About and sources
What this app is, what it is not, and where its data comes from.
What this is
A personal project that rates rugby teams from their match history and simulates tournaments to produce probabilities. It is built and run by one person, published for reading, and free to use.
It is unofficial. It has no connection to World Rugby, to any national union, to any club or franchise, to any competition organiser, or to any of the media organisations whose feeds it reads. Nothing here is an announcement, and no figure on this site should be taken as coming from the teams it describes.
The app covers senior men’s rugby union only. There is no women’s data, no sevens, no age grade and no rugby league in the databases behind it, so there is no rating, no forecast and no fixture for any of them.
Not betting advice
These are model outputs, not odds, and no part of this app is intended to inform a wager. It integrates no bookmaker, publishes no prices and takes no money.
A published probability carries real error. The model performance page reports how often the forecasts have been right and how well calibrated they are — read it before treating any number here as settled.
Where the data comes from
Every figure is derived from the sources below. None of them endorses this app or has reviewed it.
| Source | What it supplies |
|---|---|
| ESPN | Match results and scores, scheduled fixtures with kick-off times and venues, matchday squads, the XV each side has named for a fixture about to be played, the URC, Premiership and Super Rugby tables, team crests, and one of the three news feeds. |
| World Rugby | The international results ESPN does not carry — the Nations Cup, World Cup qualifying, most of Rugby Europe — which the ratings are computed from. Also the official world rankings, published here beside this model’s own for comparison, and team match statistics; neither of those is an input to any forecast. |
| Planet Rugby | News headlines and standfirsts. |
| Rugby World | News headlines and standfirsts. |
| YouTube | Upload feeds from twenty-four competition, union, and independent analysis channels. Video is played through YouTube’s own embedded player and is never downloaded or re-hosted. |
| Wikipedia | World Cup squad lists; each player’s club, caps and date of birth; each team’s nickname, head coach, captain and ground; and the Currie Cup results ESPN stopped carrying after 2022 — all refreshed weekly — and the Top 14 table, which ESPN has published for no season since 2022-23, under CC BY-SA 4.0. |
| OpenStreetMap | Venue coordinates, via the Nominatim geocoder, under the Open Database Licence. |
| Open-Meteo | What the weather did at each venue, from the ERA5 reanalysis; what it is expected to do at a fixture in the next fortnight; and the terrain elevation of every venue whose coordinate has been checked. None of it is used by the model. |
| Esri World Imagery | The view of a ground from above on a match page, and the descent onto it, shown only where the coordinate is known to be the stadium rather than its town. Imagery is credited under the picture. Not used by the model. |
| Google Earth | Linked to, never embedded: Earth refuses to be framed, so the link carries a camera and opens in its own tab. Not used by the model. |
| nationalanthems.info | Each nation's anthem on its profile page — the recording, its credits, and the words where they are out of copyright. Published under CC BY 4.0; the recordings are used on the permission the site grants for them. Not used by the model. |
Headlines link out to the publisher and the article text is never fetched or reproduced. A news item is tagged by reading its headline, the standfirst the feed supplies with it and the feed’s own category labels — so a tag means the item named that team somewhere in what the feed published, and nothing more.
Crests, names and marks
Team crests are shown to identify the side a row belongs to, in the same way its name does. Every crest remains the property of the club or union it belongs to, and every competition name is the trademark of its organiser. No endorsement or affiliation is claimed or implied.
A national flag is never shown in place of a crest — a flag names a country and an entrant is a union, so a team with no crest on file is shown as its initials instead.
If you hold rights in a crest shown here and would rather it were not, say so and it will be removed.
What the model does not know
The forecasts rest on ratings, venue and rest. They do not read team selection, so a forecast does not move because a side named its XV, and they do not read weather. A rating moves when results land.
Club and international ratings sit on separate scales with no bridge between them, and the app shows one at a time so it cannot imply a comparison the data does not support. A team the record cannot pin down is listed without a rank rather than ranked on thin evidence.
How it works sets out the method in full.
Licence and contact
No licence is granted over this app or its source. It is published for reading.
For corrections, rights queries or anything else, get in touch through github.com/ces0491.