New update: Champions League format now usable with any team

A new era for Match Simulator: our biggest update yet!

Please note: The release has been rescheduled to April 4! A year ago, we introduced the BETA version of Match Simulator. This year, we shaped Match Simulator BETA together: your feedback, ideas, and bug reports made this possible. Now, it’s time for the next chapter. On Saturday, April 5th—exactly one year after the BETA launch—it will officially take over. The original Match Simulator will be retired, and the BETA becomes the new and only version. Over the past year, we’ve added all functionalities, streamlined features, and fine-tuned every detail to bring you the best Match Simulator experience. With this major update, new features are finally on the way! The Champions League and EURO formats for custom cups, a rework of the substitution system, injuries in cups... All planned to be worked on after the new version is released! This marks a huge milestone for Match Simulator—and the beginning of much more to come! Thanks for being part of the journey, and we hope to see you on April 5th! ;

Best wishes for 2025 from Match Simulator

As the year comes to a close, we at Match Simulator want to take a moment to thank everyone for being part of our journey. Your support and enthusiasm mean the world to us, and we’re excited to share a quick look back at 2024 and what’s ahead in 2025. This year, we introduced BETA, the rebranded version of Match Simulator. While progress has been slower than we’d hoped, it’s been a big step forward. Juggling work between the old and new systems has been tricky, but we’re making steady progress. At the end of 2023, our Discord was set up by community member and moderator Larsson, who is also well-known for his mods. Since then, multiple active members have joined him as moderators, creating a vibrant and supportive community. It’s been incredible to see our Discord grow to over 400 members – this growth is entirely thanks to their dedication and the contributions of every community member. Your feedback and ideas keep us motivated! Looking ahead, our main goal for 2025 is to finalize BETA as soon as possible. Once it’s ready, we can fully focus on adding exciting new features. In the meantime, we’re gearing up to hit some big milestones: 100 million matches simulated in January and 100,000 users just around the corner. These numbers are thanks to you! Thanks for being part of the MatchSimulator.com community. Here’s to an even better 2025! ;

[FINISHED] Maintenance: Match Simulator moves to a new hosting provider

We want to inform you that Match Simulator will be down for maintenance from 23:00 UTC on Wednesday, 27 November, to 09:00 UTC on Thursday, 28 November. This downtime is part of an important transition as we switch to a new hosting provider. While we understand that any period of downtime is inconvenient, this change is essential for improving your experience on our platform. Why are we changing hosting providers? As our user base grows and the demands on our platform increase, we want to ensure that we provide you with the best possible experience. The new hosting provider offers improved performance, better reliability, and the scalability needed to support the growing number of users on our platform. By making this switch, we are laying the foundation for future improvements and enhancements to the Match Simulator. Why does the maintenance take so long? The process of switching hosting providers involves a significant amount of work, and the most time-consuming part is the migration of our database. This includes transferring large amounts of data, ensuring that everything is securely moved, and confirming that it works properly in the new environment. The maintenance window allows us to perform these operations carefully and thoroughly, ensuring that there are no issues once we bring the platform back online. We greatly appreciate your patience as we complete this necessary upgrade. Rest assured, this will help us offer a faster, more reliable service going forward. Update 08:26 UTC: The migration was successful and you can get back to simulating :) Thank you for your patience! ;

Experience the new Champions League format on Match Simulator

Match Simulator is excited to announce that the latest update features the new UEFA Champions League format, allowing you to experience the excitement of the revamped tournament. This season introduces a league phase followed by knockout rounds. In the league phase, each of the 36 teams will play eight matches against different opponents, striving to gather points and secure their place in the next stage. The top eight teams from this phase will automatically qualify for the knockout rounds. Teams placed 9th to 24th will enter the first qualifying round. In this round, teams ranked 9th to 16th will be seeded and face off against teams ranked 17th to 24th, with the seeded teams playing the return match at home. The winners from this initial knockout round will then go on to face one of the eight seeded teams from the league stage. You can explore the new Champions League season and simulate the matches on our dedicated event page. Dive into the action and see how your predictions play out! Go to event Update 07/10: The Europa League has been added as well! Check it out here: View Europa League Update 08/10: And here is the Conference League! Check it out here: View Conference League ;

Match Simulator and SoFIFA partner up!

We are excited to announce that Match Simulator has officially partnered with SoFIFA, the leading platform for FIFA/FC player and team data. This collaboration has already allowed us to quickly and efficiently integrate the 2024/25 season data into our simulations, giving you access to the latest player and team rosters for the new season. Looking ahead, we're thrilled to announce that this partnership will allow us to bring weekly updated player data into Match Simulator in the future. While we can not offer this feature just yet, it will provide even greater accuracy and realism once implemented, as player performances and transfers will be reflected more frequently, keeping your simulations up-to-date with the real football world. This is an exciting step forward, and we can’t wait to roll out these improvements to give you an even better experience on Match Simulator. Thank you for being part of our community - stay tuned for more updates!;

Exciting news: Match Simulator BETA will launch April 5

After months of hard work and finetuning, we are happy to share with you a first peek of the new Match Simulator. But more importantly, this Friday, April 5, we will launch Match Simulator BETA! Your chance to be the first to experience the new Match Simulator and contribute to the definitive release. The plan is to have the Beta exist alongside the regular Match Simulator until we are certain that it is ready to take over once and for all. So that's where we need you as well: by letting us know what you think, pointing out bugs, sharing your experience can go a long way towards an ideal Match Simulator. It is important to us what you think, to shape the future of Match Simulator. We will also reveal the new logo soon... so make sure to stay up to date and register for the BETA mailing list: beta.matchsimulator.com. Looking forward to finally share the results and hearing your reactions!;

A Commentary Makeover using ChatGPT: From Predictable to Dynamic

Our journey began with a simple yet crucial goal: to make the match commentary in Match Simulator feel alive and dynamic. In the past, repetitive and predictable lines were the norm. Every goal felt the same, and every missed shot led to the same mundane comment. We wanted to change that. In the world of sports simulation, authenticity is everything. Whether you're managing a team or experiencing the thrill of a match firsthand, the commentary can make or break the immersion. It's the soundtrack of the game, and we wanted to turn it into a symphony. The Challenge: Predictability and Monotony Before we dived into the realm of AI, our commentary system was stuck in a loop. We had a collection of pre-written lines that were triggered by in-game events. If a goal was scored, you'd hear the same few sentences about the goal-scorer and the team. It was predictable, repetitive, and far from exciting. Imagine a world where every goal in football is celebrated with the same generic cheer, and every missed shot is met with the same sigh of disappointment. It doesn't reflect the dynamism of real sports, where each moment can be a game-changer. Enter ChatGPT: Our AI Game Changer Our quest for dynamic commentary led us to ChatGPT, an AI language model developed by OpenAI. We saw the potential in ChatGPT to transform our mundane commentary system into something extraordinary. We began by harnessing ChatGPT's ability to generate human-like text. This was the key to breaking free from the monotony. Instead of relying on a fixed set of lines, we could now generate a lot of variations of the same commentary, tailored to the specific in-game events. The Power of Variability One of our goals was to make the outcomes unpredictable. We didn't want players to guess whether a shot would result in a goal or not just by the first sentence. So, we introduced randomness into our system. We wanted every match to feel unique, every goal to be a moment of celebration, and every missed shot to be a heart-stopping near-miss. To achieve this, we made lists of commentary sentences that could be easily combined and thus provides dynamic combinations every time. By varying in length, the whole commentary also feels a bit more natural. Short commentary consists of two sentences that provide the setup and conclusion of an event. For example, when a player scores, you might hear, "Goal by Player X!" followed by, "The crowd goes wild!" It's concise, engaging, and perfect for those fast-paced moments. Long commentary, on the other hand, adds an extra sentence in the middle to raise the stakes. It might start with, "Player X lines up for the shot..." followed by, "The anticipation builds," and end with, "And it's a goal! The crowd goes wild!" The added sentence creates tension and excitement, especially during critical moments. Revolutionizing the Commentary for Every Event We didn't stop at goals and misses. The commentary for any event in the match has been revolutionized to capture the essence of each moment. Whether it's a goal, a missed penalty, a foul, or even a simple substitution, we've injected excitement, unpredictability, and variety into every facet of the game. AI's Role in Future Commentary While ChatGPT played a crucial role in developing our dynamic commentary system, we envision an even greater future for AI in Match Simulator. In upcoming versions, AI might generate commentaries and match reports specific to each match, providing an incredible level of personalization and realism. As technology advances, so does our commitment to delivering the most immersive and exciting football simulation experience to our users. Ideas for more? As we look back on our journey of transforming the Match Simulator's commentary system, we're excited about the dynamic and immersive experiences it now offers. But we're not stopping here. We believe in the power of collective creativity, and that's where you come in. We invite you, our passionate community, to share your ideas and suggestions for commentaries you'd love to see in the game. Whether it's a clever twist on a corner kick or a humorous take on a substitution, your contributions can shape the future of our commentary system. The best submissions will find their way into the game, enriching the match experience for players around the world. So, let your imagination run wild, and you might see your idea in game soon!;

Match Simulator predicts: Who will win the World Cup 2022?

Over the years, Match Simulator has collected the data of more than 20 million simulated matches in our database. Could we use this data to predict the World Cup 2022 winner? For the first time, we are going to use this data to make a prediction about the upcoming World Cup 2022. Based on the official World Cup preset, we can make an overview of the amount of times countries reach the final and who has the power to best their opponent in this match. But first, let’s investigate how reliable such a prediction would be. For the World Cup 2014 and World Cup 2018, we can apply the same method, but there we already know the outcome: Germany and France won in respectively 2014 and 2018. World Cup 2014 Looking at the World Cup 2014, 315 cups have been completed from the official WC 2014 preset. A clear favourite came out in the end: the actual winners Germany. In 24.8% of the cups, the Germans won the tournament, whilst reaching the final in 39% of them. In second was Spain, taking the gold in 19.7% of the cups and reaching the final in 31.4%. In real life, however, Spain got knocked out in the group stage by Louis van Gaal’s Netherlands and Chile. The opponents of Germany in the World Cup final of 2014, Argentina, are the third favourites. In 25.4% of the cups they reached the final, where they won slightly more than half of the time: 13.3%. The biggest surprises were Greece (won the cup once), Bosnia (1 gold, 3 silver) and Switzerland (1 gold, 10 silver). In real life, Greece ended up in the round of 16 (knocked out in penalty shootout against Costa Rica), Bosnia got no further than the group stage and Switzerland also peaked at the round of 16, getting knocked out by Argentina. The following distribution is the result of all 315 cup results. The gold bar represents the amount of times a country won the final, the silver bar represents how often the silver was the highest achievable result. World Cup 2018 The World Cup 2018 has a slightly larger dataset of 441 finished cups. However, the distribution of the winners is a lot less clear. The top 3 consists of Brazil (17.5% won, 30.2% finalist) , Spain (16.3% won, 28.8% finalist) and France (15.6% won, 27.2% finalist). In real life, Brazil got knocked out in the quarter-finals by Belgium. Hosts Russia bested Spain in the round of 16 in a penalty shootout. France took on Croatia in the final, and won quite easily. According to the data, Croatia only had a 8.4% chance to reach the final, and 3.6% to win it all. Limitations There are several things to take into account when determining the accuracy of these predictions. First of all, the player ratings and therefore the team ratings are all based on EASports FIFA’s database. Therefore, the extent to which they accurately assessed the players impacts their country’s chance of winning it all. Secondly, mods could have been used in several cups, possibly resulting in boosted players or teams. Finally, the World Cup knockout stage goes according to a specific order, e.g. the winner of group A plays against the winner of group B. After that, the winner of Round of 16 #1 plays against the winner of Round of 16 #2. This impacts a team’s chance of winning, because there could be more difficult routes to the final for one team than for the other. For example, in the World Cup 2018, one could argue that the reason Croatia got to the final was partly due to their easier fixtures. With regards to the results in this article, we are fairly certain that most of the cups did not take these specific routes into account, but rather used randomly generated fixtures. Having said all that, let’s have a look at the distribution for the World Cup 2022! World Cup 2022 A total of 1281 cups has been used for this distribution. After the World Cup victory of 2018, France are now favourites with a 18.3% chance to take the gold, and a 30.3% chance to reach the final. Interestingly enough, Germany are second: 15.1% chance for the win, with a 26.3% chance of at least a silver medal. Brazil is a close third, reaching the final 24.2% of the time and winning 13.7% of the cups. England, Portugal and Spain seem very equal outsiders for the title, winning the title around 11% of the time. Although Argentina are real-life favourites, they only have a 6.9% chance of winning gold according to this data. The Netherlands and Belgium are the dark horses for this year’s edition, winning around 5% of the time and having slightly more than 10% chance to reach the final. Which country could surprise us then? Canada and Japan have surprisingly won the gold medal once, Australia and Wales got as far as a silver medal. The United States reached the final 3 times, but lost all of those. Starting with Mexico, we see some countries that could realistically transcend themselves. Mexico, Poland, Morocco, Denmark, Senegal and Serbia are all countries that could turn a few heads, while Uruguay and Croatia are always dangerous. Conclusion Based on the data, France are the favourites to win the World Cup 2022. Of course, they have an incredible squad, but many believe that they will suffer the winner's curse. And with Benzema's injury, they lose an incredibly important asset. So, could it yet again be the Germans? They have not impressed in the last years, but can you ever really exclude them? It might just be possible that Flick leads them to an unexpected result. The data believes so as well, turning Germany into second favourites. The public opinion, however, lists Brazil as the ultimate favourites for this edition. The Match Simulator only has them third, but if both Germany and France fail to get the most out of their squad, Brazil might indeed have the best chance to take the gold home after many disappointing years. In 2014, the Match Simulator predicted the winner correctly, in 2018 the third favourites won the cup. Could the Match Simulator be on to something? What do you think? Let us know in the comments who you think will win this World Cup and see if you can do better than many simulations!;