Sorriso and the late equaliser made a mess of the tidy calls

The round started with a couple of sensible calls and then spent the rest of the weekend arguing with them.

Fipster did at least find two winners in the right direction. Alverca beat Rio Ave by a single goal, and Estrela were beaten by Academico Viseu exactly as expected. That is the useful bit: when the model liked a side with a clear attacking edge, it was not guessing in the dark. It had Dawda Camara Sankharé in the frame for Alverca, and André Clóvis as the main threat for Academico Viseu. One of those calls landed cleanly; the other landed twice, which is usually enough to make a prediction look less like fortune-telling and more like work.

André Clóvis was the neatest hit, because the logic held as well as the finish.

Academico Viseu’s win at Estrela was not just a correct outcome; it was a correct read on where the goals would come from. Fipster had André Clóvis down as the key man, and he scored twice before half-time. That matters more than simply being right about an away win. The model had identified a striker in form and a defence that looked open enough to let him work. Cihan Kahraman supplied both assists, which only sharpened the point: this was not random noise from deep midfield or a set-piece scramble. It was exactly the sort of direct attacking pattern the pre-match notes were built around.

The miss that hurt most was Santa Clara, because it was built on too much faith in control.

A 0-0 at home to SC Braga is not just a wrong scoreline; it is a wrong assumption about how much pressure Santa Clara could sustain. Fipster leaned hard on Gonçalo Paciência and on Santa Clara’s recent scoring run at home. Neither side produced anything useful in front of goal, and that is where this one slipped away from the model. The issue was not that Braga suddenly became glamorous going forward. It was that Santa Clara never turned their supposed edge into actual chances on paper or on grass. Sometimes a forecast fails because it trusts momentum too politely.

The round belonged to players who either were called early or arrived uninvited.

The cleanest named success stories were André Clóvis, Georgios Koutsias and Luis Suárez Charris. Fipster had all three in its pre-match thinking, and all three scored across their fixtures. That is what you want from player calls: not just one lucky nod, but evidence that the model can spot where goals are likely to come from even when it gets some scorelines wrong around them. The awkward part is what sat beside them. Sorriso scored twice for Famalicao without being called at all, Hwang In-Beom scored for FC Porto without being called at all, and Alexander Hartmann Bah did likewise for Benfica. Those are not tiny misses; they are exactly the sort that turn a decent attacking read into an untidy round.

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