(7h ago)
By Locked In 90
Before kickoff in each of this week's 18 Champions League games, accounts on Locked In 90 locked in 323 calls. Every call is graded automatically after full time, so nothing here was added or changed once a game started. We went back through all 18 results to see where the most popular calls held up and where they came apart.
With 18 games and one week of calls, the sample is small, and nothing below should be read as a pattern you can lean on.
What the calls were
Just over half of the 323 calls (166) were straight result calls: home win, draw or away win. The rest were calls on goals, shots, shots on target and corners, for the whole match or for one side.
For 16 of the 18 games there was a clear most-picked result. Lask Linz against Slovan Bratislava drew no result calls at all, and Viking against Sabah split one each way, so we've left those two out of the result count.
Where the most-picked call was right
The most-picked result was right in 12 of those 16 games. Most of those were the obvious ones, but a few are worth a closer look.
Manchester United 3–2 AS Roma. This was the most-backed result of the round: 24 of the 25 result calls went with United at home. It was the right call, but not a comfortable one. Five goals and a one-goal margin say the game was a lot closer than the near-unanimous support suggested. The single call for over 2.5 goals in this game was the one that described the night best.
Borussia Dortmund 2–1 Real Betis. Seventeen of the 19 result calls backed Dortmund at home, and two went for a draw. Dortmund won, but again only by one goal. Like United, this was a game where everyone agreed on the winner and the scoreline stayed tight.
Villarreal 0–6 Paris Saint-Germain. All eight result calls backed PSG away, and the calls around it were just as confident: over 2.5 goals, PSG over 1.5 goals, PSG to get more than five shots on target, and Villarreal to manage fewer than four. Every one of the 20 calls on this game came in. When a team is in that kind of form, the result and the detail calls tend to point the same way.
RB Leipzig 2–3 Manchester City. Nine of the 10 result calls went with City away, and City won. The detail calls were less tidy. Calls on City's corners and shots on target both missed, while the two calls for over 2.5 goals came in. City got the result through goals rather than the steady pressure that the corner and shot calls expected.
The other winners came in as expected. Galatasaray beat Stuttgart 2–0, Sporting won 1–0 against Shakhtar, Inter won 3–0 at Feyenoord, Barcelona beat Aston Villa 3–0, Bayern won 2–0 at Atletico Madrid, Real Madrid edged AEK Athens 3–2, Arsenal won 2–1 at Slavia Praha, and Porto beat Napoli 4–1.
Where it was wrong
PSV Eindhoven 1–2 Club Brugge. This was the miss of the round. Twenty-three of the 24 result calls backed PSV at home, and one went for a draw. Nobody called a Brugge win. When almost every call goes one way, it's worth remembering that agreement isn't the same as certainty.
Fenerbahçe 3–2 Liverpool. Seven of the eight result calls went with Liverpool away, and one went for a draw. Fenerbahçe won a five-goal game at home. The calls on how the game would be played held up well: all of the calls for over 2.5 goals, over 9.5 corners, more than eight or nine shots on target and more than 24 shots came in. The calls expected an open, busy game, and they were right about that. They were wrong about who would win it.
Bodo/Glimt 0–0 Lille. Six of the seven result calls backed Lille away. The one call for a draw was right. It was the only draw of the entire round, and the only game where a draw call paid off. Across all 18 games there were nine draw calls in total, and eight of them missed.
Lens 1–9 Como. Only one account called the result here, and it backed Lens at home. Como scored nine, which equals the record for the most goals by one team in a Champions League game. We've counted it as a miss, but with a single call behind it, it says very little about anyone's judgment.
Where the calls really came apart: goals
The result calls mostly held up. The goal-count calls were a different story, and they missed in both directions.
In the three games where calls expected a low-scoring night, the games did the opposite:
- Lask Linz 4–0 Slovan Bratislava. All four calls on this game were for under 2.5 goals. There were four.
- Viking 4–1 Sabah. Six calls went for under 2.5 goals. There were five.
- Lens 1–9 Como. Two calls went for under 2.5 goals. There were ten.
That's 12 calls for a quiet game, and all 12 missed.
It went wrong the other way too. Six calls expected more than 2.5 goals in Galatasaray against Stuttgart. Galatasaray won 2–0, so the most-picked result was right and the goals calls were wrong. The same thing happened at Atletico Madrid, where four calls for over 2.5 goals missed in a 2–0 Bayern win, and in Shakhtar against Sporting, which finished 1–0.
One honest takeaway
If there's anything to take from this round, it's that agreeing on the winner was the easier part. Most of the result calls came in, and the misses were the kind every round has: a home favourite beaten (PSV), a strong away side beaten (Liverpool), and the one draw nobody but a single account saw coming.
Guessing how many goals a game would produce was much harder. The calls expected quiet games in places that turned wild, and busy games in places that stayed tight. That fits something we keep coming back to in our guide to predicting football matches (https://lockedin90.com/guides/how-to-predict-football-matches): who wins often comes down to quality, but how a game unfolds depends on how the two sides set up against each other, and that's much harder to read from a table.
We'd hold even that lightly. It's one round and 18 games.
How we counted
Every call on Locked In 90 has to be locked in before kickoff, and it's graded automatically against the final result. We took all calls on this week's 18 Champions League games from our database after the last whistle and checked each result against the final score. For each game, the most-picked call is simply the result that got the most calls, and we left out games where there wasn't one. There's more on how calls and the most-picked calls are shown on each match page on our How it works page (https://lockedin90.com/how-it-works#consensus).