Gaffer IQ · Section 08 of 22
The toolsMatchups
The four areas the page is built from – the central breakdown, the two side columns, and the season strip along the bottom.
- Read time
- ~2 min
- Revised
- 3 Sep 2026
- Status
- Published
There are four main areas providing different perspectives, to give the user every tool needed to find the information they’re seeking for the season ahead.
Central element: matchup breakdown
The central element is the deep dive into a specific matchup, allowing for a comprehensive breakdown of what makes a matchup sway one way and by how much. It shows decision weight, confidence, playstyle counters, and a score of the overall prediction. There are small info buttons that the user will see to elaborate on a metric in a way that isn’t invasive on the design, allowing the user to understand exactly how a metric comes to show the decided integer.
Left column: matchups by gameweek
The left column shows all the fixtures that are happening for one specific gameweek, allowing the user to understand who is playing who on what specific weeks. The user can also click on a matchup and the matchup breakdown will appear in the middle. This solely aims to provide the user with a different way to explore what’s coming up in the season.
Right column: fixtures by team
The column on the right shows all the fixtures that are ahead for the chosen team, meaning the user can see how strongly a team fares in its upcoming games. Similarly to the matchups by gameweek, the user can also click matchups to explore a deeper breakdown, and it serves the same purpose of providing alternative ways to filter what comes ahead.
Bottom: full season strip
The bottom strip provides the view with the best horizon, but this took the most work to get right, balancing interaction mechanics, animation, spacing, and graphic indications. This area is designed to highlight the notable matches when considering FPL specifically. It allows a view that highlights:
- Strong and weak gameweeks.
- Matches with extreme one-sided predictions.
- Strong captaincy predictions.
- Double gameweeks and postponed fixtures.
- Suggested best times to use an FPL chip.
The work taken to get the animations, spacing, colour coding and methods, general design philosophy, and presenting errors ironed out took roughly a million tokens of repeated tweaks, bug fixing, and testing to get right, but I think it’s one of the most useful tools on the site for FPL users specifically.
Terms used here
- Matchup breakdown
- The central element of the Matchups page – the deep dive on one fixture, showing decision weight, confidence, playstyle counters and the overall prediction score.
- Full season strip
- The bottom strip of the Matchups page, and the view with the longest horizon. It marks the gameweeks worth planning around rather than every fixture equally.
- Double gameweeks
- A gameweek in which a club plays twice, usually because an earlier fixture was postponed and rescheduled into it. Highlighted on the season strip because it changes captaincy and chip decisions.