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.

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.
• Which slot a fixture spends is decided by the fixture's own sides: back the home team and you spend its home slot, back the away team and you spend its away slot.
• 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, up to two bonuses, and the value the pick itself carried:

Points = result + (10 × goal difference) + bonuses + pick value (a defeat scores 0)

Said out loud: win 30, draw 10, ten a goal for the margin, ten each for a clean sheet and a card-free game, plus your pick value if they win.

Everything is scoped to the team you backed: their goals, their clean sheet, 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.

Pick value: harder picks are worth more

Every fixture carries a pick value — what that team is worth if they win. It runs from single figures for a heavy favourite to a cap of 300 for a long shot, and it comes from the team's chance of winning:

The value grows faster the rarer a win is, because it has to pay back how often the pick loses. That makes every pick worth about the same on average: a favourite scores a little most weeks, an underdog a lot now and then.

The value is shown as a number, never as odds. Each fixture's label — Strong Favourite, Favourite, Underdog, Big Underdog, Huge Underdog — is a guide for scanning only: the number on the card is what you score.

You keep the number you were shown

Values move through the week with team news. Locking a pick takes the value showing on that fixture at that moment. Change the pick before kick-off and you take whatever value is showing then — nothing carries over from an earlier choice. If the value moved while your screen was out of date, you're shown the new one to confirm or walk away from.

Worked examples

Read the first two rows together: an underdog winning 2–0 scores 210 while a favourite winning 3–0 scores 95. Backing the harder result pays more than winning by an extra goal.

Why the scale is in hundreds

Most ties are Predictors who backed the same three teams, and they score the same under any formula. What separates them is holding different pick values, locked at different moments — and only a scale in hundreds is fine enough for that difference to survive into the total. That is why the game needs no tie-break question, and why ties that do survive simply split the prize.

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 margin, both bonuses and the pick value. A team leading 2–0 at the break, having conceded nothing and picked up no cards, on a pick worth 140, banks 30 + 20 + 10 + 10 + 140 = 210 — and nothing after half-time changes it, no later goals and 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 · 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.

An even split is paid to whole pennies, and any penny left over is kept rather than rolled over. If a tie is so large that an equal share would round down to £0.00, the prize pays nobody.

The Invincible

To go Invincible, hold three picks in every game week of the season and lose none of them. Wins and draws both keep you in, and a postponed or removed pick never knocks you out. A week sat out, or left short of three picks, ends the run.

Four competition families

• 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: