Wisdom of The Crowd: Gameweek 18

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 17 REVIEW

It was back to winning ways in Round 17, with 6 correct predictions out of 10, including 2 Exact and 4 Close.  This resulted in a rise of over 1,000 places back into the Top 20% on Superbru.

The crowd also correctly predicted that Man City would score more goals than Tottenham, despite so many people giving Harry Kane the armband.

GAMEWEEK 18 PREVIEW

Here is the Expected Goals chart for each fixture in GW18:

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

It’s Man City way out in front on the Predicted Goals chart this weekend: at least 3 goals are expected at the Etihad. Raheem Sterling is the leader in the captains’ poll for good reason.

Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, and Man United are predicted to score at least two goals each, which brings the likes of Salah, Aubameyang, Hazard, and Lukaku into consideration.

In defence, Arsenal and Man City are predicted to keep clean sheets, with Newcastle, Bournemouth, Southampton, and West Ham the pick of the budget options.

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

Wolves 1 – 2 Liverpool
Arsenal 2 – 0 Burnley
Bournemouth 1 – 1 Brighton
Chelsea 2 – 1 Leicester
Huddersfield 1 – 1 Southampton
Man City 3 – 0 Crystal Palace
Newcastle 2 – 1 Fulham
West Ham 2 – 1 Watford
Cardiff 1 – 2 Man United
Everton 1 – 2 Tottenham