How it works

Live standings, results, and schedules come from public sports data feeds (ESPN). Scores and standings are factual records; we read them, we don’t invent them. We poll on our own servers and cache the result, so the page you load is fast and we’re never hammering the source.

For each team we look at every game still to be played in its group or race, and work out — across all the ways those games can go — which outcomes send the team through, which leave it out, and which depend on results elsewhere. That’s where lines like “Win and you’re through” or “A draw isn’t enough unless Iran lose” come from.

Where a competition has formal tiebreakers (head-to-head, goal difference, division records), we encode the actual official procedure for that league — in the right order. This is the hard part, and the part generic calculators are repeatedly caught getting wrong.

The percentage is a Monte-Carlo simulation: we play out all the remaining games thousands of times, weighting each result by team strength, and count how often each team ends up qualifying. A team that advances in 9,500 of 10,000 simulated seasons shows 95%.

Clinched teams are pinned to IN, eliminated teams to OUT — the simulation only governs the bubble in between.

Everything recomputes automatically a few minutes after any game finishes — no manual updates, ever. Each page shows when it was last updated. Finished seasons are frozen into a permanent archive at their year’s URL, so they stay accurate forever instead of going stale.