How to start a Premier League prediction league with your mates

A prediction league with your mates is one of the few football arguments that settles itself. No opinions, no rewriting history in the group chat on Monday. You said 3:1, it finished 1:1, the table moved.

Getting one started takes about five minutes. Getting one that is still running at Christmas takes four decisions, and they are all worth making before anyone picks a scoreline.

Decision one: how much football

The instinct is to cover every Premier League match every week. Ten fixtures, all of them, forever. It is also the most common reason these leagues die: entering ten scorelines every week is a chore, and the person with the least time drops out first.

A shorter card played by everyone beats a complete card played by three people. Somewhere between five and a dozen matches a round is the sweet spot, and mixing in a couple of big European games keeps it interesting when the Premier League weekend is thin.

Decision two: what a correct prediction is worth

Result-only leagues are simple and they get boring, because half the field ends up on the same score. Exact-score-only leagues are brutal, because most weeks nobody hits anything. What works is layered credit:

• Right winner: worth something.
• Right goal difference: worth more.
• Each team's goals exactly right: worth more again.
• The complete scoreline: the jackpot of the match.

That is the shape our scoring uses, and it means a 2:1 call on a 3:2 finish still earns you something for reading the game right, without making the exact call meaningless.

Decision three: the deadline

Whatever you agree, make it automatic. Deadlines policed by a human are the number one source of bad feeling in these leagues, because eventually the human is you and eventually the late pick is your best mate's.

Per-match locking is the fairest version: each game closes 5 minutes before it kicks off, so a Saturday lunchtime fixture is settled while Monday night is still open. Nobody has to submit everything by Friday, and nobody can wait to see a result first.

Decision four: what keeps someone in fourth interested

By October, someone is fifty points clear and two people have stopped picking. Every long-lived league has an answer to this, and it is always some form of controlled risk:

• A double or nothing pick each round, rationed so you cannot use one every week.
• Harder matches worth more, so backing yourself on a genuine coin-flip pays better than the obvious home win.
• A bonus for calls nobody else made, which is the only way somebody behind can gain ground quickly.
• A round table as well as a season table, so a bad September does not end your year.

Even one of those changes the mood. The gap stops being a wall and becomes something you can attack.

Setting it up

1. Create a private league. You get a short invite code and a link.
2. Put the link in the group chat, with the first deadline in the same message.
3. Everyone picks their scorelines before kickoff.
4. Results and points update themselves as the games finish.
5. The private table ranks only your group, while the same picks also count in the global and national tables.

That last part matters more than it sounds. Beating your mates is the reason you play, but being somewhere on a worldwide table is the reason you keep playing in a week when your mates are all beating you.