BOTS VS EXPERTS: SELECTING THE BEST TEAM FOR THE GAME WEEK 32

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 and the stats to back it.

 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.

In goal, VALDES(4.6) home game against burnley stands out. Very rarely does a goal keeper get top picks from both bots and experts but middlesboroughs defensive resolve have helped valdes stand as their representative against a travel shy burnley. DAVIES(4.8) and VALENCIA(6.0) continue their run in our team with fixtures against watford at home and goal shy sunderland away.

In midfield, SANCHEZ(11.6) makes the team but due to his high prie, he loses his spot to LANZINI(6.4) after ibrahimovic was prefered in attack. Lanzini stakes his cliaim with over 40 points produced in the last 5 games in front of his own fans and a visit from swansea who arent fans of cleansheet should see him addd to that tally. Regulars ALLI(9.0) and ERIKSEN(8.8) are joined by budget on form arsenal midfielder WALCOTT(7.3). walcott has bettered sanchez for shots and shots in the box since sanchez switch back to the left wing and with big sam likely to focus on sanchez, walcot should thrive.

In attack, mr explosive AGUERO(12.7) returns with a home fixture against hull and takes the captain band expectedly. 3 goals in his last 4 games and 9 in 9 overall is form that can nit be ignored. LUKAKAU(10.4) returns after a 2 weeks break to host a travel shy leicester city. Lukaku is justified by having scored in all his home games this year and is in race for the golden boot. IBRAHIMOVIC(11.4) is another long time absentee that returns with a lovable trip to sunderland at hand. A goal on his return to the team is a sign for things to come we hope as he beats sanchez to the position of luxury attacker this week.  

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

Hope you enjoy this piece.