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 is announced. Free, no signup needed to predict.

Click into any club or fixture, pick your formation, fill the eleven slots, and save. You get a share link straight away. No account 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. A perfect 11/11 = 100%. Simple by design — 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 api-football. Substitutes coming on during the match don't count — only the starting XI.

Predictions lock T-120 minutes before kick-off by default. Some competitions (FA Cup, World Cup, derbies during the last weekend of a season) may use a longer lockout to protect against early leaks. The lock-in countdown is visible on the predict screen.

Sign up + enable lineup alerts in your profile, then pick your favourite clubs. As soon as the manager announces the official starting XI, you'll get an email with: the full XI, what changed since the last lineup, and your N/11 score if you predicted this fixture.

The alert email still goes out — it just shows the lineup + a "predict the next one" CTA framed around the club leaderboard rather than your score.

Yes — that's on our roadmap (T2.23). For now, email is the only channel.

Player data, fixtures, official lineups, and injuries come from api-football v3 — a paid sports-data feed. Football-data is kept as a verification fallback.

We lock predictions T-120m before kick-off. If a manager later swaps a player in warmup, we still score against the original announced XI (matching what you saw when you predicted). We log late changes for analytics but don't penalise you for them.

If a confirmed XI leaks before the cron has snapshotted, the lockout-time check still rejects writes once the scheduled lockout time has passed — even if our internal snapshot hasn't fired yet. Logged-in users can also flag suspected leaks via the admin path.

We're building a friendly-name override mechanism (admin-managed). For now, send us the player URL and the preferred name — we'll override it. Many players are known by a single name (Gabriel, Vinicius Jr) and our raw feed names don't always reflect that.

The World Cup opens 11 June 2026 (USA / Canada / Mexico hosts). All 64 group-stage fixtures are loaded and predictions are open up to T-120m before kick-off. Manager squad announcements are flowing in as nations finalise selections.

Yes — every qualified nation has a country page at /[country-slug] (e.g. /england, /brazil). Click any World Cup fixture from the homepage, /world-cup, or a country page to start predicting.

No — we keep streaks contextual. For World Cup predictions you'll see crowd-consensus info (e.g. '95% predicting Kane to start') rather than club-fixture streaks, since pre-tournament friendlies are often poor predictors.

After saving you get a share link. Paste it into X, WhatsApp, Discord, or wherever — the link unfurls into a pitch image showing the XI, opponent, kickoff time, and how many fans agree. Designed for football Twitter.

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

The homepage activity feed shows recent predictions across clubs. 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.

Profile → Favourite clubs. You can add or remove clubs there, and it controls which clubs you get lineup alerts for.

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

Predictions lock when the scheduled lockout time has passed (T-120m before kick-off, or earlier if a high-leak fixture). If you got that error your tab was open past the lockout — your earlier saved version is still in your account.