BOTS VS EXPERTS: SELECTING THE BEST TEAM FOR THE GAME WEEK 22

Good evening and welcome to the continuation of our series. 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.

*it’s noticed that there were excesses on squad players from arsenal, Liverpool and Chelsea in the bots team as they were tipped to overwhelm. For FFFIRST, firmino was ranked ahead of Willian but we already had 3 Liverpool midfielders which was a maximum

                     

Hope you enjoy this piece.

*As at the time of this update, the FFGEEK site had not updated their picks so where ommited from the table and FFSCOUT hadnt given their captain article.

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(blue) 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.

Valdes(4.6) might have

 gotten only a pick from the experts but due to budget constraints and preference of Brunt(5.0) as westbroms top defence choice, he makes the cut. Alonso’s(6.5) 21 point hull didn’t go unnoticed and has been backed by all sites, receiving top slot from 4 and second slot from the last one. Finally, Daniels(5.2) pick was kind of surprising given that he had only one pick from the bots to add to his experts pick. His deal clinger though was his top scoring for the bots and the absence of any other pick within his budget range. For the third consecutive time, Sanchez(11.9) got top picked by all the sites and was the most popular captain pick to become this weeks most expected outstanding player. and he is joined in midfield by chelsea duo Hazard(10.4) and Pedro(7.0) with Coutinho(8.3) the liverpool midfielder of choice. It is to be noted that the experts (FFSCOUT) chose Coutinho in their initial picks  but due to price difficulty, lallana was picked instead. Philips(5.9) completes the midfield picks mainly due to price restrictions and getting picks from both bot and expert. Up top, Ibrahimovic(11.9), continues his superb run in the picks with nominations across the plate ahead of their trip to stoke while Lukaku(9.6) beats Costa in a close race which was helped once again by the price restrictions.

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