Privacy

What is stored, and when

Four things, and nothing else.

Your answer to the analytics question

tf-consent-v1 in your browser's localStorage holds either granted or denied, and it is written only once you give it. It contains nothing else — no identifier, no timestamp of what you read — and it does not expire on its own. Clearing your browser's site data removes it, and you will simply be asked again.

It is stored there rather than in a cookie because it is the one thing that has to persist to be useful: without it, every page you open would ask the same question again.

An XI you have saved

The XI builder can keep the team you built — the formation, the eleven, and the call you made on it: who scores and how many for each of them, who lays a goal on and how many, which card you gave each of them, the substitutions, and the result — together with the match it is about (the opponent, the date and whether it is at home), which competition that match is in, and the day you saved it. It all goes under tf-lineups-v1, in the same localStorage: one record per match, and at most fifty of them. It is written only when you press Save this XI at the top of a builder page, and the Forget button in the Saved predictions list deletes the record for the match you are looking at — your other saved matches stay.

This one is yours rather than ours, and the saved record stays on your device: it is never sent anywhere, and the Forget button above is all it takes to be rid of it — nothing else on this site can read it.

The call is in the link as well, and on the image. A picture cannot read your device, so a prediction reaches the graphic the same way the team does — inside the URL — which means the image the builder makes has your call written out under the pitch, and anyone who opens the link you copy sees it too. That is something you are choosing to send rather than something being done with your data: your prediction reaches us only as part of the request for the page or the image, exactly as the eleven in the link already did, and the record above is still the only copy that is kept. A link with no call in it sends none.

Ratings you have given a match

A played match's page — the one the player button on a season row opens — lets you score the players out of ten and keep what you thought. That goes under tf-ratings-v1, in the same localStorage: one record per match, at most fifty of them, each holding the match's own id and a score for every player you rated. It is written only when you press Save your ratings, and Forget beside it deletes the record for the match you are looking at — your other matches stay. That one asks before it does, because there is no copy of the record anywhere to put back.

It is yours in the same way the XI is, and for a reason that is this page's own subject: a rating is a judgement rather than a fact, so the provider's number comes down the wire and yours never goes anywhere. Nothing in the archive data holds it, nothing here sends it, and unlike a prediction there is no link or image that carries it — the only copy is the one on your device, and clearing your browser's site data removes it with everything else.

The clubs you follow

Every club's page has a Follow button. Pressing it keeps that club on this device under tf-clubs-v1, in the same localStorage: a list of club slugs, newest first, at most sixty of them, and nothing else — no name, no crest and no record of what you have read. The name and the crest are read from the site each time the list is drawn, so a club that is renamed needs nothing kept up to date here. Pressing Following on that club's page takes it back off. Only two things ever read the list — that button, and the strip of your clubs on the home page — and neither sends it anywhere.

The list does travel in one link, and only when you press that link. Add to calendar on that strip points at a calendar holding every followed club's fixtures, and the clubs are named in the URL itself (/calendar.ics?clubs=arsenal,liverpool), because a file cannot read your device. Your calendar app keeps that URL as the subscription it refreshes, so the list then lives somewhere other than this browser — and anyone you hand the link to can read the clubs out of it. Nothing about which clubs you follow reaches us except as part of the request for that file — the same way the call in a builder link arrives, and logged by the host like any other request.

Analytics, if you accept

Google Analytics 4 counts page views: which pages are read, roughly where readers arrive from, and what kind of device they use. If — and only if — you accept, it sets two cookies, _ga and _ga_<container>, which Google's defaults give about two years. Their whole purpose is to tell one browser from another so a repeat visit can be counted as a repeat visit.

If you decline, none of it happens. The analytics script is not loaded at all, so no request reaches Google and no cookie is set. That is the strictest of the two ways to do this, and it is the reason the numbers here only ever describe the readers who accepted — which is a trade made deliberately rather than a limitation discovered later.

What this site does not do

• No advertising, and no advertising cookies.
• No accounts, no newsletters, no forms that collect anything.
• Nothing is sold, and nothing is shared with anyone beyond the analytics described above.
• No cross-site tracking of our own. Stories link out to the publisher that wrote them, and from there that publisher's own policy applies.

Changing your answer

Cookie settings in the footer of every page forgets your answer and asks again. Analytics stops from the moment you decline, so a later no is a no for everything that follows — but cookies already set stay in your browser until they expire, because this site no longer loads the script that would clear them. Your browser's own settings can delete them immediately, and they are the only cookies this site ever sets.

Hosting

The site is served by Vercel. Like any host, it keeps request logs in order to run and protect the service; those logs belong to the platform rather than to us, and nothing on this site combines them with anything else.