FANTASY SOCCER

Charles Anumba, Shawn Wilkes and Nicholas Danberry

Engineering Modelling and Analysis, Georgia Southern University

May 4, 2019

Abstract

Analysis is sports is growing quickly. As seen in soccer and other sports, the information
gathered by analysts has increased over the last 20 years. Some of the statistics collected are
machine dependent as humans may find it difficult to not falter when collecting the statistics
during a game. The analysis carried out during these games is widely used by fans and pundits to
talk about the sport. The players themselves also need these statistics to know what part of their
game to improve. Although, statistics don’t always paint a true picture of what exactly happened
during a game, it is quickest way people who couldn't catch up with a game can judge that game.
Statistics are not only game dependent as people want players to be as consistent as possible -
some variables are collected over periods longer than a game.

Introduction

The Premier League is a football league based in England and it was founded it 1992. 20 teams
(mostly from England and Wales) play home and away games against one another resulting in 38
game weeks which lasts between August and May annually. Premier league Fantasy is a game
that allows players to pick football players and get points based on their performances. Players
have deadlines to update their teams before the start of every game week. After this deadline, the
player’s current team is used whether updated by the player or not.

We decided to carry out this project because about 2 of us in this group play Fantasy Premier
League and it was a good way to learn more things about the game and improve the results that
we get from most game weeks.
A lot of statistics are already calculated by the system and are available to players. The main
statistics of the football players are total points, bonus points and form. Total points are the
number of points gathered by a player up to the latest game week. Bonus points are the total
number of points gathered by a player in the BPS. Although the BPS doesn’t give more than 3
points to a football player, fantasy users use it as an indication that a football players’ general
performances have been very good. Form is the average of the football player’s points from the
last 5 games. Major analysts see form as the main statistic for players to base their selection off.

Experimental design and data collection methodology

The players used in this experiment have been varied depending on team and position. Forwards
tend to be the most consistent players as they score more goals but users have 2 goalkeepers, 5
defenders, 5 midfielders and 3 forwards in their team, so it would be biased not to select from all
positions and it may also yield a misleading result. At least 1 player was selected from each of
the 20 teams in the league, most of them being their best player or player with most appearances.
Players that do not appear consistently for their teams were not used in this experiment as users
often/never select those players as they will most likely give 0 points. The players used obtained
points most of the time but 0 points on a game week still occurred due to suspension, injuries,
poor performance or not participating in the game at all.

Data Summary and visualizations

The data is an accumulation of the weekly scores, then arranging the information into a
distribution to observe its mean, median, and standard deviation. This information will be
compared to the form score to see if there is a correlation between the two. The accumulated data
across team members and observation of their progression across the 5 weeks to develop a ratio
or statistic to use when selecting for a team. The form score is supposed to represent the players’
average scores leading up to the game. It would be interesting to collect the average of a few
individual players across several games to develop score distribution or a form score of our own
and see how they compare. The total scores that individuals achieved over four observations
weeks was calculated at a 95% percent confidence interval. The average players score was then
compared with their average form at a given week (fig 5.). The individual average per player
across the four observed weeks was then compared to the average form to observe any
correlation (fig 6.).

Fig 1. Game week 8

Fig 4. Game week 24
Fig 5. 95% Confidence interval

Fig 6. Normal distribution of weekly scores.

Fig 7. Average scores
Fig 6. individual averages comparison

Analysis and Discussion

The data points collected from the Fantasy premier League include the current gameweek points
and the last 5 game weeks before the current gameweek. The points from the 5 previous game
weeks gave form which is one of the most important statistics in Fantasy Premier League. Our
main statistic for this project is the current gameweek points divided by the points. The value of
this ratio can vary. This is because players can be having a good run of games and just end up
with a bad gameweek (Ratio less than 1) or players can turn up after just having a bad time for a
while (Ratio way greater than 1). The cases presented in the last 2 sentences are just extreme
cases. The most common cases involve players’ ratios around 0.7 - 1.5. Most fantasy players
expect players to return points greater than their current form, so we have set 1 as the threshold
for a players’ performances to be classified as a good performance although some will argue that
0.8 and above seems like the fairest requirement. The number of data points used in this project
is 120. It seems a good number to be able to draw a conclusion from. Out of the 120 data points,
49 came out to be good outcomes while 71 were poor. It can be assumed that the within the total
population of players picked because of the “form” that 95% of their scores fall within the range of
14.05 points to 21.4 points.

Conclusion

The probabilities for good and poor outcomes were about 0.6 and 0.4 respectively. This result
can prove to fantasy premier league users that form isn’t completely reliable when picking
players for their teams. In observation of individual points scored per week in comparison with
the average form no strong conclusion can be reached that the form represents a successful score
for individual player. In Fantasy Premier League, there are other statistics that are revealed to the
public such as influence, creativity, threat and ICT index but their methods of calculation by the
analysts are unknown. Maybe these will serve as a better method of judging players’ potential
points.

References

https://fantasy.premierleague.com/a/home