BOTS VS EXPERTS: PREDICTING THE BEST TEAM FOR GW3

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 47 with LOSSL(4.5) who steps in as a downgrade from de gea. Lossl wasn’t a pushover tho, selected by 2 of 4 bots and with a fixturea t home to southampon after two cleansheets, we are hopefull. DAVIES(5.6) leads the defense charge. His bursts down the left and his set piece threat make hi a prime pick at home to burnley. FOSU-MENSAH(4.5) was another back up pick to replace Alonso due to price. There was a liking to crystal palace defense this season with hennessey selected by 3 sites and pva, ward, dann also coming up. HEGAZI(4.7) continues his run with westbroms superb fixtures  

In midfield, SALAH(9.0) maintains his stay despite starting from the bench last match and dropping in price. He comes in due to shortage of funds to purchase Mane(9.5) while RICHARLISON(6.0) is backed to continue his run of form for watford as a backup for silva(8.1). ERIKSEN(9.5) and MKHITARYAN(8.1) also get picks from both sides of the divide and beat rival midifeld team mates pogba and alli. Eriksen tho, was selected due to his previous stay in the team.

In attack, captain KANE(12.5) is given a run in the team and with his near misses not justifying his underlying stats in previous two weeks, we make a burst or blow decision to captain him backed by all the experts. LUKAKU(11.6) continues his run. 3 goals last two games have convined us to keep him and he is picked most by the bots and experts. We follow up with a two goal hero like last week; CHICHARITO(7.1) goes away but after a brace away from home, we are baking him to put newcastle to the squad once more alongside 4 site squads. 

Thanks for reading and as usual, feedback is needed on the article so I know if its fun or usefull at all.

Hope you enjoy this piece.