Wisdom of The Crowd: Gameweek 34

Each week we are 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 33 REVIEW

Apologies again for missing BGW32, but I had a great time on holiday!  Some missed picks have meant a drop in the rankings for our crowd user, but I’ll see if I can get them added retrospectively.

Hopefully the crowd predictions are helping with your own fantasy decisions – my own fantasy team has been doing reasonably well using the wisdom of the crowd as a guide.

GAMEWEEK 34 PREVIEW

Here is the Expected Goals chart for each fixture in GW34:

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

Tottenham is the team to back this weekend, with the most predicted goals scored and fewest predicted goals conceded, courtesy of a kind home fixture with Huddersfield.  The 0.21 predicted goals conceded is the lowest I can remember.

Brighton are next on the list courtesy of their two home fixtures this weekend, but Bournemouth are predicted to score at least one goal against them, and Cardiff look more likely to score than not as they battle to avoid relegation.  The fact that Shane Duffy is second on the Captain’s Poll suggests that some people are getting a little carried away with the double game week.

Man City, Man United an Everton are also worth considering in attack, with Everton, Burnley and Leicester the pick of the cheaper defences.

Here are the picks we’ll enter for Mr Crowd Wisdom:

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

Good luck