First-Day-of-Season Tipsters: Who to Trust on Opening Weekend

**TL;DR: **On opening weekend nobody has any data, so most public predictions are educated guesses dressed up as expertise. Trust tipsters who hedge clearly, who weight pre-season properly, and who admit when they cannot tell.

Opening weekend is the most-predicted, least-predictable round of the year. Newspapers run their team-by-team previews. Pundits issue title and relegation forecasts. Twitter explodes with confidence. And almost none of it is based on data, because there is no data yet.

Why opening weekend predictions are so wild

Last season finished in May. Since then, every team has had a transfer window, a pre-season camp, a manager update or two, and a crop of new players. The 'form table' from May does not really apply. The summer friendlies are not a reliable guide either, because teams are training through them and rotating heavily.

This is what makes predicting opening weekend genuinely hard. The data you do have is incomplete, the data you do not have is the entire start of the new season.

Tipster red flags to watch for

If you are scrolling previews and trying to work out who to listen to, watch for these warning signs:

• Confident exact-score predictions for every fixture in round one
• Heavy reliance on pre-season friendly results
• Quoting last season's xG numbers as if they still apply
• Predicting promoted teams to win at top-six grounds
• Calling the title race finished after one weekend
• Never updating their priors when they are wrong

Tipsters worth your time

The good ones share a few habits. They hedge. They give percentages instead of certainties. They flag fixtures they cannot read. They distinguish between 'this is what I think' and 'this is what the data says'.

Most importantly, they update. A pundit who insists their pre-season call was right even when it has been disproved by three matchdays is selling pride, not analysis. The psychology of football predictions article digs into why so many predictors struggle to revise.

How bookmakers handle opening weekend