The latest news and updates from the Scout Network

It was another busy week for the Scout Network last week, as FPL Poker Player and Transfer Algorithm joined the line-up.

We formed this initiative to bring together some of the community’s best content, tools, podcasts, websites and video. 

FPL Poker Player has become an important part of the FPL community both in terms of his social media content and with his use of transferable skills from Poker to aid decision making in FPL. 

Other new member Mikkel from Transfer Algorithm, Mikkel is under the spotlight this week.

If you are interested in being part of either the Scout Network or the Scout Academy please get in touch HERE.

FPL BlackBox 

FPL BlackBox had its first guest ahead of Gameweek 3. Mark and Az were joined by Luke a.k.a. D1sable to discuss who the “whipping boys” are this season, which teams we should be targeting, price rises and much more.

Ted Talks FPL 

Ted looked at replacements for Allan Saint-Maximin (£5.4m) in the build-up to Gameweek 3, specifically focussing on value options. Make sure you check out his graphical fixture tickers, deep-dive into stats for all positions and prices.

El Statto 

This week El Statto added a user tutorial to his partner FPLDackel’s YouTube channel. This is to help explain how the interactive stats work on his website work and also to explain how the new filters. The website tables are now able to be filter by team.

FPL Family 

The Sunday night FPLFamily Live Stream has been watched over thirty thousand times for two weeks in a row now.). Lee and Sam recorded the third round of Sam vs Lee – The Points Predictor last week, with Sam holding a 2-0 lead from the opening two Gameweeks.  Sam has also been involved in launching the Arabic language version of the Fantasy Football Scout website alongside another member of the Scout Network, Karam Tayser from Fantasy Chat.  

FPL Nymfria 

If you’re struggling with a poor start to the season, take solace in the fact that you’re not the only one. FPL Nymfria had one of her worst Gameweeks ever, and responded by deploying her Wildcard. You can see what that looked like HERE. She was also invited as a guest on the FPL Experiment Podcast this week where she discussed her journey into FPL, as well as the hurt of selling Son ahead of his four goals.

KingFut 

Ahead of Gameweek 3, KingFut pundits Mohamed Korain and Omar Khairallah assessed what turned out to be the highest goal-scoring gameweek in FPL’s history in the latest episode of ‘King El Fantasy’. The duo discussed their next steps, players to watch amidst all the early transfers and Wildcards, as well as the captaincy choices for the third Gameweek – which stirred a lot of debate in the FPL community.

Spotlight: Transfer Algorithm 

Transfer Algorithm isTor Mikkel Tokvam’s personal project which uses underlying data to determine expected FPL points and value within the budget restraints for his team. Over time, this  has gained support in a closed FPL community and is now one of the fastest growing FPL tools to enhance points scoring potential. Transfer Algorithm uses over a dozen key statistics to consider each potential player, using both recent and historic form. 

The Transfer Algorithm also draws on minutes played, big chances, goal attempts, chances created, shots, key passes and touches. By combining these data points with fixture ratings alongside the budget and pricing restraints the algorithm is then able to rank players in tables by play position. The Transfer Algorithm is also able to consider individual fixtures to generate a weekly captain calculator to help managers make the best captain choices. 

“The Transfer Algorithm is perhaps a bit difficult to understand for those who haven’t used them before. The Transfer Algorithm load tonnes of player data for every player, and combine those data into expected FPL points for their past performances. In addition to the FPL points they actually have managed to score, these data combine to give the strength of each player going forward. Recent performances count a lot, past performances count less.  Combine this strength with the expected minutes for the player going forward and the upcoming fixture list, the Transfer Hub calculates the point-expectation for the player.” – Tor Mikkel Tokvam

All players are then subject to the money-limiting vector field (captaincy material considered) . The vector field create a list of players by a BCV rating (BCV stand for Budget-Constrained-Value). The ranking of players is trying to tell which players will be the best to buy/hold, and who will be the priority to get rid of.’

The Transfer Algorithm takes in to account:

• The players position (midfielder/forward) and team
• The players FPL price
• The players average minutes (this is the only factor in the algorithm which is subjective)
• The players weighted underlying PPM – This is the core of the algorithm, the big data. The algorithm sample the 16 most important playing statistics back to 2011 for every player.  The player data is divided into two, the real outcome, and the expected outcome. Both are given the same importance
• The players PPG – Points per game (simply expected minutes multiplied by underlying points per minute.)
• The fixture ratio – The algorithm imports the fixture list, and gives every opponent a rating based on their strengths reflected by the betting market, an example is shown below

• The players PPGW-adj – this is just a short version of Points Per Gameweek adjusted for fixture difficulty. 
• The managers BCV – budget constrained value

The Algorithm also shows the Delta which is the relative changes in BCV compared to the other players from the previous Gameweek.

You can find Transfer Algorithm over on Patreon: www.patreon.com/TransferAlgorithm