🎯 Games

Where a league has its own graded game model (the NFL, college football, MLB, the Premier League and the Champions League), that model’s number leads and the Universal Index figure for the same game sits under it as the cross-sport baseline. Every other league shows the index figure alone: the index’s own Elo, priced through each engine’s formula (the club Elo’s draw-aware model for club football, World Football Elo for national sides, the league Elo with its home edge for the NBA and NHL).

A league model’s game is paired with the index’s only when the day, the home side and the away side all match by slug or by name; if they cannot be matched with confidence the model’s number is shown alone. Market prices, where shown, have the bookmaker’s margin removed. Every forecast freezes at kickoff and is scored against the result on the league’s own page. Times are London time.

Back-tested on the last three seasons of our own results (Brier score, lower is better): club football 0.598 against 0.651 for the base rate; men’s internationals 0.515 against 0.637; women’s 0.488 against 0.613; NBA 0.210, NHL 0.239 and MLB 0.244 per game (two-way); the NFL’s Elo 0.224 against the closing market’s 0.209. A team starting a new season is carried over exactly as its engine seeds it.