Wisdom of the Crowd: Gameweek 9

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 8 REVIEW

The average crowd predictions last weekend were pretty much bang on average, with 5 correct picks out of 10 but no Exact Scores.  It was a tough round for everyone, with a 0-0, 3-2 and 1-5 amongst the scorelines, and overall, our Crowd Wisdom user is still beating the majority of people on Superbru.

GAMEWEEK 9 PREVIEW

Here is the Expected Goals chart for each fixture in GW9:

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

Both Man City and Liverpool face bottom half opposition in the shape of Burnley and Huddersfield, and thus they return to the top of the predicted goals chart. Man City’s home fixture is expected to yield more goals than Liverpool’s away tie; this means Sergio Aguero is the obvious captaincy pick.

Arsenal and Tottenham also seem worthy of consideration, with Alexandre Lacazette and Harry Kane likely to be popular picks.

In defence, it’s Liverpool and City again in that order, with lots of budget options this week, such as Bournemouth, Fulham and Wolves.

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

Good luck for Round 9.