Football results Friday 9 October 2026: AI predictions review

Four matches went to the models on Friday 9 October 2026 and only one came back. The consensus finished 1 of 4, a return that will sting given three of the four calls carried a clear majority and one of them was unanimous across every model in the pool.

The biggest surprise arrived in the Bundesliga, where Borussia Dortmund were backed by 100% of 12 models to beat Werder Bremen and instead drew 2-2. Malaga's 1-1 stalemate with Espanyol and Lexington's 0-0 with FC Tulsa did the rest of the damage, leaving Lens 2-1 Lyon as the solitary correct pick.

Full time on a night when the consensus managed only one correct call from four.

Where the AI got it right

Lens vs Lyon prediction was the cleanest piece of work on the card. The consensus called a Lens win on 75% of 12 models and named 2-1 as the most common scoreline; the match finished 2-1 to Lens. Average confidence sat at 44%, so this was a measured call rather than a shout, but the scoreline and the winner both landed.

That is the entire right column for the day. One match, one correct verdict, and the rest of this review is a post-mortem.

Where it got it wrong

Borussia Dortmund 2-2 Werder Bremen is the headline miss. All 12 models went for a Dortmund win, the most common scoreline was 2-1, and average confidence was 52%. Dortmund scored twice and still did not win. When a pool is unanimous, the failure is not a split decision or a coin flip landing the wrong way — it is a shared blind spot, and the two goals conceded are where it lived.

Malaga 1-1 Espanyol was a narrower but still clear miss. Espanyol drew 83% of the 12-model vote, with 0-2 the most common scoreline and average confidence of 44%. Espanyol did not win, and they did not keep a clean sheet either. The consensus read the away side as the stronger team and the match as low-scoring; half of that held, the decisive half did not.

Lexington 0-0 FC Tulsa is the softest of the three misses and the least embarrassing. Only 50% of 10 models backed a Lexington win, the most common scoreline was actually 1-1, and average confidence was 36% — the lowest on the card. The pool was effectively split and the goals never came. A goalless draw is a poor outcome for a prediction that leaned home, but this was never a confident call.

Models of the day

Four models topped the table on 2 of 4: GPT-5.6 Luna, Mistral Medium 3.5, DeepSeek V4 Pro and Grok 4.6. None of them cleared half the card, which says as much about the fixtures as about the models.

Behind them, a cluster finished on 1 of 4: Claude Sonnet 5, Qwen 3.8 Max, MiMo V2.5 Pro, Gemini 3.8 Flash, Kimi K3 and GLM 5.3. Cohere Command R+ (08-2024) also landed 1 correct, but from only 3 selections.

The worst tally belonged to Llama 3.1 70B Instruct, which went 0 of 3. It was the only model on the day to finish without a single correct verdict.

Full results

• Bundesliga: Borussia Dortmund 2–2 Werder Bremen — consensus Borussia Dortmund win (100%) WRONG
• La Liga: Malaga 1–1 Espanyol — consensus Espanyol win (83%) WRONG
• Ligue 1: Lens 2–1 Lyon — consensus Lens win (75%) RIGHT
• USL Championship: Lexington 0–0 FC Tulsa — consensus Lexington win (50%) WRONG

The pattern is worth noting for anyone tracking the models over time: the two highest-confidence calls of the day both failed, while the lowest-confidence call also failed and the only success came from a mid-range 75% majority. Today's fixtures are already through the pipeline — the full set of predictions is live on the today's football predictions page.

Next up: today's football predictions from the same panel, and the results archive with every graded call. Forecasts are informational only.