SELECTING THE BEST TEAM: BOTS VS EXPERTS TEAM OF GAMEWEEK 1.

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 and midfield picks to 3.

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.

Even though Everton have a tough start to the season, their opening fixture is one of the easiest as PICKFORD(5.0) welcomes stoke to Goddison park. He is the most picked goalie with 3 of the 8 teams going for him and 2 of the experts. AZPILICUETA(6.5) gets the nod over Alonso due to being less expensive as we ran short of cash but needed to cover the chelsea defense. He though, was selected by 3 compared to alonso with 4. CEDRIC(5.0) comes in for Bertrand while cheap ALEX-ARNOLD(4.5) of liverpool joins them with 3 picks from the experts. Crystal palace’s DANN(5.0) completes the defense as a home fixture against huddersfield sees him prosper.  

ZAHA(7.0), DE BRUYNE(10.0), SALAH(9.0) and WILLIAN(7.0) make up the midfield as all had pickings from both bots and experts. Kdb’s immense form in preseason warrants his pick while zaha, salah, willian topped up their pre season form with excellent home fixtures.

In attack, LUKAKU(11.5) takes our captain armed band with 6 picks of the 8 and 5 captain picks. H e was selected by all the experts while KANE(12.5) came a close second. Highest by the bots but second for the experts, the highest goal scorer last season is backed for an explosive start.

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

Hope you enjoy this piece.