Forecasts,
not tips.
A calibrated football model that commits to its predictions in public, before kickoff, and then publishes how it did.
What this site is
Sensible Stats publishes probabilistic forecasts for the Premier League, the Champions League and the 2026 World Cup. Every match forecast is written to a public log before kickoff, settled against the result afterwards, and never rewritten. The full record — including the misses — is on the accuracy page.
It publishes probabilities and projections. It does not publish tips, odds comparisons, accumulators or staking advice, and it has no affiliation with any bookmaker. If you are looking for a betting service, this is not one.
Who runs it
Sensible Stats is an independent project built and maintained by Rich Pomfret. There is no newsroom behind it and no sponsor: the site is one person, a model, and a set of scheduled jobs that refresh the data without anybody opening a laptop.
Everything published here is generated from that model and from the named data sources below. Nothing on the site is written by hand to fill a gap, and no number is ever back-filled after a match has been played.
How the model works
Team strength comes from a time-weighted Elo rating. A Dixon-Coles Poisson model turns those ratings into goal expectations and a full scoreline distribution, and a gradient-boosted classifier predicts the outcome directly from the same features. The published forecast is a blend of the two.
Season-long title, top-four and relegation probabilities come from a Monte Carlo sweep of every remaining fixture. Candidate models are replayed out-of-sample against completed seasons and only ship if they improve both Brier score and log loss. The full method, including the caveats and the rejected candidates, is set out on the accuracy and methodology page.
Where the data comes from
Live fixtures, results and standings come from football-data.org. Historical match event data used for research and backtesting comes from StatsBomb open data. Where a feed is degraded or unavailable, the site says so on the page rather than substituting an invented value.
Getting in touch
Corrections, questions and bug reports are all welcome — see the contact page. If you think a published forecast or a settled result is wrong, please say so; the record only means something if it is correctable.