Becoming addicted to FPL (only my 3rd season though) is not a surprise for me. After all, FPL combines 3 of my biggest passions – Football, Betting and Numbers.
Needless to say, #ChampManFPL has been a miracle for me during the last few months. Allowing me to continue to do the things I love, and on top of that it brings into the mix another great love of mine – CM01, which as a 15yr old boy I spent countless hours on (played CM/FM from 98 till about 11 or 12).
So thanks to the 3 legends that run the game, thanks to Planet FPL James that brought the game to life, thanks to Luke d1sable for his fascinating deep dive into the game, and thanks to Whitebeard and his crew for doing the dirty but all important work of collecting and presenting the data. Thanks for the community, which I randomly stumbled upon from a random tweet about someone running an FPL game on CM01 and that have completely changed my last 2 months. Thank you all.
There has been much debate in our little #ChampManFPL community about analysis done from running sims vs our specific sim world. I have to say that I do follow closely and rely on analysis made by d1sable and others, but I feel I have a very nice tool to give some sense in our specific sim based on results so far.
Introducing the Simple Rating System (SRS). SRS is a predictive ranking system and can be read about here:
https://www.pro-football-reference.com/blog/index4837.html?p=37
In short, it’s a ranking system used by gamblers and bookies to get a feel for team quality. The quality is not judged by number of wins (like in a normal league table) but on the margin of goals and strength of schedule of the team.
For example if Chelsea loses 0-4 to a low rating team (coming into GW 15) like Sunderland it will hurt their rating badly. Losing away 0-1 to a team like Man U could possibly even improve their rating.
The ratings assigned to each team you will see below represent how far apart they are from the average team. The average team would have a rating of 0.
Unsurprisingly, the results are not far from the actual league table but can give great insights on specific match-ups, I especially find the home/away ratings useful as I feel they really capture the way the game simulates our matches.
The ratings will be updated each GW and will have better prediction power as we go.
Here are the results:
First we have the general SRS rating for each team. Here home advantage was figured by excel as 0.67 which are added for the home team each game. The ratings are for the team home and away.
So Man U – Mid is not predicted to finish 1-1, but a draw\tight win for Man U is most likely. Two high rating teams does not imply high scoring match, they will often actually cancel each other out.
For the DGW Liv – Ful was predicted to be 2.39 – 1.43. This is pretty damn good now that we know the game finished 1-0.
Any game that gives a margin of +2 between the teams is a hint for a battering.
Home & Away Ratings:
Leeds (H) and Tottenham (A) are too great bets. Man U relatively calm results in our sim are highlighted here as they are not top for home or away.
Bayes Rating
I also added an additional regression to the mean technique (Bayes) due to the very small sample (as low as 15 for some teams). This is usually done by incorporating the team’s score from last year, in our sim I used Team Reputation / 20 (after d1sable confirmed this would be the expected quality of the team coming into the season). I am actually not sure about the correctness of this one, but results do make sense here, so yeah.
GW17 Predictions:
Derby away is the lowest rating in the model, so it seems Tottenham, the 8th rated home team, will have another goal fest this week with expected margin of 1.65. Rebrov will continue his run for top goal scorer this week.
Surprisingly, the highest expected margin (2) is in the Mid-Che game. They are the favorites to win both games according to the model, although very close with Man U. The high expected margin in the Chelsea game suggests a strong possibility for a clean sheet. Targeting triple Mid players across the different positions seems like a good bet.
Last suggestion, and more differential, is to look at Aston Vila attackers this week. Together with the analysis d1sable has been making on their team under Dalglish and the high expected margin (1.14) against West Ham, they could prove as valuable picks.
Hope you enjoyed the read and that you find it useful, I am open to any follow up questions you may have.