coupon.

It also changes where the banker belongs. A banker doubles your total on that match and wipes it if you miss, so a banker on a heavy stamp is the biggest swing available anywhere in the game. Most people put theirs on the easiest match on the coupon. The people winning rounds do not.