Wisdom of the Crowd: gameweek 35

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 34 REVIEW

Six correct picks out of 11 last weekend beat the community average of 5.59, and with 1 Exact Score pick and 5 Close picks, it resulted in another green arrow.  Let’s see if the Crowd Wisdom user can enjoy a strong finish to the season, now with 34 rounds worth of knowledge behind the crowd.

GAMEWEEK 35 PREVIEW

Here is the Expected Goals chart for each fixture in the big GW35:

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

Despite two difficult fixtures, Man City top the predicted goals chart, ahead of Arsenal, Watford, Tottenham, Man United and Wolves – all of whom are expected to score at least 3 times across their two fixture.

In defence, Watford looks like the pick of the teams with two fixtures, with Arsenal also predicted to concede fewer than 2 goals across their matches.  Brighton sit at the bottom the predicted goals conceded table, suggesting more misery for those of us that backed them in their double double game week.

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

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