About Punctae

How the numbers are made

Three steps, run again after every matchday:

1. 1Every club carries a rating built from its results, adjusted for home advantage.
2. 2Each remaining fixture becomes a set of scoreline probabilities drawn from those ratings.
3. 3The rest of the season is played out thousands of times. What you read is how often something happened, not a forecast.

What a probability means here

A team that stays up in 91% of runs is not safe. It went down in nine seasons out of a hundred we played, and those nine are as real as the ninety-one.

It says 99.9% and not 100% because 100% here means mathematically settled — no remaining combination of results can change it. 0% means impossible rather than merely unobserved. Rounding is never allowed to manufacture certainty.

What the model does not account for

A model knows what it has been shown: ratings, fixtures, goals. It does not know about:

• Injuries and suspensions
• Transfers
• A manager change
• Motivation, and a squad with nothing left to play for
• Weather and scheduling
• Anything off the pitch

When it runs

Fixtures and results are pulled in continuously, and every competition re-runs once its matchday finishes. Each page says when the run it is showing happened, so you are never reading a number without knowing how old it is.