Wisdom of the Crowd: Gameweek 3

Each week we will be reviewing the aggregated predictions on Superbru’s Premier League Predictor game, using the collective Wisdom of the Crowd predictions to guide our fantasy football thinking.

Please join the FFS league here and add your own predictions to the data – the more there are, the more accurate the crowd should be (in theory).  And don’t forget there is £50,000 in prize money on offer every week.

THE CONCEPT

We must all make predictions about how each match will go when deciding on our fantasy team selection, predicting where the goals will be scored, which teams are most likely to keep a clean sheet and so on.  If we aggregate the predictions of thousands of football fans playing the Premier League Predictor game on Superbru, any bias should be ironed out, and the collective knowledge will produce more accurate predictions that we can make on our own.

We tested this last season by taking the average community predictions, and entering them into the game as a user called Mr Crowd Wisdom.  That user finished in 20th place out of 481 people in the Fantasy Football Scout league – a highly knowledgeable group – and also beat 98% of other people on the global leaderboard.

We’ll follow the average picks again this season and hopefully it will provide another reference point for your fantasy team selections.

GAMEWEEK 3 PREVIEW

Here is the Expected Goals chart for each fixture in GW2:

And here is the ranking of teams in order of Expected Goals Scored and Conceded:

Once again, Man City and Liverpool are at the top of the predicted goals chart, with City’s away fixture at Wolves expected to yield at least three goals, and slightly more than Liverpool’s home match with Brighton.  Sergio Aguero and Mo Salah are the obvious captaincy candidates, and this data suggests that Aguero might be the best pick.

Chelsea and Arsenal are also expected to score at least two goals, but elsewhere the crowd is predicting a relatively low-scoring set of fixtures.

That might be good news for defenders, with City and Liverpool predicted to keep clean sheets, whilst Huddersfield and Fulham offer the budget-friendly options this time.

Here are the aggregated predictions that we’ll enter for Mr Crowd Wisdom this week.

Good luck for Round 3!