What is real and what is simulated
The table or standings you start from are the real ones, and every game already played keeps its real score and cannot be edited. You can type a score into any game still to be played. The Simulate buttons fill in the season, or just the current round, with the model described below. Clear takes everything back to the real standings.
A simulation is one possible season, not a forecast. Run it twice and you get two different seasons, because the model draws each result at random from the range of results two teams like these produce.
Soccer
Each team has a rating centred on zero. The difference between two ratings sets how many goals each side is expected to score, and the actual scoreline is drawn from a Poisson distribution, the shape goals follow in real matches. Two equal teams average 1.50 goals for the home side and 1.25 for the away side, the long-run Premier League figures, so home advantage comes from the data.
- In the top leagues, a team's rating comes from its finishing position last season and the market value of its squad.
- In the lower divisions it comes from last season's tables across the whole pyramid, with a step between one division and the next.
- Tables are sorted by points, then goal difference, then goals scored.
In the Carabao Cup there are no scores: you pick the team that goes through in each tie. Rounds that have not been drawn yet are drawn on the page at random, as there are no seeds after the early rounds, and a button draws them again.
NFL, NBA, WNBA, MLB and NHL
These leagues are decided by records, not goals, so the model draws a margin of victory and a total score instead of goals. Each team is rated from its point differential per game (goal differential in the NHL, run differential in MLB), and the difference between two ratings sets the expected margin. What the ratings cannot explain becomes randomness, measured from real games.
- NFL: home teams win 53.7 percent of games, by 2.07 points on average, measured over all 272 games of the 2025 season. Ties are possible, and scores are rounded to ones football can produce.
- NBA: home teams win 55.4 percent, by 1.72 points, over 1,239 games of the 2025-26 season.
- WNBA: home teams win 53.5 percent, by 1.94 points, over the first 269 games of the 2026 season.
- MLB: home teams win 51.7 percent, by 0.05 runs, over 1,921 games of the 2026 season.
- NHL: home teams win 52.2 percent, by 0.13 goals, over 1,313 games of 2025-26. The model sends 24.8 percent of games to overtime, where the loser still gets a point.
Standings are sorted the way each league reads them: by points in the NHL, by winning percentage elsewhere, then by wins and point differential. The simulators mark the playoff places, and the play-in places in the NBA; the full official tiebreaker procedures, such as strength of schedule, are not modeled.
What the models leave out
Injuries, trades, lineups, rest days and weather are not in any model. A rating is a summary of how good a team was, not a scouting report, and that is the main reason a simulated season should be read as one plausible outcome rather than a prediction.
The blog's data pieces use the same models and say in a closing note how their numbers were built. Questions or corrections: futsimulator@proton.me.