The Disaster That Started It All
You wouldn’t believe the mess I got into that led me to start documenting football lineups this obsessively. It wasn’t about fantasy leagues or being a huge fan; it was about saving my Uncle Tony from himself. Tony, bless his heart, decided about six months ago he was a brilliant sports analyst, and he started throwing money—I mean real money, savings account money—at these dodgy prediction services online.
He was blowing it weekly. He’d send me these texts, all caps, saying things like, “They promised Moreno was starting!” and then Moreno would be on the bench, sitting there chewing gum. I told him to stop paying those clowns. If you want a decent guess at who’s going to step onto the pitch, you don’t buy some algorithm’s output; you have to put in the time and just look at the history yourself.
So, this practice record, the whole system I built for tracking, started purely because I wanted to prove to Tony that simple manual tracking beats outsourced garbage any day. The Villarreal vs Betis Matchday XI was the breaking point because he lost big on the previous week’s game based on bad intel, and I promised him, “This week, we do it my way.”
Grabbing the Raw Materials
My process always starts messy. I opened up four different tabs on my browser: two for local Spanish sports news sites, one for the official team Twitter feeds (if they bothered to post anything useful), and one gigantic, awful spreadsheet in Google Sheets.
First thing I did was ditch all the noise. I ignored the headlines about transfer rumors or manager scandals. I just needed fitness reports. I went straight to the injury list. For Villarreal, I had to cross-reference three different sources just to figure out if Chukwueze was actually fit to start, or if he was still dealing with that knock from the last training session. One site said yes, one said maybe, the official site hadn’t updated since Tuesday. This manual verification is key—you have to assume everyone else is lying until you see photos or official team training reports.
Then I logged the last three match formations for both teams. I didn’t care about scores; I cared about who played 90 minutes. I dumped those names into my sheet: Position, Player Name, Minutes Played (Last 3 Games). I color-coded players who played over 250 minutes in those three games. Those guys were red flags for fatigue, unless they were center-backs or goalkeepers who never move.
Detailing the Matchday XI Prep
When it came to figuring out the Villarreal vs Betis lineups for this specific Matchday XI, I had to think like the coach, Setién. That meant looking at his tendencies against teams with a strong midfield presence like Betis. This isn’t data science; it’s just paying attention to patterns.
My checklist for the predicted XI looked like this:
- Verified Fitness: Who is absolutely, definitely ready to go? (I ruled out three players immediately based on the confirmed injury list, regardless of the previous prediction services Tony paid for).
- Rotation Necessity: Villarreal played midweek. Who looked gassed? I pegged two defensive midfielders for likely rotation. I slotted in the backup who usually performs better on the counter.
- Home vs Away Strategy: Villarreal was at home. Setién likes to press higher at home. I checked the stats for the wingers who are best at high pressure—that boosted Pino’s chances of starting over a more defensive option.
- The Wildcard: Every coach has one weird choice. Who was it going to be this week? I looked back at the last two Matchday XIs against top-half teams and identified the surprise striker he likes to pull out when the opponent expects the main guy.
I spent about four hours grinding through this stuff, just simple checking and comparing. I wasn’t running algorithms; I was basically just reading body language and history.
The Finalized Record and the Results
After all that digging, I compiled my final predicted lineup for Villarreal. I usually write it out first, then copy it into my permanent log so I can track how accurate I was later. For this Matchday XI, my biggest call was betting against the widely rumored starting central defender, guessing a more experienced veteran would be brought back in to steady the ship against Betis’ quick counterattacks. I committed the list to my spreadsheet, locked it down, and sent it to Tony.
The waiting was the worst part. We waited for the official team sheet to drop an hour before kickoff. When the lineup came out, I scrolled through it nervously. I nailed nine out of the eleven starters for Villarreal. The only two I missed were minor positional swaps—I had one winger on the left when he was on the right, and the coach made a late decision on one rotational midfielder that I hadn’t quite predicted.
Nine out of eleven, purely by looking at recent form, injury news, and coaching habits. Tony was ecstatic, especially since the two missed predictions didn’t actually affect the outcome he bet on. This whole process proved my point: you don’t need fancy tools. You just need persistence and the commitment to do the tedious work yourself. This successful verification is why I keep these practice records. It’s my proof that the simple, manual grind works better than relying on some expensive, generalized software that doesn’t understand the specific drama happening in the training ground that week.
I still run this process every week, mainly because Tony now calls me before every major European fixture, and honestly, the habit of tracking it has become a necessary routine.