I took part in a prediction league with friends during one FA Premier league season a couple of years ago. I didn’t take part in later leagues as I did the admin work, using spreadsheets, and it was a lot of work.

The idea was that every week I would email out a spreadsheet with the fixtures for the week (Friday to Thursday). The spreadsheet would have columns for each person taking part and they would each fill in what they think the result will be for each game. After the last game I would put in the actual result into my master sheet for the week and then allocate points to each person for each game, at the time I think it was 6 points for a home win, 7 points for an away win, 8 points for a draw, also if they got the score right, extra points ( i think 2). At the end of the season, the person with the most points wins the season.

I have been working on an application using C# (DotNet 3.5), and using a database file (mdf) . The premise of the application is that it will allow a person to manage this prediction league. I have been battling on how to automatically work out the fixtures for a season when the user indicates which teams are in the league, so for now I have settled on generating a complete fixture list based on the number of games the user indicates, and when they do the weekly email they will have to select which games will be played in that week.

At the moment, you can set up new leagues/Seasons, create new Teams and Predictors, and Setup fixtures for a season.

Eventually, the user will be able to use this application to email the weekly fixture list out, it will automatically calculate the persons scores from actual results. I have other features in mind, like expanding it to include world cup type formats etc etc, so that it can be used for any sporting event as my friends do really like placing friendly bets with each other, but those will have to wait.

I will try to post screen shots soon of the application, and keep this blog updated with my progress, which is slow at best since I work on it after hours at home and by  the time I get home, the last thing I feel like is doing more work infront of the computer.