BBC Sport football pundit Chris Sutton has kicked off his season-long predictions contest for the 2025-26 Premier League, pitting himself against Microsoft's Copilot AI, BBC readers and a rotating cast of celebrity guests. The exercise, which sees Sutton forecast all 380 top-flight fixtures, matters because the AI chatbot won the inaugural contest last season, narrowly beating Sutton on the final day, and this year's edition tests whether humans can reclaim the title.

For the opening weekend, Sutton's guest is Courteeners frontman Liam Fray, a Manchester United supporter who is optimistic about the club's prospects under new manager Michael Carrick. Scoring awards 10 points for correctly predicting a match result and 40 points for an exact scoreline, with readers able to submit their own predictions online. Fray previously topped the guest leaderboard for the entire 2024-25 season after winning the opening weekend outright, and Courteeners have a new single, "Plus One Forever", out ahead of a greatest-hits compilation on 28 August.