Wisdom of The Crowd: Gameweek 31

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 30 REVIEW

It was another disappointing week for the crowd picks, and it looks as though they won’t hit the heights of last season.  Just 3 correct picks out of 10 in an unpredictable round was worse than the community average of 4.3 and resulted in a second consecutive red arrow.

GAMEWEEK 31 PREVIEW

Here is the Expected Goals chart for each fixture in the shortened GW31:

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

Liverpool is clearly the focus this week with only ten teams in action and, given their benign fixture against strugglers Fulham, Mo Salah and Sadio Mane are strong captaincy options. At least one of their defensive options seems essential with a clean sheet expected at Craven Cottage.

West Ham are second on the predicted goals chart, and are also predicted to keep a clean sheet with goal-shy Huddersfield paying a visit.

7 of the 10 sides have a Predicted Goals Scored below 1.5.

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

Bournemouth 1 – 1 Newcastle
Burnley 1 – 1 Leicester
West Ham 2 – 0 Huddersfield
Fulham 0 – 3 Liverpool
Everton 1 – 2 Chelsea