Serhou Guirassy and the late goals gave this round its edge

The round was mostly right about direction, less so about detail

Eight correct calls out of fourteen is not a disaster, but it is also not the sort of week that lets a model swagger into the next one. Fipster found plenty of home wins and several scorelines close enough to count as sensible reads, yet the round kept asking for more than a broad lean. The pattern was simple: when the model had a clear handle on who would carry the scoring load, it looked sharp; when it leaned on team shape alone, it got dragged around by individual finishing.

Liverpool against Villarreal was the best kind of hit

The Liverpool call was right because the model trusted the right kind of game: a home win with enough attacking volume to turn into a narrow victory. It did not name any scorers there, which spared it from overcommitting to the wrong individual and left room for the match to be decided by players outside the pre-match sheet. Alexis Mac Allister then scored twice, while Florian Wirtz added another, and Rio Ngumoha supplied two assists. That is exactly the sort of outcome that rewards a decent structural read without pretending to know every last name in advance.

Sabah FA was where the numbers got too comfortable

The worst miss came in Sabah FA against Borussia Dortmund. Fipster backed a comfortable home win and built much of that confidence around Veljko Simić, Joy-Lance Mickels and Steve Solvet. None of them scored. Instead Serhou Guirassy did what good strikers tend to do when given half a chance: he scored twice and settled it. The model over-weighted Sabah FA’s recent attacking form and home scoring record, but this was decided by one player who simply mattered more than all that neat background noise.

The round belonged to players Fipster partly saw — and several it did not

Mason Greenwood was one of the few named calls who paid back immediately, scoring for Fenerbahçe in a match that finished level rather than as predicted. Andreas Klausen Helmersen also justified his pre-match billing by scoring for Bodo/Glimt, even if Napoli still won that one by sheer force of chaos and Scott McTominay’s brace. Beyond those hits, though, the round belonged to names Fipster had not flagged: Serhou Guirassy with his two goals, Alexis Mac Allister with his pair for Liverpool, Soriba Diaoune with two for Lille even in defeat, and Lucas Hernández adding another from an unexpected angle. That is where this round really bit — not in whether goals would come, but in who would provide them.

What comes next is clearer than some of these scorelines

The useful lesson here is not that Fipster should stop trusting home wins or start chasing every outsider with a pulse. It is that this competition stage keeps rewarding sharper player-level judgement than broad venue bias alone can offer. The next round will ask for better separation between teams that merely look stable and teams with one forward ready to ruin everyone’s afternoon. That is where this model has work to do — and where it can still improve without pretending football has become polite.