BOTS VS EXPERTS: SELECTING THE BEST TEAM FOR THE GAME WEEK 23

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 6* sites. 3 have bots (fantasy football fix, first and assist) while 3* are human experts (fantasy football scout, geek and the official fantasy app scout).

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.

                     

Hope you enjoy this piece.

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 £85. 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.

*I recently discovered that the official mobile app put out a scout team and added them. If they continue to put out a team, I’ll keep using them. Their picks and that of FFSCOUT just came out few hours ago causing the delay. I’m sorry.

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 three columns give the experts view from three popular sites. The column in orange lists the players that were selected by at least 2 of the sites. There is no ranking for the expert teams. Finally, the column in red collates the data from all 6 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 83.2 which at this stage is pretty affordable when mixed with bench fodders for the budget.

A burnley home game always smells of clean sheets and with max bps in 2 of his last 3 home games, Heaton(5.0) mans the post with 1 bot and 2 experts picks. Rose(6.1) has shrugged off an injury to make his way into 4 of the 6 picks ahead of the trip to sunderland. Valencia(5.5) and Koscielny(5.3) beat competition from their team mates jones and bellerin to make their way with 4 and 3 picks respectively. For the fourth succesive time, Sanchez(11.9) got top picked by all the sites and was the most popular captain pick(alongside ibrahimovic) to become this weeks most expected outstanding player and he is joined in midfield by spurs duo Alli(8.8) and Eriksen(8.7) with Stanislas(5.3) coming in as a good enabler with 4 of 6 picks. Up top, Ibrahimovic(11.9), continues his superb run in the picks with top nominations across the plate and captain backing by 3 of the sites ahead of their trip to stoke while Giroud(8.7) comes in despite fears that walcott and welbeck might affect his starting place. Finally, Gray(6.2) takes his spot as a chiepie forward as the team ran out of funds for kane, ozil or pogba and gray was prefered to siggy and walcott.

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