Almost everyone starts their prediction pool with an Excel or Google Sheets file, and almost everyone abandons it before the season's even over. It's not that Excel is bad, it's just not built for this. Let's break down why.
Building a decent spreadsheet for a prediction pool isn't a walk in the park: you need a tab with the fixtures, columns for each participant, scoring formulas, another sheet with standings that update themselves... If you're handy with formulas it can take a whole evening; if not, it can eat a whole weekend. An app already comes with all of that built in.
This is the real problem with spreadsheets: someone has to copy the actual results match by match and enter them manually, and that's exactly where mistakes creep in. A typo in a score, a formula that breaks when a row gets copied, a participant editing a cell they shouldn't touch... and suddenly the standings don't add up and nobody fully trusts the points anymore.
With a spreadsheet, someone in the group has to update it after every matchday and then resend or reshare it so everyone can see how the standings look. That "someone" usually disappears after a few weeks because they've got other things going on, and that's when the pool starts to fade.
It's a pattern that repeats itself in most homemade spreadsheet pools: the first two or three matchdays are full of enthusiasm and everything gets updated properly, but around week 3 or 4 someone forgets to enter results, the sheet falls behind, people stop checking it, and the pool quietly dies without anyone officially calling it.
Everyone enters their prediction from their phone before kickoff, and as soon as the match ends the standings recalculate on their own, no one has to manually copy results or send an updated sheet around the group.
In Match Prophets, standings update automatically the moment each match ends, so nobody in the group has to be the designated "spreadsheet person." It's free and works right from your phone, perfect for making it to the end of the season without the pool fizzling out along the way.