About Dugout

Dugout is the editorial home of Starting11. We publish predicted starting XIs for every round of the competitions we cover: the Oracle's call, the crowd's picks, the team news around them, and then the honest scorecard once the real team sheets land.

The Oracle

The Oracle is Starting11's lineup prediction engine, and we say so plainly: it is a machine byline, not a pen name. It reads availability, suspensions, form and team news, calls every XI before the news breaks, revises its call as the picture changes, and its full record is published live on Meet the Oracle, competition by competition, including where it is weakest. When a prediction was built on thin history, the article says so before kickoff, not after.

The crowd

Alongside the Oracle, thousands of fans build their own XIs on starting11.com. Where enough picks exist we show the crowd's consensus XI, and after full time we score both against the official team sheet. Machine against humans, in the open.

Editorial standards

• Data first. Every piece is built from real numbers: our own prediction engine, fan picks, confirmed lineups, injuries and form. Nothing is invented to fill space.
• Human-reviewed. We use tooling to draft from that data at speed, and a person reads, checks and stands behind every published piece.
• Honest bylines and dates. Bylines are real (the Oracle is disclosed as an engine), publish dates reflect when the content first existed, and updated dates reflect real revisions, never a render clock.
• Predicted means predicted. Only an official team sheet is ever called confirmed. Predictions are labelled as ours or the crowd's, with the confidence we actually have.
• Corrections. If we get something wrong, tell us at hello@starting11.com and we will fix the piece and say so.

The data

Fixture, lineup and match data come from our licensed data provider; crowd XIs come from fans on Starting11. Build your own XI and take the Oracle on at starting11.com.