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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.