Porto and Sporting did the heavy lifting, but Estrela made the round awkward

The favourites mostly did what they were supposed to do, until they didn’t

This was a round that split neatly between authority and inconvenience. Fipster nailed the obvious away win at FC Porto and also had Sporting CP down for victory at Rio Ave, which is the sort of backbone a model wants from a weekend: the strong sides winning cleanly, without much theatre. But the rest of the card kept tugging at that neat picture. A couple of narrow calls landed, a couple of home assumptions went missing, and one game turned into a proper nuisance after 90 minutes had already started to feel like enough.

The cleanest hit was Porto’s three-goal job

FC Porto’s 3-0 win at Academico Viseu was the round’s most convincing call because the scoreline and the pattern matched up from early on. Fipster had backed an away win by that exact margin, and the actual goals arrived in a way that made the prediction look sensible rather than lucky: André Silva struck first, Gabri Veiga added both a goal and an assist, and William finished it off before half-time had properly settled. That matters. It wasn’t just that Porto won; it was that they won in the controlled, front-foot way the model expected. When a forecast says 0-3 and the match is effectively over by 38 minutes, there is not much room left for argument.

The miss came where control was assumed to be permanent

The ugliest miss was Famalicao against GIL Vicente. Fipster saw an away win and a tidy 0-2; instead it finished 0-0, which is not merely wrong but annoyingly efficient in its wrongness. The model appears to have leaned too hard on GIL Vicente’s ability to impose themselves without asking whether Famalicao could drag them into something slower and less generous. The actual match offered no goals at all, which is often football’s bluntest correction: no clever scoreline survives if nobody scores. The standouts list tells its own story too — useful performances from Diogo Ferreira Prioste, Finn van Breemen and Rodrigo Pinheiro, but nothing that broke the deadlock or rescued the forecast.

The round belonged to players who either were not called or were called only indirectly

The player story was lopsided in an instructive way. Fipster did not name any scorers pre-match in this set of fixtures, so most of the damage came from unforeseen names rather than from tidy pre-baked calls. André Silva opened Porto’s win; Gabri Veiga added both substance and style; William completed the job. Sporting CP then produced another pair of uncalled scorers in Flávio Gonçalves and Geny Catamo before Luis Suárez Charris took over with two goals of his own. That last one deserves particular note: two goals away from home in a 4-0 win is not subtle work, but it is decisive work, which tends to matter more than subtlety when you are writing reviews rather than poetry.

There is still something useful here for next week

The useful bit is fairly plain. Fipster remains comfortable when strong sides are expected to travel well and finish jobs properly; Porto and Sporting CP both fit that pattern, even if Sporting CP ran well past the modest 1-2 forecast. The trouble starts when a match looks like it should settle into one rhythm and then doesn’t oblige — as with Famalicao’s blank draw or Nacional letting Estrela turn a home lead into an away win through Wesley Gasolina, Ianis Ilie Stoica, Abraham Marcus and Leandro Antonetti López. That is where this round leaves its lesson: trust clear superiority when it shows itself early, but be wary of assuming control will stay polite for ninety minutes. Next round will ask for more patience around tight games, because this one charged extra for certainty.