About
Football forecasts, measured honestly.
MatchScout forecasts matches across eleven European leagues and the major UEFA competitions. It publishes probabilities — not tips — and it measures itself against the one benchmark that matters: bookmaker closing odds.
How the model works
The core is a Dixon-Coles bivariate Poisson model. Every club has an attack and a defence strength; home and away goals are drawn from Poisson distributions built from those strengths and a home-advantage term. Two refinements matter:
- A low-score correction for 0–0, 1–0, 0–1 and 1–1, where naive independent Poissons misprice a large share of real scorelines.
- Time decay — each past match is weighted by how long ago it was, half-life about 200 days, chosen by out-of-sample tuning.
All parameters are fitted at once by maximum likelihood, so every market is a coherent sum over the same score matrix.
Promoted clubs
Three clubs arrive each season with little or no top-flight history. Over ten seasons, promoted sides score 28% fewer goals and concede 31% more than league average. Treating them as average is the single biggest source of early-season error, so MatchScout shrinks them toward that empirical prior and reads their second-tier form at a heavy discount.
How it’s measured
Profit over any realistic number of bets is dominated by variance. The honest test of a forecasting model is closing line value — whether its selections consistently beat the price the market settles on. That is very hard to do by luck. MatchScout tracks it and reports it plainly: the model does not beat the closing line. The ranking it produces is useful for finding matches worth a closer look; it is not an edge you can bet blindly.
Known limitations
- Well calibrated in the 0.2–0.5 range; under-confident on heavy favourites (matches priced ~0.74 have come in nearer 0.85).
- No player-level data. A missing first-choice striker and a missing reserve count the same.
- Cross-league ratings are the weakest part — the linkage rests on a thin set of UEFA fixtures, corrected against ClubElo.
- The Super Lig and Bundesliga are the weakest single-league fits.
- Fixture times are cached for 12 hours; late rescheduling can lag.
Data
Historical results and bookmaker odds come from football-data.co.uk. Cross-league rating anchors come from ClubElo. The forecasts themselves need no personal data; if you sign up for email alerts we hold your address for that alone — see the privacy notice.
MatchScout is operated by Tronk Solutions Limited (UK, company no. 12094442). Questions or complaints: hello@tronk.co.uk. Service status.