538 EPL Predictions: What Happened to FiveThirtyEight's Soccer Model (And What We Use Instead)
If you've landed here searching for "538 EPL predictions," there's something you need to know that almost nobody else in this space will tell you: FiveThirtyEight's soccer prediction model isn't running anymore.
At Todayspredict, we'd rather give you that answer upfront than keep you on this page pretending otherwise. FiveThirtyEight was shut down by ABC News in 2023, and its live Soccer Power Index (SPI) predictions tool went dark along with it. If you're still seeing sites claiming to pull "today's 538 EPL odds" or describing SPI as "updated in real time," that claim is outdated at best. We checked — it's simply not true anymore, and we think you deserve to know that before anything else on this page.
So let's actually answer what you came here for: what 538/SPI was, how it worked, why people still search for it, and what we use at Todayspredict to fill that gap for Premier League predictions today.
What FiveThirtyEight's SPI Model Actually Was
FiveThirtyEight's Soccer Power Index was created by Nate Silver in 2009, originally for ESPN, and was later substantially revised when FiveThirtyEight adapted it for club football. It wasn't a betting tips service — it was a public, transparent statistical model that assigned every team an offensive rating and a defensive rating, expressed in expected goals against a league-average opponent.
From those two numbers, the model could simulate a match thousands of times to produce probabilities for a home win, draw, and away win, and it could run those simulations across an entire season to estimate title chances, European qualification odds, and relegation risk. It covered the Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A, Ligue 1, and the Champions League.
What made it genuinely useful, and why so many people still search for it years later, is that it was transparent. FiveThirtyEight published the actual methodology and the underlying data, so you could see exactly why a team's rating moved, not just trust a black-box number.
Why So Many "538 EPL" Sites Are Misleading You Right Now
We looked at what currently ranks for this exact search term, and the pattern is consistent: page after page describes 538/SPI as if it's still actively producing daily predictions — "updated regularly," "10,000 simulations per match," "current SPI values." None of that reflects reality anymore. Some sites go further and attach invented accuracy statistics ("84% accuracy," "99.9% winning") to a model that hasn't generated a new prediction in years.
We're flagging this not to score points off other sites, but because if a page won't tell you straight that the thing you're searching for is discontinued, you should be skeptical of everything else it tells you too.
What's Actually Available for EPL Predictions Today
Since the original SPI tool is gone, here's an honest picture of where the underlying idea lives on:
Opta Analyst publishes Premier League match probabilities and season simulations built on Opta's own data, in a similar public spirit to what FiveThirtyEight offered. It's the closest thing to a direct successor for EPL-specific projections.
Club Elo maintains a simpler, Elo-based rating system for club football worldwide, including the Premier League, updated after every match.
Understat and FBref don't produce win probabilities directly, but they publish the underlying expected-goals (xG) data that models like SPI were partly built on — useful if you want to build your own view of team strength rather than rely on someone else's black box.
None of these are a like-for-like replacement, and we won't pretend otherwise. But together they cover most of what people actually wanted from 538: transparent, data-driven team strength ratings rather than a tipster's gut feeling.
How We Approach EPL Predictions at Todayspredict
We don't claim to have revived FiveThirtyEight's exact model, and we're not going to pretend a simplified in-house number is the same thing. What we do instead is build our Premier League analysis around the same principles SPI was built on, applied to current, actually-updated data:
- Underlying team strength, using recent expected-goals data rather than just results, since results alone can flatter or undersell a team's real performance level.
- Home and away splits, since Premier League teams often have meaningfully different away form versus home form.
- Confirmed team news close to kickoff, since a rating built purely on historical data misses a suspended defender or a returning striker.
- Market odds as a cross-check, since bookmaker pricing reflects information — team news, weather, public money — that a pure statistical model can't fully capture on its own.
We publish the reasoning behind our EPL picks, not just the pick, because a probability estimate you can't interrogate isn't meaningfully different from a guess dressed up in stats language.
What We Won't Do
We won't tell you a discontinued model is "updated today." We won't attach a precise accuracy percentage to football prediction, because nobody, including FiveThirtyEight at its peak, could honestly back one up match-to-match. And we won't call anything a "100% sure win," because in a sport this low-scoring and this prone to upsets, that phrase is a marketing claim, not a statistical one.
The Honest Bottom Line on "538 EPL Predictions"
If you searched for 538 EPL predictions expecting FiveThirtyEight's live SPI tool, the accurate answer is that it no longer exists in that form. What does exist is a set of good alternatives that carry the same transparent, data-first spirit — Opta Analyst and Club Elo chief among them — plus our own approach here at Todayspredict, which borrows the same underlying logic (strength ratings, home/away splits, current team news) and applies it to today's Premier League fixtures rather than a discontinued tool.
We'd rather be the one page in this search result that told you the truth about that, and earned your trust by doing so, than be another copy of the same recycled claim everyone else is running.
This content is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or betting advice. Please gamble responsibly.