Frequently Asked Questions

Starting 11 is a predicted-XI football game. You pick the starting eleven you think a manager will name, share it, and score points based on how close your XI is to the real one once the team sheet drops. It's free, and you don't need an account to play.

It's three steps. First, pick a fixture from the homepage, a club page, or a country page. Second, choose a formation and fill the eleven slots with the players you think will start. Third, save before the deadline and you get a share link right away. Once the manager names the official XI, we score your prediction automatically and update your profile and the leaderboards.

Click into any club or fixture, pick your formation, fill the eleven slots, and save. You get a share link straight away, and no account is required.

Not to predict. Every prediction works as a guest. Sign up if you want to save predictions to your profile, climb the leaderboard, and get lineup alerts for your favourite clubs by email.

Yes. Predicting, sharing, leaderboards, and alerts are all free.

Your XI is compared to the official starting eleven once it's announced. Each correct player you pick is worth one point, so a perfect call is 11 out of 11. We kept it simple on purpose. We're called Starting 11 for a reason.

No. Formation is a side note in the core scoring model. We track your formation accuracy separately and have a special award for users who consistently call it right, but it doesn't add to your prediction score.

We score against the official confirmed lineup as published by our data provider. Substitutes who come on during the match don't count, only the starting XI.

Every prediction shows your score out of 11 once the lineup lands. Sign up and those scores roll up into your profile and onto the leaderboards, so you can track your accuracy across a season and measure yourself against other fans.

A leaderboard that resets every calendar month, so joining midway through a season costs you nothing. It ranks on your average score per prediction rather than your total, which means predicting more games does not buy you a higher place. To qualify you need at least 5 scored predictions across 3 different match days, so one lucky call cannot take the title. Level averages are separated by who predicted more.

Predictions lock 120 minutes before kick-off by default, which is roughly when managers start releasing team news. A live countdown sits on the predict screen so you always know how long you have left. Once the deadline passes, that fixture becomes read-only.

Two hours before kick-off is the sweet spot. It's late enough to be a real test of judgement, but early enough that official team news hasn't leaked yet. Some fixtures use a longer cutoff to stay ahead of early leaks, for example the FA Cup, World Cup ties, and derbies on the final weekend of a season. Whatever the window is, the countdown on the predict screen always shows the real deadline.

The cutoff for that fixture had already passed, so we reject new writes to keep things fair. If your tab had been open a while you may have crossed the deadline without a refresh. Any version you saved before the cutoff is still safe in your account.

We lock predictions before team news lands. If a manager later swaps a player in the warm-up, we still score you against the originally announced XI, which matches what you were predicting against. We log late changes for our own analytics, but they never cost you points.

It's against the rules, and it's the one thing that can get a prediction thrown out. Predictions lock at the scheduled deadline, and we can lock a fixture early if we suspect team news has leaked. We also keep a full history of every edit, so a suspicious late change is easy to spot. Suspected cases are always reviewed by a real person using that history, never by an algorithm alone. If we find a prediction was edited off the back of a leak, we re-score it as it stood before the leak, and in serious or repeat cases we void it and remove the entrant from prize contention. Prizes are for signed-in accounts only, so guest predictions cannot win them. If you think we got a decision wrong, you can appeal it once by contacting us.

Sign up, turn on lineup alerts in your profile, then pick your favourite clubs. As soon as the manager announces the official starting XI, you get an email with the full XI, what changed since the last lineup, and your score out of 11 if you predicted that fixture, plus how your call stacked up against the crowd.

The alert email still goes out. It just shows the lineup with a nudge to predict the next one, framed around the club leaderboard rather than your score.

Yes. Turn on Prediction results in your profile and you get your score the moment the official XI drops for any fixture you predicted, even if it is not one of your favourite teams. It is on by default.

If you turn on Prediction reminders, we send one batched email a day before kick-off when a favourite club or country has a fixture you have not predicted yet. A single digest covers every open match, never one email per fixture. It is on by default.

A short one-off welcome note. It explains how the scoring works and shows what is happening at your favourite club, either the XI the crowd expects or who has just signed. You only ever get it once, and if you spot a player missing from a squad we would genuinely like you to reply and tell us.

Every email has a one-click unsubscribe link at the bottom, so a single tap stops that kind of email. You can also turn any channel on or off any time in your profile.

Yes, they're on the roadmap. For now, email is the only channel.

Paste your Fantasy Premier League Team ID on the FPL alerts page and we show your locked squad against our predicted and official lineups: who is confirmed starting, who is named on the bench, and who is out of the matchday squad entirely. It also previews what FPL will do automatically, like which bench player comes in for someone who does not play, and where the captain's armband goes. The one-off check is free and needs no account.

Open the Points page on the official FPL site or app while logged in. The number in the page address is your Team ID. It is public information, anyone with the number can view a team through FPL, and we only ever read what FPL already makes public.

Because by the time real lineups exist, your FPL team is locked. FPL closes changes 90 minutes before the first kickoff of a gameweek, and managers announce their teams roughly an hour before each match, always after that point. So everything we show is information about a locked team, never advice. What we can tell you, before anyone else, is what has actually happened to your players and what FPL's own rules will do about it.

Only if the benched player finishes the gameweek on zero minutes. This is the bit most people get wrong: a player who comes off the bench for even one minute keeps his place in your XI and scores his own points, and your substitute stays out. That is why we mark benched players as a watch case rather than a done deal, and only players left out of the squad entirely as near-certain.

At most one per kickoff wave, and only when something material happened to your team, like a starter left out, a captain problem, or a gap your bench cannot cover. If all your players are starting, we stay quiet. A typical gameweek is zero to three short emails, and you can narrow it to captain issues only, or widen it to a full matchday digest, in your alert settings.

No. Starting 11 is independent and not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Fantasy Premier League or the Premier League. We read publicly available team information from the FPL game, we cannot see your login or make any changes to your fantasy team, and you can disconnect your Team ID at any time.

Player data, fixtures, official lineups, and injuries all come from our official data provider, a professional sports-data feed. We also keep a second independent source as a verification fallback, so we can catch and correct the occasional discrepancy.

For Premier League clubs, the penalty, corner, and direct free kick order comes from Fantasy Premier League's published hierarchy, which their team keeps current through the season. For every other league we show each club's actual penalty record instead, taken from the season statistics our data provider supplies, since no reliable corner or free kick taker feed exists outside the Premier League.

The press conferences page indexes each club's own official website daily and links you straight to the original article or video on the club's site. We only track official club sources, and we never republish their content, just the headline and the link.

During transfer windows and pre-season, squads can briefly lag reality. Clubs confirm signings and loans before our data provider publishes them, so a player may appear or drop off a little after a move is done. We show a heads-up on the builder while a window is open, and the squad catches up as our provider confirms each move.

Two reasons. A player out on loan stays on the club page, marked with the club they have joined, because they are still the club's player, but they cannot start for it so the selector leaves them out. Academy and under-21 players are handled the same way: our data provider sends us the full registered squad with no marking of age group, so we identify the youth players ourselves and label them Academy on the club page rather than offering them in a lineup. If you spot a first team player wrongly marked, tell us and we will correct it.

If a confirmed XI leaks before our snapshot has run, the cutoff-time check still rejects predictions once the scheduled deadline has passed, even if our internal snapshot hasn't fired yet. Signed-in users can also flag a suspected leak for us to review.

Send us the player page link and the name you'd expect to see, and we'll override it. Plenty of players go by a single name, like Gabriel or Vinicius Jr, and a raw data feed doesn't always reflect that, so these reports genuinely help.

We keep it light. Cloudflare Web Analytics measures page speed and pageviews without any cookies. Google Analytics gives us session-level usage, and it only sets cookies if you agree. If you're in the UK, EU, or Switzerland we ask first with a cookie banner, and it stays off until you accept. We do not use advertising cookies or cross-site ad tracking.

Use the "Cookie settings" link in the footer at the bottom of any page. You can accept or reject analytics cookies there at any time, and if you reject, Google Analytics runs without cookies. Full detail is in our privacy policy.

Yes. The World Cup opened on 11 June 2026, hosted across the USA, Canada and Mexico. All 64 group-stage fixtures are loaded, and predictions are open up to 120 minutes before kick-off. Squad announcements keep flowing in as nations finalise their selections.

Yes. Every qualified nation has its own country page, for example /england or /brazil. Click any World Cup fixture from the homepage, the /world-cup page, or a country page to start predicting.

No, we keep streaks contextual. For World Cup predictions you'll see crowd-consensus info instead, for example '95% are predicting Kane to start', since pre-tournament friendlies are often poor predictors of a first XI.

After saving you get a share link. Paste it into X, WhatsApp, Discord, or wherever your group chats live, and the link unfurls into a pitch image showing the XI, the opponent, the kick-off time, and how many fans agree with you. It was built for football Twitter.

Yes. Each shared lineup has a "Copy this lineup" button. Registered users get a working copy in their account, and guests are prompted to sign up first.

The homepage activity feed shows recent predictions across clubs, and each card links to the full lineup. Once enough fans have predicted a fixture, the consensus XI becomes the headline on that club's page.

Yes, and it's free. Fan forums and football sites can embed a live crowd-XI widget for their club: it shows the predicted XI for the next fixture, updates itself every game, and invites your members to add their own pick. There is nothing to install or maintain. Visit the partner program to pick your club, grab the embed code, and apply.

No. Anyone can build and submit an XI in the widget without signing up for anything. If you want predictions credited to individual members, your site sends us a salted one-way hash of your member id, generated on your servers. We never receive usernames, display names, or email addresses, and anything that isn't a valid hash is discarded, so we can count and score a member's predictions without ever knowing who they are.

Go to Profile, then Favourite clubs. You can add or remove clubs there, and it controls which clubs send you lineup alerts.

Usernames are locked once set, so leaderboard history stays stable. If you have a strong reason to change yours, contact us.