After more than 20 years, legendary BBC football pundit Mark Lawrenson is making his final set of Premier League predictions this weekend.
Lawro first started the weekly feature, which would become a fixture on Football Focus, BBC Radio 5 Live and the BBC Sport website, way back in 2000.
Since then, he has made more than 8,000 predictions, taken on hundreds of celebrity guests who have given their own scores, been sent a rude message by dozens of them - including Arnold Schwarzenegger [see video below] - and even got one or two results right along the way
"My average score is not too bad actually," Lawro said. "But lots of people have asked me about my predictions down the years, good and bad - well, mostly bad.
"The time I always remember is one unbelievably cold February a few years back, after a night match at Aston Villa.
"I was walking out of the ground and a fella stopped me, very politely, and said 'Mr Lawrenson, I follow all your predictions, and you are not doing very well, are you?"
"I said 'OK, fair enough, but do you know what... if I honestly thought I could accurately predict the results of football matches, I wouldn't be here, freezing my backside off. I would be in Barbados, in Sandy Lane hotel.
"I think he understood where I was coming from.
After starting out as an occasional segment on TV via Football Focus, Lawro's Predictions became a popular feature on the BBC Sport website, where they generates hundreds of thousands of page impressions each week - his record was 1.2m when he took on Rick Astley for the festive fixtures at Christmas 2020.
There have been plenty of complaints too - from fans and even clubs who were somehow convinced Lawro was biased against them when he submitted his scores. Among them are Tottenham, Southampton and, especially, West Ham.
In January of the 2015-16 campaign, the Hammers were lying sixth in the Premier League but in Lawro's League Table - which is at the bottom of every predictions page, and is based on his results, not reality - they were 19th with just two wins all season. It didn't go down well at Upton Park...
Even Hammers joint-chairman David Gold commented, saying he was "no fan of Lawro". Such is the power of a few predictions, apparently.
Lawro's response probably didn't help, but then he has never made a prediction just to try to please people either.
"I certainly don't have anything against West Ham," Lawro said the following week. "In fact I almost joined them as a teenager - they offered me an apprenticeship before I joined my hometown team Preston.
"I have been wrong about them a lot this season so I am sure their fans will not mind that I am tipping them to lose again [to Bournemouth] this week."
West Ham won 3-1.
At the other end of the scale, Lawro was also responsible for the longest unbeaten run in English football history. Well, sort of.
No, not the 49 games by Arsenal's Invincibles between May 2003 and October 2004 - this is the 159-game streak that Lawro tipped Liverpool to remain undefeated for, between May 2016 and November 2020.
In fairness, his former team only lost 16 of those games in real life and he has regularly also tipped Emirates Marketing Project to remain unbeaten for entire campaigns too in recent seasons - including this one.
"I only became aware I didn't tip Liverpool to lose a couple of seasons into that run when people started giving me a bit of stick about it," Lawro explained.
"Since then, though, Liverpool have been absolutely outstanding and have hardly ever lost a real game either. So how good am I?
"Seriously, though, I don't go through my previous predictions for each team when I look at the fixtures each week. That doesn't help me get their next results right.
"I don't pay any attention to the table based on my scores either, but the top teams often stay unbeaten because I don't tip them to lose many games - they don't, so why would I?"
