Premier League Pool: Soccer Pick’em and Survivor Formats

A Premier League pool is an office pool run on English top-flight fixtures instead of NFL games: 20 teams, 38 matchdays, and a season that runs from August to May. Players pick match results each matchday, scoring is automatic, and the standings run alongside the real table all year.

Premier League is one of the leagues you can select when you set up a pool, and it is supported in the same five formats football pools use — pick’em, confidence, survivor, reverse survivor and single pick. The format details sit on the Premier League format page; this guide covers the decisions a commissioner has to make before matchday one.

How is a Premier League pool different from an NFL pool?

Four differences drive everything else.

Twenty teams, not thirty-two. A smaller board changes any format that spends teams.
Thirty-eight matchdays, not eighteen weeks. More than twice the season length.
No byes. Every team plays on every matchday, so the full board is available all season.
Draws. Matches can end level, which football pools never have to account for.

That last one is not a detail. It is the first rule you have to write, and most groups that struggle with a soccer pool struggle because nobody settled it in advance.

Agree your draw rule before matchday one

A meaningful share of soccer matches end without a winner. If your rules only say “pick the winner”, every drawn match becomes an argument in a group chat on a Saturday morning.

So decide it yourself, in advance, as a commissioner. This is your call to make with your group. The usual options:

A draw scores nothing for anyone. Simplest to explain and simplest to defend. Nobody picked a draw, so nobody is rewarded. The downside is that a matchday with several draws feels flat.
A draw is worth a half point to both picks. Softer, and it keeps late matches meaningful, but it introduces fractional scores that you have to be willing to track and explain.
Count the draw as its own outcome. Under this rule players call home win, draw or away win, and a correct draw call counts like any other correct pick. It is closest to how soccer is actually followed and it rewards real knowledge, though it makes the pool harder — which is either the point or a problem, depending on your group.

Whichever you pick, write it in one sentence, post it on the commissioner sticky note so it shows on the Dashboard and Make Picks screens, and do not revisit it in October. The same discipline applies to your survivor rules below: draws need an answer there too, and it does not have to be the same answer.

Why survivor suits a soccer season differently

Survivor is an inventory problem. You have a board of teams, you spend one per round, and you cannot reuse what you have spent. In the NFL you hold 32 teams against 18 weeks. Your board is nearly twice the length of your season, so a full run costs you 18 of 32 assets and you finish with teams to spare. The pressure comes from quality, not quantity: only a handful of those 32 are ever worth using, byes remove teams from a given week, and the strong ones get spent early by nervous players.

The Premier League inverts that. You hold 20 teams against 38 matchdays. Your board is barely half your season. Under a strict one-use rule, no entrant can survive the full campaign — the arithmetic ends the pool by matchday 21 whether anyone has lost or not. That is not a flaw. It just means a soccer survivor pool is a different design problem, and you have to choose a structure rather than inherit one.

Three structures work:

Split the season. Run survivor across the first 19 matchdays, settle it, then reset the board and run a second pool over the back 19. Two winners, two prize pots, and a natural mid-season relaunch that brings eliminated players back in.
Allow each team twice. One use in the first half of the season, one in the second. Twenty teams times two uses covers 38 matchdays with nothing to spare, which keeps the inventory pressure high all year.
Run a short block. Ten or twelve matchdays, start to finish, then run another. Short blocks suit offices where people lose interest over nine months and new colleagues join in January.

Two other things change. Without byes, your board is never artificially thinned, so the squeeze that hits NFL survivor pools in the middle weeks does not happen the same way — you always have all your remaining teams to choose from. But draws cut the other way. If a draw eliminates you, the format bites far harder than football survivor does, and a thirty-person pool can be halved on one matchday. Decide whether a draw is a survival or an elimination, say it out loud, and expect the pool to move faster than the NFL version either way.

The setup mechanics are identical to the football version, so the survivor setup walkthrough applies directly, and the format overview lives on the survivor pool page.

How do you keep a nine-month pick’em pool interesting?

Pick’em is the natural default: ten fixtures a matchday, everyone picks, results score automatically, weekly and season leaderboards update with a podium.

The real problem is pacing. Nine months is a long time to chase a single season-long total, and anyone who falls behind by November has nothing left to play for. Fixes that work:

Monthly mini-standings. A small prize for the best month keeps someone in twelfth place engaged.
Split the year in half. First-half champion, second-half champion, overall champion. Three chances, one entry.
Add a second format alongside it. Season-long pick’em as the main event, with a survivor block or a single-pick game running underneath.

Confidence works well here too, because ten fixtures make a clean 1-to-10 ranking every matchday. Two settings change how players behave and are worth knowing about: “Correct underdog picks score double” rewards reading a league where mid-table teams beat top-six teams regularly, and “Incorrect picks subtract points” makes people think harder before backing a coin flip.

Can you run one pool across more than one competition?

You can, and groups often want to once cup rounds start. Be clear about what it costs you.

Adding other competitions breaks the tidy ten-fixture matchday. Some weeks swell to twenty-plus fixtures, some teams do not play at all, and the fixture list stops being symmetrical. Two settings keep it manageable: a curated weekly slate, where only the games you select appear on Make Picks, and “Picks per week (N of M)”, where you offer twenty fixtures and each player picks ten.

For most office groups, league-only is the better first season. It is easier to explain, the standings mean something obvious, and everyone knows what a matchday is. Add cups next year. If you want a sense of how competitions stack across the calendar, the season calendar lays out what overlaps when.

When should picks lock for a US-based group?

Kickoffs spread across a weekend and across time zones, so a single lock before the first fixture of the matchday is the cleanest rule. Everyone picks the same information, nobody gains from submitting late, and there is nothing to dispute afterward.

For an American office that usually means a Saturday morning deadline, which is genuinely early for some people. Two ways to soften it: lock each fixture at its own kickoff instead, so late players can still pick the Sunday matches, or set the weekly deadline on Friday evening and treat the pool as a Friday ritual. The Weeks tab handles locking either way, week by week or with “Lock all weeks”. Whichever you choose, send the reminder a day before the deadline rather than an hour before — more on habits that keep participation up in these commissioner tips.

What about tiebreakers?

Soccer scores cluster tightly, so a combined-total question produces a lot of identical answers. Both tiebreaker questions are available — total points or margin of victory — with a ranking rule of closest, or closest without going over. Margin of victory usually separates a soccer field better, and “closest without going over” stops everyone guessing high. The tradeoffs are covered in this guide to tiebreaker rules.

Commissioner checklist

Choose your format: pick’em, confidence, survivor, reverse survivor or single pick.
Write your draw rule in one sentence and post it before matchday one.
If you are running survivor, choose a structure — split season, two uses per team, or short blocks.
Decide whether a draw survives or eliminates in that survivor pool.
Decide league-only or league-plus-cups, and set a curated slate or picks per week if you go wide.
Set the lock time and say whether it is one deadline or fixture by fixture.
Choose your tiebreaker question and ranking rule.
Plan the pacing: monthly prizes, half-season titles, or both.

Costs are the same as any other sport here: four free seats, then $3 per player beyond the free four, dropping to $2 past 30 players and $1 past 100, billed per unique person across your pools. Details are on the pricing page.

If you are weighing soccer against the other options your office might actually turn up for, office pools beyond football compares them. Otherwise, read the Premier League pool overview for format specifics and start your pool before the next matchday.

Frequently asked questions

What is a Premier League pool?

It is an office pool run on Premier League fixtures rather than NFL games. Players pick results across 38 matchdays from August to May, picks lock at a deadline the commissioner sets, and results score automatically into weekly and season-long standings. It can run as pick’em, confidence, survivor, reverse survivor or single pick.

How should draws be handled in a soccer pool?

That is a commissioner decision, and you should make it before matchday one. The common choices are that a draw scores nothing for anyone, that a draw pays a half point to both picks, or that draw is a selectable outcome alongside home win and away win. Pick one, write it into your rules, and leave it alone for the season.

Does survivor work over a Premier League season?

Yes, but not with a strict one-use rule: 20 teams cannot cover 38 matchdays. Choose a structure instead. Split the season into two 19-matchday pools, allow each team once per half, or run short blocks of ten to twelve matchdays. Decide separately whether a draw eliminates a player or lets them survive.

How many fixtures should players pick each matchday?

A league-only matchday has ten fixtures, which most groups can pick in full without complaint. Once you add cup rounds the count jumps and weeks become uneven, so use a curated slate of selected fixtures, or the picks per week setting to require ten picks from a longer list. League-only is the easier first season.

When should picks lock in a Premier League pool?

A single lock before the first fixture of the matchday is cleanest, since it puts everyone on the same information. For US-based groups that often lands on a Saturday morning. If that is too early, lock each fixture at its own kickoff, or set a Friday evening deadline and make the pool a Friday habit.