Questions and answers

The World Cup is a separate product - you predict the champion, top scorer, best goalkeeper and the winners of 12 groups, plus you set an eleven for every match of your chosen national team. It is free right now in the launch campaign, and people joining mid-way play from the current stage without points for closed stages. Different rules from the club core: we show your version of the match, but the real tournament decides how many matches your chosen team still has. More on the /mundial page.

World Cup 2026 has 3 separate rankings:

• Picks - everyone competes for the same points for predicting the champion, top scorer, best goalkeeper, the winners of 12 groups and the play-off bracket. One general table.
• Team fans - you lock plans for your national team. A table per team - France fans compete with each other, Argentina fans with each other.
• Neutrals - you lock plans for any national team in a given match (no fixed allegiance). A separate global ranking.

After logging in you will see all 3 tables in /mundial/leaderboard.

Important rule: your campaign result does not change the official FIFA bracket. If your national team is eliminated in the real World Cup, the campaign for that team ends and you keep playing as a neutral.

Yes. You can play in both modes and your plans stay - each one is saved separately for its match and remembers which mode you set it in.

• National team- you stick with one team for the whole tournament. Points go to that team's fan ranking and to your friends league.
• Neutral - you play with no fixed allegiance. For each match you pick which side you lock a plan for. A separate ranking.
• When your team is eliminated - you switch to neutral and keep playing until the end of the World Cup. Everything you scored as a fan stays counted. Nothing is lost.

Until Thursday June 18 (18:00 Poland time) you can change team or go neutral freely. After that you can no longer change teams, and you switch to neutral only once your team drops out of the tournament.

The World Cup has two sources of points:

1) Tournament predictions (locked on Thursday June 18, 18:00 Poland time):

• World Cup champion - 20 pts
• Top scorer - 15 pts
• Best goalkeeper - 10 pts
• Group winner (×12) - 5 pts each
• 2nd and 3rd place in a group - 3 and 2 pts each
• Play-off bracket - 2 pts for a correct slot in the round of 16 and beyond

2) Match plans - you lock the lineup and decisions for every match of your national team (fan) or any team (neutral). Points per match are analogous to club: better than the real coach + a sensible setup + courage + substitutions. The simulation is based on Elo (less accurate than club - no individual xG for all 736 World Cup players).

Full legend with examples: /punktacja.

You play coach of a football team. Before a match you set the lineup of 11 players and a strategy (formation, playing style, two conditional substitutions). After the final whistle, Dobitka replays your version 5,000 times and shows how it could have unfolded. You get post-match commentary, stats and points in the fan ranking.

Right now the main game is World Cup 2026 - you lead a national team through the whole tournament. Club football has its own season path, kept separate from the World Cup.

No.You are not trying to guess the real score. You are trying to prove that your plan would have been better than the real coach's plan. Dobitka does not take deposits, does not pay cash prizes and is not financial advice. It is an analytical game for adult football fans.

World Cup 2026 and the current season path are available without payment. No paid season offer is active. If that changes, its terms will be shown before purchase. The club season is live and match-plan saving is available. Current details on /pricing.

Until the season starts (24 July) - yes, as often as you like. After the first kickoff your club is locked for the season, and a club change reopens in the January transfer window - just like real football. A new account currently saves one club; we do not sell an upgrade to that limit.

Yes - we support the Polish Ekstraklasa, the five biggest leagues in Europe (Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A, Ligue 1) and the Champions League. You pick a club during onboarding - over 100 teams from these competitions are available. World Cup 2026 is a separate product - there you play a national team (48 national teams). Lower divisions and other countries are not supported yet.

You get: your version of the match (one concrete playthrough representative of the whole distribution from 5,000 simulations), stats (% of wins across 5,000 runs, most common score, xG, key moments), match commentary in the style of your chosen commentator persona (Pub, Classic, Analytical, and for national-team matches - Anthem), a comparison with the real result and points in the ranking. All on one page with an option to share a screenshot with friends.

Nothing bad: a round without a plan is simply 0 points - no penalties, nothing negative. Only the rounds you actually play count; you can come back at any point of the season and chase the table.

In club mode the ranking is a table of managers of a single club. All Barça managers are in one table, all Lech managers in another, and so on. You earn points for your version of the match being better than what the club actually did - and still credible. Plus a bonus for sensibly going against the “wisdom of the crowd”. The full formula is in Scoring - everyone can verify their result step by step. The table holds for the whole season.

You are not guessing the real result- this is not a prediction game. Four components, up to 100 pts total: your version's result (win 30 / draw 10 / loss 0), a coach bonus for beating reality (0-25, never a penalty), credibility (0-25) and substitutions that measurably improved the game (0-20). A win always pays, and a settled plan earns at least 5 pts. One-screen overview: How it works, full legend with examples: /punktacja.

Short version: a single match is chance - a miss from 5 metres, an injury in the 20th minute and that is it. Five thousand replays (Monte Carlo - we play the match over and over, each replay a different scenario produced by the model) tell you whether your lineup reallymade sense. You get: a percentage chance of win/draw/loss, the most common score, plus one concrete version as “your story from the match”.

Under the hood: the engine is Dixon-Coles + bivariate Poisson(classic football modelling), and for national teams additionally combined with an ELO ranking. Each of the 5,000 replays plays out an “alternative film of the match” - goals, substitution moments, a possible red card or injury follow from model factors (team strength, formation, style, plan B). At the end we sum up: result probabilities, average xG (shot quality), the distribution of the most common scores, a list of key moments (when your substitution actually came on, whether plan B worked).

The model accounts for, among others:

• team attack and defence strength calibrated on historical matches,
• xG and xA of each of the 11 players(xG = shot quality, xA = quality of passes leading to a shot) plus their role on the pitch - a creator like Pedri / De Bruyne / Modric, who does not score himself but drives the team's chances, is valued differently from an out-and-out striker + minutes played (form vs substitute),
• home advantage (different weights for clubs and national teams),
• your formation (12 to choose from),
• playing style - 4 sliders: pressing, tempo, directness, defensive line,
• conditional substitutions (max 5 per FIFA: after a minute, when losing, after a red card, after an injury),
• plan B (changing formation or style during the match),
• reaction to a red card (keep the formation / park the bus / all-in),
• injury plan - who to bring off the bench on an injury (separate backup for GK / defender / midfielder / striker),
• national team ELO ranking (strength ranking of national teams - for the World Cup),
• match context - rest, derby, end-of-season pressure, travel.

The exact weights, parameter calibration and internal model extensions remain our secret ;) - thanks to that your result cannot be reproduced with pen and paper.

The same lineup and the same strategy always give the same result - we do not randomise anything behind your back.

The sweet spot between accuracy and cost. At 5,000 runs the margin of error for a win chance is only ±0.7% - the same lineup gives practically the same result every time. At 1,000 runs the margin grows above 2% and the result “jumps” (48% one run, 52% the next), which undermines trust. Above 20,000 the result is only marginally more accurate but takes longer to compute - not worth it. The 5,000-run simulation itself takes less than a second. You see the full result with commentary a few minutes after the final whistle - the time it takes to confirm the real match score.

Refereeing style (red cards and penalties are randomised the same way, regardless of who officiates the match), motivation like “playing for promotion vs a comfortable mid-table”, the exact cohesion of the lineup (how many matches a given eleven has played together), style clashes (whether high pressing breaks a team that builds slowly from the back) or the stadium atmosphere. These things we are still working on. For now we deliberately simplify the model - it is meant to be stable and repeatable. See how often the model is right and where it misses.

Matches, lineups, stats:API-Football v3 (Ekstraklasa fixtures, Europe's top-5 leagues, Champions League, World Cup 2026). Team form, xG, xA, ratings: our own statistical model built on FBref data (a public football stats database) and historical matches. Match commentary: the Claude model with a separate voice for each persona. Simulation: Monte Carlo (we replay the match thousands of times, each replay with different scenarios produced by model factors - lineup, form, playing style, formation, etc.), the Dixon-Coles + bivariate Poisson model (classic statistical formulas for counting goals in football) and a combination with ELO (national-team strength ranking).

Yes. We do not store passwords or card data. We process your email (for code-based login), nickname, favourite club, your picks, setups and simulation results, plus minimal technical data needed for operation and security. We do not collect tracking cookies without consent, do not sell data, do not pass it to third parties for marketing. We host in the EU (Vercel + Supabase), connection over HTTPS, passwords do not exist (login via an email code or Google OAuth). Full description in the privacy policy. We delete accounts on request: write to reklamacje@dobitka.pl from the email linked to your account and we will remove your data as described in the terms (section 5 of the Polish version).

Email kontakt@dobitka.pl - we reply within 24 working hours. All legal matters (complaints, withdrawal, GDPR) are described in the terms.