What American Sports Fans Should Know About Football Predictions
The Premier League has never been bigger in the United States. NBC's deal brought live matches to American living rooms, and the audience has grown every year since. If you are one of the millions of Americans who now wakes up early on Saturday to watch football - proper football, not the kind with helmets - you are probably ready to take the next step. Score prediction games are one of the best ways to make every match feel personal, even when your favourite club is not playing.
But football predictions work differently from anything you are used to in American sports. The scoring is lower, draws are a real thing, and the league structure follows completely different rules. Here is what you need to know.
The Biggest Difference: Draws Exist
This is the single most important thing for American sports fans to understand. In the NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB, someone wins. There might be overtime, extra innings, or a shootout, but regular-season games produce a winner. In the Premier League, roughly 25 to 27 percent of matches end in a draw. That is more than one in four. If you are ignoring draws in your predictions, you are ignoring a quarter of all results. We have a full guide on when to predict a draw that is worth reading.
Draws are not boring. They are tactically fascinating and incredibly valuable for prediction purposes. A well-timed 1-1 prediction is worth just as much as nailing a 3-0 - and it is often easier to get right because most people in your prediction league will not bother predicting them.
Low Scores Are Normal, Not Boring
If you come from the NFL where a 28-24 scoreline is unremarkable, or the NBA where teams routinely score over 100 points, football scores can feel shockingly low. A 1-0 result is not a defensive bore - it is a perfectly normal, respectable football match. In fact, low-scoring games are some of the easiest to predict.
Here is a rough guide to what different scorelines mean in football:
- 0-0 - A tight, tactical match. More common than you would expect (about 7-8% of matches)
- 1-0 - One of the most common results. A goal and a defensive effort
