About FootUps

I was twelve when my father took me to my first football match. It was Rapid București, and what I remember is not the score — it's the crowd. Thousands of people excited, hopeful, completely in love with their team. That feeling stayed with me.

What I also remember is my father. He was calm about football in a way I couldn't understand. He would say quietly how a game would finish, and he was right more often than he had any business being. No software, no data, no models — just years of watching. As a boy I thought it was a trick. As an adult I realised he had built a model in his head over a lifetime and never wrote a line of it down.

He taught me something else, too: the ball is round. Not every match is winnable, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. But he believed that inside every game there is a balance you can find if you look at it honestly — that the numbers, read properly, show you the real players at their peak, not machines trained to perform.

My mother taught the rest. There were four of us boys, and she taught us all how to behave, how to eat, how to keep things clean, how to respect one another and how to love one another. She was the one you went to when you needed guidance most. I understand now, better than I did then, that everything she was teaching came down to three things: love, care, and faith. If this site is honest with the people who read it, that's hers.

FootUps is my attempt to write down what they knew.

The site runs an ELO rating model I built myself. It publishes a win, draw and loss probability for every fixture before kickoff, and updates after every result. The model is not always right. Over 104 World Cup 2026 matches it called 70.2% correctly — which means it was wrong nearly one time in three, and those misses are published here alongside the hits.

That's deliberate. A prediction you only see after it turned out correct isn't a prediction. My father never pretended he couldn't be wrong, and neither will this site.

I'm not a bookmaker or a tipster. I'm an IT engineer in Cyprus. I build things — network systems, fibre infrastructure tools, and side projects that matter to me. FootUps is one of them.

Everything I've built comes from the wisdom of my parents. This one is for them.