About Predictions League

Predictions League is a free site for playing football with your mates: score predictions leagues, Last Man Standing pools, tournament sweepstakes and Football 501, the football darts game. It is built and run by one person, Richard Kiy, in the UK.

Where it came from

It started as a passion project. I was playing a predictions league with friends, the kind that lives in a group chat and a spreadsheet that one person has to update every Sunday night, and at the same time I was learning Python. Building something to score the predictions automatically seemed like a good way to practise. It scored the predictions, then it locked them at kickoff so nobody could edit a score after the early game, then it ran the Last Man Standing pool as well, and at some point it had become a website.

I kept working on it for fun. Every feature on the site exists because a group I play in wanted it: the reveal grid after kickoff, the wipeout rules for a pool, guest entrants in a sweepstake so the colleague who will never install an app can still hold a team. The football darts game came from a car journey.

What it is now

Predictions leagues with your own scoring, Last Man Standing pools with the rules you agree up front, sweepstakes with a live draw and a shareable results link, and Football 501, which scores every footballer you name against a real database so nobody has to argue about the numbers. Fixtures and results sync from football-data.org, deadlines lock themselves, and there is a weekly gameweek review built from the predictions people actually made on the site.

It works on any phone, installs to the home screen like an app if you want it to, and sends a reminder before each deadline if you ask it to.

Free, and how it stays that way

Everything on the site is free to play and always has been: no subscription, nothing to buy, no premium tier. It is a hobby, not a business, and the running costs are small. To cover the hosting, the public pages that you can reach without signing in carry a small number of ads; signed-in members never see any. The site never handles money - if a group plays for a prize, that is an arrangement between friends and nothing to do with the site.

If you want to help keep it running, the best things you can do are play, tell your mates, and report anything that looks wrong.

Who writes the guides and reviews

The written guides - on running a predictions league, Last Man Standing strategy, sweepstakes, football darts and the rest - are drafted with the help of an AI writing assistant, working from how the games on this site actually run and the rules groups play by, and published by me. Each one says so next to its date. They are opinionated on purpose: where there is a right way to set something up, the guide says so. I'm adding my own experience of running these games to them over time.

The gameweek reviews are built from the site's own data - how many people backed each result, which exact scores were called, which Last Man Standing picks survived. The stats commentary is drafted automatically from those numbers with AI assistance, and when I have something to say about a round, my own take goes at the top under my name. The figures are never edited by hand, each review says how many predictions it was built from, and a round is only written up when enough people played for the numbers to mean something.

Get in touch

Bug reports, feature ideas, a rule your group plays by that the site doesn't support yet: email richard.kiy@hotmail.co.uk or see the contact page. How your data is handled is on the privacy page.