About Lower League Analyst

The short version

Lower League Analyst analyses every upcoming fixture across the Championship, League One, League Two, and the National League. Every match is run through 8 equally weighted data factors: form, position, home and away record, head-to-head, goals data, shots and xG, injuries, and fixture difficulty. The output is a conviction score out of 10. The work that used to take hours on a Friday night, done in seconds, with the reasoning shown on every pick.

Where this came from

We've spent years following lower league football properly. Not just glancing at the table, but digging into the form lines, breaking down home and away records by opponent quality, checking which teams were genuinely well-placed and which were just flattering to deceive.

It was brilliant. We loved every minute of it. But it took hours, and those hours are hard to find when you've got a business to run during the week.

So we built a tool that does it for us. Not a generic prediction engine. There are thousands of those and most of them are rubbish. We wanted something that thinks the way we think. That looks at the same things we look at. That breaks the data down in the same way we would if we had unlimited time on a Friday night.

That tool is Lower League Analyst.

Why lower leagues?

The Premier League is the most analysed competition on the planet. Every data company, every model, every analyst is covering those twenty teams. Insights are hard to find because the field is saturated.

Lower leagues are completely different. The data exists, but very few people are doing the work properly. Nobody is sitting down every week and analysing every fixture in League Two, breaking down each team's record against top-half and bottom-half opposition, checking which sides are creating genuine chances and which are surviving on luck.

That gap is where Lower League Analyst lives.

How the analysis works

Every fixture gets a team strength rating, built from every league result since 2024, updated after every match with home advantage and the margin of each result. That rating decides the pick and the conviction score. Every pick then shows 8 factors as the evidence:

1. 01
   League position. The gap between both teams in the table and what that gap actually means in context.
2. 02
   Recent form. Who's winning, who's struggling, who's in freefall.
3. 03
   Home and away record. Performance broken down separately, then again by opponent quality.
4. 04
   Head-to-head. How these two specific sides have matched up in recent meetings.
5. 05
   Goals, conceded and clean sheets. Attacking output and defensive reliability across the season.
6. 06
   Shots and xG. Chance creation quality, not just results. A side winning with low xG is getting lucky. A side losing with high xG is creating chances and the results will come.
7. 07
   Injuries and suspensions. Key absences that change how a team plays. In lower league football where squads are smaller, one or two missing players can change everything.
8. 08
   Fixture difficulty. How tough this specific game is to win, given everything above.

The conviction score runs from 0 to 10, rounded to one decimal place: it is the backed side's share of the win chance implied by the two ratings, home edge included. The eight factors do not move the score; they show where the evidence agrees with the pick and where it cuts against it. Where a factor has no reliable evidence, we leave it out and say so on the breakdown instead of guessing. A conviction score is not a probability of winning.

A fixture is only scored once both clubs have six league matches behind them that season. Every fixture gets a team strength rating, built from every league result since 2024, and the eight factors are shown as the evidence. A pick is released at 10:00 UK time on the first morning its score is final, once both teams have played their last league game before it. Anything at 7.0 or higher is released. No exceptions after the fact, and picks are locked from then on.

Full transparency

Every pick is tracked. Every result is recorded. The wins and the losses, both. No deleting bad weeks, no quietly forgetting calls that didn't land. Performance tracking went live on 14 April 2026, and you can see the running record on the Insights page at any time.

If the model has a bad run, that will be there in black and white. If it has a good run, same. The point of building this in the open is so you can judge it on the evidence rather than the marketing.

Who this is for

Lower League Analyst is for people who already follow lower league football and want a faster, more rigorous way to make sense of the weekend's fixtures. It's not a get-rich scheme and it's not pretending to be one. It's a tool that does the analytical heavy lifting so you can spend your time enjoying the football instead of poring over spreadsheets.

If you'd rather watch a game with a stronger view of what the data says, you'll get value from this. If you're looking for guaranteed winners, you won't. They don't exist, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something we wouldn't buy.

Behind the tool

Lower League Analyst is built and operated by Maitland Agency Limited, a digital agency based in Darlington. It sits within the Maitland SaaS incubator alongside our other data products.

See the live scoreboard on the model performance and hit rate page, browse the analyst blog for previews and method notes, or get in touch via the contact page. You can also follow @LL_Analyst on X.