BOTS VS EXPERTS: PREDICTING THE BEST TEAM FOR GW35

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 8* sites. 4 have bots (fantasy football fix, first, overlord and assist) while 4 are human experts (fantasy football scout, fpl academy, thefpl blog and the official fantasy app scout).

The team of the week is entered into my FPL team to make sure they are affordable and follow all FPL rules. The screenshot is shown below:

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 that is affordable. 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.

The column in yellow are the top picks based on rankings by the 4 different bot sites (first 4 columns) with total rank points beside them in the bots column.. The next four columns give the experts view from four 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 8 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.

We set out this week hoping to beat our last week score of 82 with CABALLERO(4.6) who faces a goal shy middlesborough. With bravo out, he is our one certain starter from citys backline. He is joined by sam alardyce flying dutch full back VAN AANHOLT(4.9), STEPHENS(4.0) who is our cheapie from southampton defense that hosts hull city and double cleansheet hero BAILY(5.5) who provides security of starts in valencia’s absence.

In midfield, ALLI(9.2) leads the pack with arsenal turning up to the lane for a north london derby. Spurs have been incredible at home and hope to continue that run against arsenal. KING(6.1) is in with a form that has fetched him 8 goals in 9 games ahead of a trip to basement boys sunderland. FIRMINO(8.6) ousts his brazilian teammate coutinho from the team to take his slot. Returns in the 5 last 6 games puts him as an under the readar option and he travels to face a watford team that might be on the beach already. HAZARD(10.4) is the surprise pick this week as he is away to a quite resilient everton side but after dishing a 5-0 drubbing in the home fixture and with hazard picking his usual end of season form, we turn to the star man of the league leaders.

In attack, KANE(11.5) continues his unstoppable run in the team. He might only have given an assist in his last game but that is returns of 2 goals and 2 assists in his 2 games since returning from injury and tha man chasing lukaku for the golden boot wont want to let go easily. He also tops our CAPTAIN picks with 3 out of the 4 bots choosing him and ine expert adding to the call. We have been waiting for the moment to put GABBIADINI(6.4) in our teams and at home to relegation battlers hull seems like the right time if he is to sell us on his potential for the double game weeks ahead.

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

Hope you enjoy this piece.