What changed

Pay without leaving the site, and a sheet that grades itself faster

The checkout now lives on our own page, and a leg is graded within the half hour of full time.

• Feature Joining Pro happens on footballbetbuilder.co.uk itself: the checkout is on our own page, billed in your own currency, with no account to create with anyone else.
• Feature Every leg on the sheet is graded from the live scores board, so a Friday night game is settled on the page before you go to bed rather than the next morning.
• Feature Where the research desk's only objection to a call is the price, it now says so beside the leg instead of removing the leg. The football read and the price are two different judgements, and you see both.
• Feature Tomorrow's free acca lands in the Telegram channel every evening at 19:30, straight from tomorrow's sheet.
• Content The sheet is written the moment the site starts if a scheduled write was missed, so the days ahead are always there.

The daily sheet, rebuilt, and the previews list opened up

Everything we price, in one place, with the working-out under every bet. And the biggest page on the site stops hiding the number.

• Feature The daily sheet now reads the whole board rather than a handful of leagues: three accas, the strongest single bets ranked, and the markets we refused, each with the research and the team news underneath.
• Feature A ready-made same-game slip for every fixture we price, four days out, grouped by day and priced from real bookmaker odds.
• Feature Sheets are written three days ahead, so a weekend can be planned on a Thursday. Every pick carries the day, the kick-off and the minute it was locked.
• Feature Double stamped picks: where the board and the research desk land on the same market independently, and the price is worth taking, the bet is marked.
• Content A losing acca now shows which of its legs landed. Yesterday's result sits at the top of the sheet, and every sheet we have issued is one click away, graded, losses included.
• Content The previews list shows our number on every fixture, not three of them, and it stays on the row once a game kicks off.

FBB Pro: the research desk behind the picks

The model has always published its calls before kick-off and graded them in public. From today there is a paid tier for what happens in between: the research that decides whether a call survives.

• Feature The desk's written card on each game: who is missing, how the opponent sets up, whether the price is worth taking, and a verdict that can throw the model's own call out.
• Feature The model's number on every pick, row and market, not a star rating: the probability it actually calculated, next to the price you can get.
• Feature The board's calls, priced: every call on the board with the model's number and the best real price beside it, exchanges excluded.
• Feature The morning sheet: every leg with the reason it is there, every refusal with the reason it is not, locked before the first kick-off. On a quiet day it says no bet and prints why.
• Feature Fantasy picks and last man standing in full, and questions to the model without a daily limit.
• Feature Sign in by email from any device, with a six-character code for when the link lands on a different phone. Pro follows the account, not the browser.
• Fix The record stays free, and so do the daily board, the prices and every preview. A record behind a paywall is not proof of anything.

The site tour: sixty seconds, ten stops, hands on

New here and not sure where to start? The tour walks you through the whole site on live data, and you build your first leg yourself along the way.

• Feature A guided walkthrough from the homepage verdict to a real match page to the same-game builder: the record, the rails, the slip, the AI assistant, ten stops in about a minute. Look for "Take the 60-second tour" at the top of the homepage, or start it any time at /?tour=1.
• Feature It is hands on: mid-tour you tap a real price into your slip and watch it follow you to the next page.
• Feature Always current: the match the tour visits is chosen live from today's top-rated priced fixtures, so it can never show you a stale game.
• Fix Faster pages behind the scenes: above-the-fold content no longer fades in late, homepage scripts are cached instead of re-downloaded, and pages always revalidate so you never see a stale copy after we ship.

The black & gold redesign: one brand, one slip, every page

The biggest visual change since launch: the whole site moves to a black-and-gold design language, and the bet slip becomes a first-class citizen on every page.

• Feature Full redesign: every page, card and email in the new black & gold look, with a new crest, share image and a proper features page that says what the site does in one read.
• Feature A site-wide bet slip: tap any pick or price anywhere on the site (look for the + mark) and it lands in your slip, which follows you from page to page. Match-stat projections (corners, cards, fouls, shots) are now addable too, marked as model estimates.
• Feature Live scores rebuilt on a sturdier data feed after our previous source started refusing requests, the live board joins the site properly.
• Fix Match pages on phones: the favourite's big percentage no longer runs off the screen edge, and the floating slip and chat buttons no longer sit on top of the Open Bet Builder bar.
• Fix Unpriced fixtures no longer show placeholder 0% verdicts. Until the bookmakers price a game there is no rating, and the page now says so instead of inventing one.

Pipeline hardening: the posting engine gets regression-tested end to end

A week of unglamorous work on the machinery behind our social posts, because a record you can trust needs plumbing you can trust.

• Fix Live-match updates: if we post a half-time score we now always post the full-time result, no more matches left hanging at 45 minutes.
• Fix Result cards can never show placeholder text or a WON badge on a losing slip; a lost slip now says so plainly, with the legs that failed marked.
• Feature One house card and one voice for everything we post, the same design whether it is a daily acca, a same-game fold or a hand-built slip, so you always know what you are looking at.
• Fix Over forty new automated tests pin all of this in place, covering result grading, card rendering, caption honesty and the daily posting caps.

EFL weekend: every league covered, better emails, a faster homepage

The Football League returns, and the site is ready for it.

• Feature Bet builders now cover the whole EFL slate, Championship, League One and League Two, plus an Under 4.5 goals market across the site.
• Feature The Match of the Day email is now a short letter in a human voice, and only sends when a pick clears a real quality bar, no more filler emails about games we do not rate.
• Fix Homepage first load went from seconds to instant: the heavy builds now happen in the background and stay warm.
• Fix The status monitor was redesigned for phones, and match previews on mobile now load beyond the first screenful.

Live on X, graded in public

Our X account now runs on the same rules as the site: every posted bet logged before kick-off and graded after it, losses included.

• Feature Daily posting goes live: same-game fold cards built from live bookmaker prices, a daily top-picks card, and result cards after full time, wins and losses alike.
• Model Grading got stricter: an acca only ever counts as a winner if every leg lands. Partial hits are losses, on the site and in every recap.
• Feature Accas will not stack correlated legs any more, one leg per price family per match, so a single event cannot sink two legs at once.
• Fix Duplicate-detection in the results feed fixed so the public sample counts each pick exactly once.

A database for bet builders: 24 tracked price families

Every market we surface now belongs to a tracked family with its own public record, the groundwork for rating whole bet builders, not just single picks.

• Feature Twenty-four price families (goals, corners, cards, shots, result markets and more) tracked from live bookmaker odds on every fixture we cover.
• Feature Every bet-builder page gets the full market board and a slip, and builders enforce one leg per family so the combinations stay honest.
• Fix Site navigation rebuilt; first-half markets no longer mis-grade as automatic losses.
• Content Off-season SEO build: evergreen guides and market explainers published while the fixture list was thin.

The honesty release: verdicts only where the record has earned them

A sweep of every number the site publishes, so no page can claim more than the record supports.

• Model Model verdicts and star ratings now appear only on leagues where our record is proven with a real verified sample. Everywhere else you get the bookmakers' odds and the data, clearly labelled, with no dressed-up claim.
• Fix One live accuracy number site-wide, computed from the verified ledger, never hardcoded, never stale. Several pages quoting their own stale figures were brought into line.
• Feature Shadow tracking now covers every league we list, building the evidence that decides when a league earns verdicts.
• Feature Single picks are tracked and graded individually, not just accas, and the track record shows them.

Forward-tracked odds and the proven-model page

We started recording bookmaker prices at the moment we publish a pick, so the record reflects odds you could actually have taken.

• Feature Every published pick now logs the live bookmaker price alongside it, forward-looking, never back-filled.
• Content A proven-model page that sells exactly what we measure, prediction accuracy on verified leagues, and deliberately does not claim profit.
• Fix Value-bet odds logging corrected so the edge calculations use the price that was really on the board.

Ask the site anything: the assistant arrives

A chat assistant grounded in our own data, ask about any fixture, market or number on the site and it answers from the same sources the pages use.

• Feature Site-wide AI chat: fixtures, form, head-to-heads, our rated markets and the track record, answered with the site's own numbers and honest about what it does not know.
• Feature Season watcher: league pages know when their season is over and say so, pointing you at what is actually on.
• Model World Cup learning loops fed the tournament's verified results back into calibration through the summer.

Kick-off day: live group standings, full-site audit, every page in the new design

Three independent audits swept every page on the site the night before the World Cup, then we fixed the lot.

• Feature Live World Cup group standings: points tables now compute from real finished results within ~15 minutes of full time, with honest empty states before the first whistle. Fixtures page gets a "jump to today" anchor and final-score stamps on played matches.
• Feature Head-to-head pages now draw on our verified results archive, so they stay rich with real past meetings through the summer break instead of going empty.
• Fix The "Build a bet for this match" button on World Cup match pages linked to a dead URL. Fixed. Bet builder pages also stopped pairing redundant legs (Over 2.5 + Over 3.5 in one builder).
• Fix Off-season honesty everywhere: league pages, the EFL hub and team pages now say plainly when a season is over (and point you at the World Cup) instead of presenting May data as fresh.
• Feature Every remaining page, accuracy, track record, results, about, methodology, tips pages, team pages, value bets, brought into the new design language, with long-shot value bets clearly badged.

Full redesign for the World Cup: launcher homepage, one bet builder, tournament hub

The biggest visual and structural update we've shipped: the whole site rebuilt around one design language the day before the World Cup kicks off.

• Feature New launcher homepage, land and see every door: one Build-a-Bet button, six smart tiles with live stats (previews rated today, hit rate, matches in play), and a gold World Cup ribbon at the very top.
• Feature One bet builder, two modes: Smart Acca ("build it for me") and Pick & Mix ("I'll pick myself") merged into a single hub with a toggle. The Customise form is now a guided three-step flow (legs, markets, confidence) and builds without a page reload.
• Feature World Cup hub reorganised into a proper tournament centre, matches on now, bet the World Cup, the race for the trophy, teams & squads, news, with quick-link chips and the fixture wall capped to the next two days.
• Feature Match previews get a sticky section nav (Prediction · Odds · Form · H2H · Line-ups) and Today's Edges trend cards land on the homepage: real streaks tied to a fixture and a price.
• Fix Homepage is ~680KB lighter on mobile (pick data now loads only when you open the builder), long Smart Acca pick pools scroll properly, and building a custom acca no longer dumps the full fixture list under your slip.

Player-level data: injuries, xG, lineups

The model now sees who's actually playing. Until today we tipped Liverpool the same way whether Salah was fit or not. That's no longer true.

• Feature Live injury data per team: top-flight European leagues track every player out, the position, and how long they're expected to be sidelined. Match preview pages now show the casualty list.
• Model Injury impact baked into win probability. A team with 4+ key players out has its win chance shaved up to 3 percentage points; the opponent gains roughly half that back. Small but meaningful when the picks are close.
• Feature xG (expected goals) restored. The previous source died in April, replaced by a fresh feed. Each team page and match preview shows xG for, xG against, last-5 averages, and whether the team's been outscoring or underscoring its xG (a "running hot vs running cold" signal).
• Model xG regression in win probability: when a team's been outscoring xG by 0.3+ goals/game (lucky run), we shave its win chance accordingly. Underscoring teams get a small boost. Stops the model from chasing form that isn't backed by underlying performance.
• Feature Confirmed lineups now cached pre-match (data plumbing only this round, feeding into the model itself comes next).

For the technically curious: three new services pull from API-Football Ultra. Injury severity (0-5) and xG over/underperformance feed a new applyDataEnrichment() step that runs after the bookmaker-blend calibration on every H/D/A triple, with capped per-side adjustments and re-normalised totals. All adjustments are deliberately small. Dixon-Coles + bookmaker blend remain the dominant signals.

Smarter picks for less-covered leagues

Our model learns from past results, but we have way more results from the Premier League than from Eredivisie or the Saudi Pro League, so it could act overconfident on a Dutch top-flight match because the Premier League average looked fine. Today fixes that.

• Model If we don't have enough data on either team yet (fewer than 5 tracked matches), we now skip the fixture entirely. No tip on a side we genuinely don't know.
• Model Each league now keeps its own track record, so if Eredivisie's been overconfident at the 70–80% range, the model shaves a few points off Eredivisie picks at that range without affecting how it handles Premier League ones.
• Feature Net effect: fewer tips on the leagues we have least data on, more accurate confidence numbers on the leagues we have most.

For the technically curious: the Dixon-Coles + Poisson + bookmaker blend is unchanged. We've added a per-team data-volume guard at the start of pick selection, plus a per-league live-calibration map (keyed by league + market + probability bucket) that layers on top of the global market calibration once a league has 30+ verified picks at that confidence level.

Honest stats, methodology page, market tip pages, EFL hub

• Feature New /methodology page: the full Dixon-Coles + Poisson + bookmaker blend explained openly. No "AI" buzzwords. Competitors hide this; we publish it.
• Feature New /why-our-odds-look-lower page: why we quote UK retail prices instead of sharp/exchange ones you can't actually take.
• Feature New EFL hub page: Championship, League One, League Two as first-class citizens. Most tipster sites barely cover the lower leagues.
• Feature Three new market-tip pages: /over-2-5-tips, /btts-tips, /correct-score-tips, with daily auto-filtered picks plus evergreen explainer copy.
• Fix Three different "hit rate" numbers were drifting (homepage 70% / accuracy page 72% / track-record 69.8% / Telegram 73%). Every public surface now pulls the same live count from the verified CSV.
• Fix Min 1.20 odds floor extended from Over 1.5 to all five other tight markets (Under 1.5, Over/Under 3.5, all three Double Chance variants). Sub-1.20 picks no longer get tipped.
• Fix Telegram acca posts now require a minimum total of 2.00. If the day's picks won't combine to a 2× return, no acca goes out. Better silence than misleading 1.44 "accas".
• Fix /h2h pages no longer 200 + index garbage URLs. /h2h/foo-vs-bar now correctly 404s when neither team has data.
• Fix /teams index page now caches its view model for 1h instead of rebuilding 30 days of fixtures + 5,000 verified outcomes per request.

Pro-grade nav, Build a Bet hardening, team search

• Feature Top nav rebuilt to match the editorial-sportsbook standard: flat 5-link row (Tips · Previews · Saturday Acca · Accuracy · Track Record), Build a Bet promoted to a green CTA pill on the right, and a single search icon that expands inline. Mobile centres everything inside the hamburger panel.
• Feature New /teams index: every tracked team grouped by league with last-5 form pills, match-tracked count and a one-click search filter.
• Feature Nav search bar: type a team name, get up to 8 ranked results (prefix matches first), click to jump straight to the team page.
• Fix Build a Bet legs in niche markets (Eliteserien Over 1.5, Scottish Prem totals, lower La Liga Double Chance) were displaying sharp bookmakers like Pinnacle and Coolbet that UK users can't take. New UK retail fallback prefers Sky Bet, Bet365, Ladbrokes, Coral, Paddy Power, BetVictor, Unibet, BoyleSports, Betfred and 888sport when William Hill doesn't price the market.
• Fix Over 1.5 picks priced under 1.20 are now skipped. They barely move the acca payout but carry full break-the-acca risk. Picks now actually contribute meaningful return.
• Fix "No bookmaker odds available for this market" no longer fires on Over/Under 1.5 and 3.5 legs. The comparison panel populates correctly so you can see every book's price.
• Fix Today's Top Picks chips on the homepage now show the kickoff time (e.g. Sat 03 May, 15:00) so you can tell at a glance which game each pick is for.

Cleaner stats, tidier nav, smarter previews

• Feature Match preview pages no longer show 0% on Clean Sheet, BTTS or goals-per-game stats when the upstream data feed is sparse. We now fall back to our own form-window data, calculated from actual results.
• Feature Top nav split into a primary row (Home, Live, Previews, Sat Acca, Build, Track Record) plus a "More" dropdown for Value, Accuracy, Results, Offers, How It Works, Updates and Feedback. No more crammed line of 12 links.
• Model Nightly learning Telegram digest now reports data-cache health: team form, xG and injury caches are tagged healthy or warning with byte size and freshness, so stale feeds surface immediately.
• Fix Match writeup no longer says "BTTS sits at 0%, it's close to a coin flip" when there's genuinely no data; the line now skips entirely.

Universal team form, nightly learning, broader markets

• Model Daily learning loop now refits Dixon-Coles each night on results from every covered league. Half-life cut from 180 days to 45 days so ratings react to current form.
• Feature Form data added across all 26 leagues: last-5 W/D/L, home/away splits and a full match history with scores on every team page.
• Feature League pages (e.g. Saudi Pro League, MLS, Eliteserien) now show a form table with every team sorted by form points.
• Feature Smart Acca defaults broadened: BTTS, Draw No Bet and Double Chance now included by default. Over 1.5, Over 3.5, Under 4.5, Handicap +1 and Double Chance Home/Away thresholds calibrated against the walk-forward backtest.
• Fix Probability arithmetic: bookmaker overround is now stripped before calibration, so home/draw/away always sum to 100% (previously summed to ~115%).
• Fix Match-preview headlines and correct-score predictions no longer contradict the model's top pick.

Homepage redesign, Find Matches rebuild, William Hill display odds

• Feature Homepage redesign: quick-shortcuts strip (Previews · Live · Sat Acca · Track Record), trust strip with verified-prediction count, email signup for daily tips.
• Feature Find Matches redesign: Today / Tomorrow / Weekend / 7 Days quick chips, league pills, custom date range tucked behind a chip.
• Feature Displayed odds now default to William Hill where available, falling back to best across all books for markets they don't price.
• Content 16 new league SEO pages: World Cup, Conference League, MLS, Eredivisie, Eliteserien, Allsvenskan, Brazilian Série A, Saudi Pro League and more.
• Fix /api/v1/* responses now declare charset=UTF-8 so accented team names round-trip cleanly.
• Fix Today's Games posts no longer show 40-something percentages as if they're tips. Bunched outcomes are now flagged "Tight".

Pre-launch polish, EV tags everywhere, iOS backend

• Feature /track-record page with full sortable table and CSV download.
• Feature /team/{slug} and /h2h/{slug} pages launched for SEO.
• Feature Edge / value badges on every pick across the site.
• Feature iOS backend endpoints + FCM push notification service.
• Content Smart Acca / Build a Bet renamed and reframed across site, Telegram and the iOS app.
• Fix Hero CTAs clearer, mobile Top Picks horizontal scroll, build-a-bet duplicate picks resolved.

QA blockers cleared, Telegram overhaul

• Fix Stack-trace leak on 404 responses fixed.
• Fix Admin-only verify button removed from public /accuracy.
• Fix Old palette purged across templates; WIN badge contrast restored.
• Feature Telegram channel-first overhaul: friendlier copy, milestone tracking, Saturday acca posts.

Live scores

• Feature /live-scores page with proper match cards and goal events.
• Feature Live scores overlaid on previews and the homepage.
• Feature Match previews stay visible during and after kickoff.

xG, value bets, premium palette

• Feature xG data added to API and match preview pages.
• Feature Acca builder API and value-bets dashboard.
• Content Premium colour palette: blue-tinted darks, mint green and gold accents.

Initial public release

• Feature First public version of Football Bet Builder.
• Feature Predictions across 13 leagues with conservative odds, 30+ markets, verified accuracy tracking.
• Feature JSON API v1 published for the iOS app and external consumers.
• Feature League SEO pages launched.