Chris Sutton v Football Manager 27 and Copilot AI: how BBC Sport’s Premier League picks are scored
AI already tops BBC Sport’s prediction table, and Sutton now faces the FM27 engine and studio boss Miles Jacobson.
In brief
- AI leads BBC Sport’s prediction league table, and Chris Sutton now faces a second machine.
- The FM27 engine simulated the weekend’s matches, and studio director Miles Jacobson added his own picks.
- Football Manager 27 is released on 10 November with new manager appearance options and a Tactical Effectiveness training system.
Chris Sutton has two machines to beat this weekend. BBC Sport reports that AI already leads its prediction league table, and Sutton’s guest opponent for the latest round of fixtures is Football Manager 27, the newest edition of the long-running management simulation, due out on 10 November.
How the three sets of predictions are made
The FM27 game engine played out the weekend’s matches, and its results, goalscorers included, appear in the BBC article. Miles Jacobson, studio director of Sports Interactive, the company behind Football Manager, also made his own calls. The AI forecasts came from Microsoft Copilot Chat, which was simply asked to predict this weekend’s Premier League scores.
How to play along
Readers can enter their own scorelines, and the most popular scoreline picked for each game is the one used in the scoreboards and tables.
That new Match of the Day predictor game runs every week and mixes domestic and European fixtures, for readers who want more than the Premier League slate.
The key games and Jacobson’s calls
The article gives context for several games, plus Jacobson’s FM27 forecasts.
| Match | Context | Jacobson’s FM27 prediction |
|---|---|---|
| Everton v Coventry | Coventry have three league wins, as many as sixth-place Brentford. Sutton does not see them getting anything on Frank Lampard’s return to his former club. | 2-1 Everton |
| Leeds v Tottenham | Tottenham have lost only one of their last 15 Premier League meetings with Leeds, stretching back almost 25 years. Under Roberto de Zerbi they have won three in a row, helped by Jean-Philippe Mateta’s red card against Crystal Palace. Leeds lost to Bournemouth last week. | 1-1 |
| Arsenal v Hull | Arsenal have lost width with Bukayo Saka out injured. | 2-1 Arsenal |
| Fulham v Newcastle | Newcastle, managed by Matthias Jaissle, have lost three of their last four league games. Fulham are managed by Alvaro Arbeloa. | 0-0 |
Elsewhere, Nottingham Forest have scored only six league goals in their first nine games.
What is new in Football Manager 27
The game widens the options for changing a manager’s visual appearance, and for the first time it includes wheelchair-using managers. Jacobson told BBC Sport: “It’s something we are really proud of,” adding that representation matters to wheelchair users.
FM27 also introduces a training system called Tactical Effectiveness. Jacobson explained its logic this way: “It reflects what happens in real life when a new manager comes into a club and does something different, it takes players a while to get used to the new tactics.” A manager arriving at a club must choose between investing time in a complicated tactic, which takes longer to learn and leaves less time for other work, or starting with the basics and building up. Jacobson linked this to Nottingham Forest boss Oliver Glasner, who said after the defeat against Brentford that he had been nice to his players but now they had to listen.
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