10 Mistakes Every New Football Predictor Makes

Everyone starts a prediction game thinking they have got this. You watch football every week, you know the teams, you have strong opinions. How hard can it be?

Then the first results come in and you are sitting on 2 points from 10 fixtures. The person in your league who "doesn't really follow football" has 11. It is a humbling experience.

Most of the mistakes new predictors make are the same ones. Here are the ten that come up again and again, and what to do instead.

1. Predicting your own team to win every match

This is by far the most common mistake. Your loyalty says Arsenal 3-0, but Arsenal are away at Anfield having lost their last four visits. Bias clouds your judgement more than any other factor.

The fix: Try to predict your own team's matches last. Do all the neutral fixtures first while your head is clear, then come back to your team and be brutally honest.

2. Ignoring the draw

New predictors almost never predict draws. It feels like a cop-out. But roughly 25% of Premier League matches end in a draw. If you are not predicting any, you are writing off a quarter of the results before you start.

The fix: Look at your predictions before you submit. If you have not predicted a single draw across 10 fixtures, something is wrong. Matches between evenly matched sides, especially away from home, end in draws more often than people think. 1-1 is one of the most common scorelines in English football.

3. Going for scorelines that look exciting

4-3 is a great scoreline to watch. It is a terrible scoreline to predict. It almost never happens. New predictors tend to go for dramatic results because they are more fun to imagine, but the points go to people who predict boring, realistic scores.

The fix: Stick to low-scoring predictions unless you have a very good reason not to. 1-0, 2-1, 1-1, 2-0 - these four scorelines account for a massive chunk of all Premier League results. They are not exciting, but they win points.

4. Not checking team news

You predict Manchester City to win 3-0, then find out their two best midfielders are injured and their striker is suspended. The team that takes the pitch is nothing like the team you had in your head.