About the project
Uncle Predictor started in 2014, during that year's World Cup, as a game between friends run on spreadsheets. Twelve years later it's an app — but the rules that made it last are still the same.
How it worked in 2014
Each player filled in a spreadsheet with their predicted scores for the upcoming matches and sent it off before the matchday kicked off. At the other end, those predictions were copied by hand into a master sheet, the scoring was worked out and the updated leaderboard went out to the group. There were even printed game cards for those who preferred paper.
It was rudimentary and took a considerable amount of work — but it ran for an entire World Cup and nobody wanted to stop when it ended. Three things made the game last: you predicted the exact score, not just the winner; there was a leaderboard everyone followed closely; and there was a deadline after which nothing could be changed.
The limits of that model
- Manual work every matchday. Collecting, copying and double-checking everyone's sheets.
- Deadlines enforced by hand. Making sure nobody sent theirs in after a match had started was down to whoever was collecting.
- No live tracking. The leaderboard only arrived once the matchday was closed and processed.
- Hard to grow. With a small group it was manageable; with a lot of people it stopped being so.
The current version
Each player's sheet became a game card in the app, which saves itself and locks automatically 1 hour before kick-off. The master sheet became a database that calculates the scoring as soon as the result comes in.
With automatic scoring, mechanics that were impractical by hand became possible:
- Rarity bonus, which requires comparing every player's predictions for each match.
- Live leaderboard, with the points moving while matches are being played.
- Notifications before every deadline, instead of relying on everyone's memory.
- Several competitions at once, each with its own leaderboard.
The scoring was rebalanced around one principle: rewarding those who take risks. Predicting 1-0 for everything is safe and rarely wins. Hence the rarity bonus, the Joker and the tie-break criteria. It's all in the rules.
How it's built
For years the game ran on Google Sheets with scripts layered on top. That was already a step up from emailing spreadsheets around, but it hit its limit when the number of players grew and the live leaderboard arrived.
In July 2026 everything moved to a database. The scoring, which used to be calculated in each person's browser, is now done on the server — which guarantees that everyone sees exactly the same points. Results come in automatically from an official football data source, with nobody typing them in by hand. In August 2026 the Android app launched on Google Play, running the same version of the game.
The 2026 World Cup ran entirely on this version: 104 matches and 4,305 predictions recorded, with the leaderboard updating during matches and not a single spreadsheet in sight. That's the data behind the strategy guides — not third-party statistics, but what the players of this game actually wrote down.
What Uncle Predictor is not
It's not a tipster site either. We don't publish odds, we don't recommend bets, and the content of the guides is about how to score better in this game, not about where to put your money.
Who's behind it
Uncle Predictor is an independent project, developed and maintained in Portugal — no team, no investors and no paid advertising. It has grown by word of mouth between groups of friends, workmates and families who wanted a proper leaderboard for the league season or the World Cup.
All the content on this site is written from scratch and the analysis comes from the game's own data. Whenever a number appears on a page, the date it was compiled is stated.
If you have a suggestion or spot a mistake — in the writing or in the numbers — the contact page is always open.