Wisdom of the Crowd: Gameweek 5

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 4 REVIEW

Once again the average crowd’s predictions beat the community average, with 6 correct picks out of 10, including 4 ‘Close’ predictions and 1 Exact.

GAMEWEEK 5 PREVIEW

Here is the Expected Goals chart for each fixture in GW4:

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

Man City and Chelsea look like the teams to back in Round 5, with Sergio Aguero way out in front in the captain’s poll, followed by Eden Hazard.

Chelsea’s defence also looks to be the most profitable, and Marcos Alonso could be set to profit at both ends of the pitch according to the crowd predictions.  Wolves, Everton and Crystal Palace appear to offer the budget-friendly defender options for Gameweek 5.

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

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

Good luck for Round 4!