Q: What is taybl?
taybl is a game that started socially between friends, originally called “Prediction League”.
Everyone in the group writes down what they think the final Premier League table will look like, before a ball has been kicked.
Whoever is closest at the end of the season wins the kitty. And sometimes gets to pick the following week’s teams for 6-a-side…
It was all pen-and-paper until Adam decided he had far too much time on his hands, so built a digital version with a few tweaks to keep it interesting throughout the whole season!
Q: How does it work?
Everyone who enters arranges the teams in the order they predict the league table will look week-on-week.
Once the season starts, the real-world league table is used to calculate each player’s score periodically for the current Match Week.
This is the “week” of the season that is currently taking place, and is exactly the same as in Fantasy Football.
- i.e. for a Premier League season with 20 teams, there are 38 Match Weeks.
Q: How much does it cost to enter?
Entry costs £10.00, which is split out as follows:
- £5.00 to the winner’s kitty at the end of the season
- £2.50 donation to The Liz Clarke-Saul Fund for adamantinoma research
- £2.50 donation to Forest Holme Hospice
Q: What can I win?
The total prize fund is determined by the number of players.
For every entry, £5.00 will be added to the winner’s kitty which is then shared between the top 3 positions on the leaderboard at the end of the season.
See the question above for the full split.
Q: How do I win?
The winner’s kitty will be split between the 3 players with the highest overall score at the top of the Leaderboard once all Match Weeks have been completed within the season.
See the next question for an outline of how the scoring works.
Q: How are points calculated?
Each player begins with 200† points every Match Week, and will receive 1 “hit point” for each position that has been predicted incorrectly for each team.
For example:
| Prediction | Actual | Points Hit |
| Team A in 1st | Team A in 3rd | -2 |
| Team B in 20th | Team B in 15th | -5 |
| Team C in 10th | Team C in 10th | -0 |
Once a new Match Week starts, the previous Match Week’s score is frozen and the next Match Week begins with a score of 200.
The total cumulative score over all Match Weeks for each player is used to calculate the Leaderboard, which is topped by the person with the highest cumulative score across the season.
In the event of a tie on the Leaderboard, the tied players will be ordered by the highest single Match Week score that each of them has gained throughout the season up to that point.
†Please note: the 2022-23 season originally began with a weekly starting score of 100 points for each player.
However, players who incurred more than 100 hit points actually received an overall negative score for a single Match Week, which then put them at a disadvantage should a new player join the following Match Week (the new player has a cumulative score of 0 points, which is greater than a negative score so actually started the new player higher in the leaderboard than these existing players, which is against the spirit of the game!)
The starting score of 100 has therefore been increased to 200 to ensure that players can no longer achieve a negative score within a single Match Week.
(200 is the highest number of hit points possible with a league of 20 teams = 19+17+15+13+11+9+7+5+3+1+1+3+5+7+9+11+13+15+17+19)
This fix was released on 14/08/2022 in the middle of Match Week 2, and a one-off recalculation of all Match Week 1 scores was then performed.
Q: How can I maximise my score?
Each time a new Match Week begins, you’ll be able to login and swap the position of 2 teams in your predicted table.
For example, if we thought Arsenal were going to do quite well, we might put them 5th in our table. But if they don’t have the best start to the season - and by Match Week 4 find themselves in 14th - this would give us an extra 9 “hit points” in the game.
We might therefore decide to swap Arsenal into 14th position in our own table for Match Week 5, which would be more likely to get us closer to 0 hit points (for Arsenal at least).
However, this means whoever we had previously in 14th position (maybe Southampton? Or Leeds?) would now have to occupy 5th position. And depending on their current progress, we could end up with a lot more than the original 9 hit points we had for Arsenal…
These kinds of scenarios - coupled with the fact that the league table can actually swing quite significantly week-on-week, especially in the first half of a season - are all factors to take into account when deciding which teams to swap each Match Week.
Q: Do I have to make changes every week?
Nope!
You’re more than welcome to submit your initial prediction and ride it out for the whole season if you prefer to live dangerously…
Q: How do I make payment?
Payment is required as part of your entry and is processed via PayPal.
We’ve used PayPal’s basic Checkout Integration in order to provide the most secure and seamless way of making payment.
This means you don’t necessarily need a PayPal account yourself, and can use a credit/debit card (sent directly to PayPal’s servers) instead.
Whilst the payment flow itself is embedded into our site for convenience, the transactions themselves only ever take place directly with PayPal.
See the documentation for more info/peace of mind!
Q: When can I enter?
Entries are open now for the 2022-23 Premier League season!
Q: Where does the real-world league table data come from?
All real-world football data is consumed from football-data.org.
This is a very comprehensive, developer-friendly, near-realtime data source that covers a significant number of global football competitions, including the Premier League and EFL Championship.
Under the hood, the API itself retrieves its own data from multiple open sources, as well as the Data Sports Group.
taybl consumes the latest league table data from football-data.org every 15 minutes. It then relies on this data to determine its own logical processes, including when a new Match Week has begun (i.e. the current “round number” value has been increased since the last data pull).
Q: How is the project supported/funded?
In order to ensure that 100% of all entry fees go to the winner’s kitty and charity donations each season, we cover all of the on-going running costs out of our own pocket. This includes payment processing (via Paypal), hosting, build/deployment pipelines, domain registration and transactional emails (via Mailgun).
We also build and maintain the project in our spare time for free.
If you’re a developer and are able to donate any of your time in helping to maintain the project, please do get in touch or fork us on GitHub.
Q: Which charities are you supporting?
All charity proceeds are donated equally to the following fantastic causes who do exceptional work:
The Liz Clarke-Saul Fund pioneers research into adamantinoma - a rare form of bone cancer - and is supported by the Bone Cancer Research Trust. Liz is a GB Paracycling Squad bronze medalist who sadly passed away in 2020, leaving an incredible legacy that we are honoured to support in any way we can.
Forest Holme Hospice are a vital organisation who provide life-enhancing support to our local communities in Poole, Wimborne and the Isle of Purbeck.