How DataPitch prices a football player market before kickoff

What is on a fixture page

A fixture page opens with the match, the competition, the kick-off in UK time and the referee, and then our read of the night in one sentence. Under that sits everything we price on that game: on a busy fixture that runs to well over a hundred lines across half a dozen markets, grouped by market, best first.

A market opens on a tap and a player opens on another. Behind a player's tap is the arithmetic: our percentage and the market's for the same line, the gap between them in percentage points, his season average in that market, his record at that line, and his last five in it with the opponent and the date on each. A last-five history counts starts of sixty minutes or more in the last year, most recent first.

Colour is the verdict on a row rather than decoration. Green marks a positive trade in the numbers on show, red a negative one, white neutral, and there is a filter for showing the green rows only.

The dials: your view re-prices every market

Under the markets is a block the page calls "Go deeper: make this match yours". It is three steps, all of them at match level and never per player, and pressing Simulate re-prices every row above it in your browser.

Step one is the referee: how strict you think he will be tonight, from letting play run through as usual to stricter than usual. Our card model already has his record in it, so this is your view on top of ours rather than instead of it, and it touches cards, fouls and fouls drawn.

Step two is how the game goes: who has the ball and who is chasing it, from an even game to either side dominating. The page states the mechanism it applies rather than hiding it, which is that the side chasing shoots more and gets fouled more while the side in front tackles more. That one touches every market.

Step three is battles, and none is fine. A battle is one attacker against the defender marking him; add the duels you expect to shape the game and Simulate works them into both men's numbers. A chip at the top of the page swaps the colours back to DataPitch's own model whenever you want to see the difference, and Reset puts everything back.

The referee panel

The referee's name in the header of a fixture page is a tap, and behind it is his own sheet. It opens with a one-line read of how he runs a match on cards, then his card figures, then the league average yellows a match to set them against.

Under that the sheet breaks his cards down by position and by minute band, gives home against away, gives a patience section, and lists the last ten matches he has taken charge of with the yellows in each. Where we hold nothing for a referee the sheet says we hold no card record for him yet rather than printing a zero, because a zero there would read as a fact about the man instead of a gap in what we know.

Why every price here is a market price

DataPitch never prints its own odds. Every price on a fixture page is the latest market price we hold for that market, labelled by market and by the source that quoted it, fetched before the match and never invented. Our side of a row is words, a percentage and a flag where our read sits above the market's.

That distinction matters most on the percentage. It is our strength of read on a player, not a claim about how often the thing happens, and the page says so where it prints one. Where a market's price and our read agree, the row says the price is fair and that there is nothing to back, which is the answer on most rows on most nights.

From the slate to a fixture in one tap

The slate is the day's fixtures in kick-off order, UK time, with filters by league and a top row shown on each match so you can see what is on a game before opening it. Tapping a fixture opens the page above.

When the day is done the slate says so and points at the finished matches below, and tomorrow's list goes up a few hours before the first kick-off. From any fixture, the live board and the in-play alerts are one tap away in the block at the foot of the page, which is where a pregame read usually wants to go once the whistle has gone.