Every Fantasy manager must make predictions as to what will happen in each fixture when setting up their team for that gameweek.
Often it’s a subconscious process – ‘City at home to Burnley, I predict plenty of goals, captain Aguero’.  Or sometimes, we’ll look at bookies’ data for Anytime Goalscorer and Clean Sheet odds, and use their analysts’ predictions to guide our selections.
The power of the collective wisdom of football fans is not often considered, and this season I am planning to run a series of articles using aggregated prediction statistics from around 50,000 football fans on Superbru to see if we can glean anything from their collective knowledge.
By way of introduction, I am entering my 11th season on FPL, starting out as an amateur in 2007, and now with three finishes in the top 2,500 (interspersed with a few frustrating seasons, like many people).  I’m yet to crack the Top 1000, with a career high of 1,060, but maybe, just maybe, this is my year.  I take Fantasy Premier League fairly seriously, competing predominantly against a bunch of mates to see who pays for the end of season curry.  I like using stats and data to inform my decisions, taking some of the gut feel out of it, and I find that also helps mitigate the frustration when I make a bad decision.
Every week, I will make my predictions on Superbru’s Premier League Predictor game, considering each fixture carefully and then locking them in before I look at my starting lineup and captaincy decisions.  I will also look at the community statistics on Superbru, and often the collective wisdom of the crowd might adjust my thinking one way or another.
The Premier League Predictor game on Superbru records predictions by all those playing, and we can assess the average predicted goals for each team and factor that into our fantasy thinking.
Here is the early data for Round 1, with nearly 10,000 predictions made for each match so far.
It suggests that Manchester City away at Brighton is the best for goals, ahead of Chelsea at home to Burnley, whilst the Champions are most likely to record a clean sheet, according to the collective wisdom of 10,000 fans.
This looks like good news for those backing one of Manchester City trio Kevin De Bruyne, Gabriel Jesus or Sergio Aguero with the armband. In addition, those endorsing Chelsea wingback Marcos Alonso will also be pleased to have the crowd on their side.
The data also says that West Brom v Bournemouth could feasibly be 0-0, and could be a good place to look for kindly priced defenders, with Cherries pair Charlie Daniels and Nathan Ake among the standout selections for this tie.
I’ll update this Gameweek 1 data later this week once more people have made their predictions closer to kick off, and the data becomes slightly more robust as any outlier picks are drowned out by the crowd.
As part of the experiment this season, it would be great to add your predictions into the mix, and the more knowledgeable people that join, the more useful the crowd data will become.
It’s free to play, I’ve set up a FFScout pool that you can join using this link, and you can also win up to £20,000 each week depending on the number of exact scores you can predict.
Please give it a go and let me know if you have any feedback.
