How to play

Available leagues are Premier League, Championship, League One, League Two and the WSL — 106 clubs in total.

Every league is open every week.

The weekly reveal will inform Predictors which leagues have fixtures that week.

Bootbag may introduce additional leagues throughout the season

A game week is any week containing a fixture from one of those leagues.

Participation varies week to week: international breaks remove the Premier League, the WSL does not run every week, and the EFL seasons finish before the Premier League's does.

The season runs to 42 game weeks

Picks are fixture-based: you back a team to win a specific match.

• Pick the winners of 3 fixtures each game week. A flat three, regardless of how many leagues or fixtures the week contains.
• One team per fixture. Three picks means three different fixtures; you cannot back both sides of the same match.
• Any fixture in any league is eligible, provided the club you are backing has the relevant slot unspent. All three picks may come from one league.

Club spend: Two slots per club

A club may be picked twice a season — once in a home fixture and once in an away fixture.

The two are independent slots. Backing Arsenal at home leaves Arsenal-away available; backing Arsenal at home twice is not allowed.

• Both slots may be spent in the same game week, if the club plays twice that week and one fixture is home and the other away.
• Neutral-venue fixtures may be backed with either slot. The away slot is used by default; if it is already spent, the home slot may be used instead.
• There is no mid-season reset. Slots are spent for the rest of the season.
• Slots reset between seasons. Every Predictor starts each new season with a clean board.
• A club with no fixture in a given game week simply has no fixture to pick that week. Its slots stay available for later.

The team tracker shows each club with two markers — home and away — and a club is only struck through once both are gone.

Deadline

Picks lock 2 hours before the first fixture of the game week, one deadline for all three picks.

This is deliberately a single weekly lock rather than a per-fixture one. A per-fixture deadline would hand whoever picks a Sunday fixture several days of extra injury news and results over whoever picks the Monday fixture.

A defeat scores nothing. Every other pick scores a result, its winning margin, and up to three bonuses:

Points = result + (2 × goal difference) + bonuses (a defeat scores 0)

Said out loud: win 3, draw 1, two points a goal for the margin, and a point each for a clean sheet, a penalty save and a card-free game.

Everything is scoped to the team you backed: their goals, their clean sheet, their keeper, their cards. What the opponent picks up is ignored.

Nothing ever deducts. A pick's score has a floor of zero, so a Predictor's total only ever climbs. A heavy defeat costs no more than a narrow one — both score 0.

A game week's score is the sum across that week's three picks.

Two things worth reading off that table

A 4–3 win scores less than a 1–0 win (6 against 7), because the margin is the same but the clean sheet is gone — this game rewards control, not chaos. And the bonuses carry real weight: a clean, disciplined 1–0 beats a scrappy 2–1 by two clear points.

Why the margin is doubled

It is not there to make big wins feel bigger. A weekly score is the sum of three small integers, and if too few totals are reachable then large numbers of Predictors land on exactly the same one — which matters because tied Predictors split the prize rather than being separated by a tie-break. Doubling the margin roughly halves how many Predictors tie at the top of a large field. It only works because the bonuses are worth one point each: doubling on its own would make every score even, and the odd-valued bonuses are what fill the gaps back in.

A clean game means no cards at all

The clean-game bonus is all-or-nothing. One booking in the 90th minute costs it, exactly as a red card would. There is no partial credit and no counting beyond the first card — the only question is whether the team finished the match with a clean record.

This is deliberately simpler than the discipline rule it replaces, which deducted per card and needed second yellows matched to individual players. That whole apparatus is gone: a second-yellow dismissal is just a card like any other, and it costs the bonus that the player's first booking had already cost.

At half-time, a Predictor may freeze one game per week and bank that fixture's score as it stands.

• Offered at the half-time break only — one discrete moment per fixture, not a continuous live decision.
• One freeze per game week, and only on a fixture you have picked.
• The whole score freezes as at half-time: the result, the doubled margin and all three bonuses. A team leading 2–0 at the break having conceded nothing and picked up no cards banks 3 + 4 + 1 + 1 = 9, and nothing after half-time changes it — no later goals, no later cards.
• The bonuses are judged on the half of football actually played. A team with a clean sheet at the break banks the clean-sheet bonus even if it concedes twice after it, and a team with no cards at the break banks the clean-game bonus even if it collects three later.
• Freezing a fixture your team is losing at half-time banks 0, because a defeat scores nothing. There is no reason to do it.
• A freeze cannot be undone, and a fixture can only be frozen once.

Half-time-only is deliberate. A freeze available at any live minute would structurally advantage Predictors who happen to be awake and watching.

If a fixture is suspended or postponed, it is removed from the Predictor's week.

• The pick scores +1 — a neutral value, the same as a draw.
• The club's slot is refunded. It returns to the tracker unspent and can be picked again later in the season.
• A win streak is not broken by a removed fixture.

A fixture already known to be postponed when picks open cannot be picked. Without this, backing a called-off match would be free value — a guaranteed point that costs no slot. The removal rule only covers fixtures postponed after picks lock.

Tables are football-league shaped:

Pos · Predictor · GF · GD · Pts

There is no tie-break order. Predictors on the same points share the same position, and a tied prize is split evenly between them. Nothing rolls over.

Four competition families

Up to 100 members, invite code

• Other Predictors see only your points and goal data, never your private profile.

At different points during the season, Bootbag could introduce more leagues to pick your 3 teams each week.

Recorded so they are not reintroduced by accident from older drafts or the prototype: