BOTS VS EXPERTS: SELECTING THE BEST TEAM FOR THE GAME WEEK 21

Good morning and welcome to the continuation of our series. I want to apologize for the hiatus, the Christmas break was a busy time with game weeks coming in thick and fast and sites updating late plus I had to travel for family re-union and was faced with very poor network coverage. Also this week’s piece came relatively late and ill like to apologize. Hope you find this useful.

Choosing a team for a game week can be hard. Sentiments and personal preferences can cloud ones judgement. There have been many FPL sites that try to predict the team for the week but there is usually a large discrepancy.

My plan in doing this article is to compare human analysis (totw from experts on different sites) to AI analysis (totw from bots on different sites).

Now these sites are expected to churn out different teams every week irrespective of transfer limitations. The difference is that the experts bring their teams based on strict FPL formation and price while the bots simply bring out the best set of players from their algorithm projections.

For this study, I'll be using 5 sites. 3 have bots (fantasy football fix, first and assist) while 2 are human experts (fantasy football scout and geek).

The picture below is an excel representation of the data gotten. I didn't delve into stats. Just collated results by sorting by next game week scores (for the bots) and getting the teams for the experts.

There is room for 3 goalkeepers, 5 defenders, 7 midfielders and 5 forwards in the initial selection for the bots and these are given rank 1-7 with 7 being the highest. The players with highest rank points are then fitted into an FPL formation with a max cost of £86. Substitutes aren't used, a captain is also selected using the same method. 

Another modification made was to reduce the number of defensive entrants from a team to 2 as most bots select based on fixtures and can pick all defenders from a team.

Hope you enjoy this piece.

The column in yellow

 are the top picks based on rankings by the 3 different bot sites (first 3 columns) and gives you a general idea of the players that the auto bots in general think will perform with total rank points beside them. The next two columns give the experts view from two popular sites. The column in orange lists the players that were selected by both sites. There is no ranking for the expert teams. Finally, the column in red collates the data from all 5 sites and tries to give the best possible combination of teams from both the bots and the experts. The last column is for players who for cost or maximum number of team mates missed the cut but could be viable alternatives.  

The team cost is 86 which at this stage is pretty affordable when mixed with bench fodders for the budget.

Heaton(4.9) was selected all 3 bots and 1 expert to claim our goal keeper slot. Rose(6.0) was selected by all 5 sites and top scored for 4 to become a “must have” for the week. Walker(6.1) followed closely behind as tottenham defensive assets were highly favoured. Daniels(5.2) and PVA(5.0) had little to separate them; daniels topping from the bots but PVA getting a mention from the experts to equal him so this one depends on funds and squad member. Sanchez(11.9) got top picked by all the sites and was selected captain by 4 of them to become this weeks expected outstanding player. His away form must have added to his appeal as he is the highest points scorer away from home and he is joined in midfield by spurs duo Eriksen(8.6) and Alli(8.5) who both received nominations from 4 of the 5 bots and experts. Snodgrass(5.8) completes the midfield set up ahead of hulls easiest feature in the next 4 gameweeks. Up top, Defoe(7.8) gets a pick from 4 sites toping in 2. He is joined by Giroud(8.6) with 2 top picks (3 total) and a captain nomination alongside Ibrahimovic(11.6) who is picked by all 5 sites despite having a relatively hard liverp0ol fixture.  

Feedback is needed on the article so I know if its fun or usefull at all.