Guus Til and Anis Hadj-Moussa made the loudest arguments in a round Fipster mostly read well

The round was mostly right about where the goals would come from — just not always from who it named

There was a clear pattern to this week: Fipster kept finding the better side in several tight games, but it often leaned on the wrong scorer inside those matches. That is why the record ends up looking more awkward than it felt in real time. The broad calls were not miles off. The detail was where things slipped, which is usually where football earns its keep and your spreadsheet starts muttering into its tea.

The cleanest hit was AZ Alkmaar against Telstar

This was the one prediction that never really looked troubled. Fipster called a narrow home win and got exactly that, with Mexx Meerdink doing the only scoring. The model’s read on AZ Alkmaar’s control held up because it had identified Mexx Meerdink as a live threat and treated Telstar’s attack as thin enough to be managed. That part mattered more than the scoreline itself. A 1-0 can flatter nobody, but here it backed up the pre-match logic rather neatly.

Where we overcooked it: Feyenoord-Utrecht got away from the script early and never came back to it

The miss here was not just the result. It was the assumption that Utrecht could stay involved long enough for the game to become a proper shootout. Fipster did call Anis Hadj-Moussa, and he delivered twice, so there was at least one useful thread of truth in there. But the model over-weighted Utrecht’s scoring case and under-estimated how quickly Feyenoord would turn this into a one-sided afternoon. Nacho Ferri, Luciano Valente and Gaoussou Diarra were all unforeseen scorers, which tells you enough: once Feyenoord got rolling, the match stopped being about balance and became about damage limitation.

The players who actually shaped the week were not always the ones Fipster had circled first

Anis Hadj-Moussa was the standout name across the round because he scored twice for Feyenoord after being flagged pre-match, so that call aged well even if everything around him went feral. Julian Brandt and Toluwalase Arokodare both rewarded their pre-match billing for Ajax, which at least gave that draw some structure before Excelsior found answers of their own. Wout Weghorst also justified his inclusion by scoring for Twente against PSV Eindhoven; he did not decide the whole game alone, but he did exactly what a model wants from a named forward: show up when asked and make life slightly less tidy for everyone else.

A useful bruise before next week

The encouraging bit is simple enough: Fipster still found several of the right winners, including one perfect read in AZ Alkmaar-Telstar and decent calls on Twente-PSV Eindhoven and Groningen-PEC Zwolle. The less cheerful bit is equally plain: too many of the misses came from trusting familiar scorers in matches where different players took over instead. That is not fatal. It is just a reminder that this model likes a known face almost as much as any manager does, which is charming until someone else steals the headlines.