Help: Competition

Each week the Predictor analyses the past week's match results and declares a best-performing Premier League 'Team of the Week'. If you can correctly work out who that team will be for the week using your skill and knowledge of football, you will be entered into a prize draw for a pair of Premier League match tickets.

The competition will run from midday Weds (when the Predictor is updated with the previous week’s results) to midday Sat each week. Only teams playing on the upcoming weekend are eligible for ‘Team of the Week’.

The football team that the Predictor declares to be the Team of the Week is the one that outperforms the Predictor’s expected results by the largest goal difference.

So, if Sunderland are predicted to lose by three goals against Manchester United for that week’s fixture, but in fact earn a draw when the match is played, they could quite easily be Team of the Week because they have outperformed the prediction by three goals - which is quite a large difference. By contrast Manchester United would have to beat Sunderland 6-0 to gain a goal difference of three. If they had won by only 3-0, then that is exactly what was predicted so there would be no goal difference from the prediction.

Note that the Team of the Week will only be selected from the Premier League.

The Predictor calculates its predictions on past performance only - it doesn’t take into account other factors such as player availability, injuries or even weather conditions. So, if you knew Manchester United’s strongest player was unavailable, and Sunderland were currently on a lucky roll, then they might be a good pick for ‘Team of the Week’ if you thought these factors would see them doing better than the Predictor expected.

To gain extra insight using the Predictor you can use the Game Simulator to tweak the strength of the attack and defence for any potential clash to reflect your opinion of how well a team is currently playing.

Once you’ve decided who will be Team of the Week, click here to enter the competition.

For further information on how the Predictor uses past match statistics to predict future outcomes, please visit http://www.dectech.org/times/Predictor.html.