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.
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.
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.
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.
The written guides - on running a predictions league, Last Man Standing strategy, sweepstakes, football darts and the rest - are written by me, from running and playing these games for years. They are opinionated on purpose: where there is a right way to set something up, the guide says so.
The gameweek reviews are different. They 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 - and the commentary is drafted automatically from those numbers so it can go out the moment the last match ends. 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.
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.