Vertize Sports is two things at the same time. It is somewhere to check a score, a table or a schedule. And it is somewhere to ask what happens next, then answer it yourself, game by game.
The first half is what you would expect from a sports site: fixtures, results, league tables, full season schedules, rankings and leaderboards, across twelve sports — soccer, NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, WNBA, college football, college basketball, tennis, Formula 1, golf and UFC. Forty-one competitions are live right now, from the Premier League and LaLiga down to League Two and the National League, plus MLS, the A-League and the domestic cups.
The second half is the part that took the work, and it is the reason the site exists.
The simulators
Almost every competition here has a simulator attached to it. You do not start from a blank page. The season so far is already in place, with every result that has actually happened filled in and locked. What is left is everything still to be played, and that part is yours.
They come in three shapes, because three kinds of competition need three kinds of tool:
- League simulators, for soccer. You go matchday by matchday, type a scoreline into each match, and the table rebuilds itself underneath as you type. The promotion, European and relegation zones move with it.
- Season simulators, for the North American leagues. The NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL and WNBA are not played in tidy matchdays, so these work night by night instead, and rebuild both conference standings as you go.
- Cup simulators, for knockout football. You pick who goes through in each tie and the bracket carries the winners forward — including into rounds that have not been drawn in real life yet.
What is locked, and why
Matches that have already been played cannot be edited. That is deliberate, and it is the rule the whole site is built on: results are facts, not predictions. A simulator that lets you rewrite last weekend is a toy. One that starts from the real table and asks what you would do with the rest of the season is a question worth answering.
So the table you begin with is the real one, with the real points, and the first thing you can change is the first thing that has not happened yet.
The button that fills it in for you
Typing out thirty remaining matchdays by hand is a lot to ask, so most simulators have a button that fills in the rest for you. It is not a random number generator.
Every team carries a rating centred on zero. The difference between two ratings becomes an expected goal count for each side, and the actual scoreline is drawn from a Poisson distribution, which is the shape goals genuinely follow in football. The two baseline numbers — 1.50 goals for the home side, 1.25 for the away side — are the real long-run Premier League averages. Put two identical teams against each other and the model returns exactly those figures, which means home advantage here comes out of the data rather than out of a number someone nudged until it looked about right.
Where there are no ratings solid enough to stand behind, the button simply does not appear. We would rather not offer the feature at all than offer it while quietly making the numbers up.
And it is a draw, not a verdict. Run it twice and you will get two different seasons, which is the honest way to represent a competition nobody has played yet.
Where the numbers come from
Scores, fixtures, tables and venues come from live data feeds and refresh on a half-hour cycle, so nothing you are looking at is more than about thirty minutes behind the real thing. Pages are generated in advance and served ready-made, which is why they open quickly even when one of them is carrying an entire season of games.
Kick-off times for the North American leagues are shown in US Eastern rather than in your own clock, and that is on purpose. An NBA game starting at 9:30pm Eastern falls after midnight UTC, so in a browser-local view a single night of basketball splits across two calendar dates and stops looking like a night at all.
Nothing you type is saved
There is no account, no sign-up and no paywall. There is also nowhere for your season to go: the results you enter live in the browser tab and nothing more. They are not written to a server, they are not stored on your device, and they are not attached to you in any way.
The practical consequence is worth knowing before you spend an hour on a bracket — refreshing the page starts you over from the real standings. The upside is that you can be as reckless as you like. Relegate the champions. It costs nothing.
Finding your way around
Every address on the site follows the same shape: the sport, then what you want from it. So /nfl/schedule is the NFL schedule, /soccer/table is the Premier League table, and /nba/simulator is where you play out the NBA season. Individual competitions sit one level deeper, which is how you reach /soccer/fixtures/la-liga or /soccer/simulator/serie-a.
The bar across the top moves between sports, and the row underneath it moves between competitions inside the sport you are already in. Competitions we do not have data for yet are shown greyed out rather than hidden, so you can see what is coming without clicking into an empty page.
What is still being built
Some sections are published but empty on purpose and marked as in build. Their pages and addresses exist before their content does, so that when the content ships it lands somewhere search engines already know about, instead of at a brand new address nobody has ever visited.
This blog is one of those places. It starts here, with this article, and it will fill up with the things a table cannot explain on its own: how a playoff seeding actually resolves, what a tiebreaker does when three teams finish level, why a bracket is drawn the way it is.
In the meantime, pick a sport from the bar at the top and take a season apart. That is what it is for.