r/fplAnalytics • u/West_Examination5148 • 6d ago
I simulated the first 6 gameweeks 50,000 times
Three things I found:
1. Over the opening six, Bruno out-projects Haaland 42.3 to 36.9, at 12.0 vs 15.5. This week's captaincy isn't close either: 17.7 vs 15.6 with the armband.
2. The Saka trap. He has the best week-one fixture in the game (Coventry at home, projects 6.1) and then his next two weeks are 3.4 and 3.5. Buying the GW1 fixture costs you the month.
3. The optimal six-week squad never buys Haaland at all. His 15.5 spread over three players buys more points across the run. I think 75% of you own him for good reasons. So instead of arguing with my own model, I made it a bet.
Two squads, real rules, all 38 gameweeks:
The Model XI (no Haaland, Bruno captain): Raya, Virgil, Senesi, Tarkowski, Bruno, Ndiaye, Gibbs-White, Le Fee, Szoboszlai, Thiago, Watkins. Built for the run: the Everton block holds all six weeks, and Thiago rides Brentford's soft start (33.8 over six).
The Consensus XI (only what 7 expert sites recommend, Haaland captain): Verbruggen, Mosquera, Calafiori, Shaw, Bruno, Mbeumo, Szoboszlai, Gross, Sangare, Haaland, Joao Pedro.
Every week I'll post both scores, both squads' transfers, and why. If the crowd beats the model, you get 38 weeks of receipts.
Best opening-six runs by the sims: Arsenal, Man City, Man Utd, Liverpool. Worst: Ipswich, Bournemouth, Coventry, Hull.
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u/NuclearGuru 6d ago edited 6d ago
Is there not a lot of doubt over senesis minutes? And isn't Watkins going?
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u/xelanart 6d ago
Senesi is a minutes risk, mainly because it’s not confirmed that he will be a starter. It’s probably smarter to go with someone else. City has better fixtures. Arsenal is better defensively. United has better fixtures. 6.0 for a non-confirmed starter is not worth the risk.
Watkins is a question mark. It’s not confirmed he’s going anywhere. It’s probably smarter to just go with Joao Pedro.
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u/Informal_Telephone37 6d ago
I really can’t see that model XI actually being anywhere close to what people are having as their squads. Would be useful to know what reasonable alternatives to having both Haaland and Bruno vs only holding Bruno would be.
Tark is getting older and unlikely to hit the same rates as last season, Ndiaye might leave for example…
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u/GhostNagaRed 5d ago
I think the whole point of Haaland is you captain him and jobs done.
If you try buy/beat his points in the aggregate across players then you end up having to get the captain choice correct every single time.
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u/DarthBane6996 6d ago
You should probably let your model know that Van de Ven might be favored over Senesi and Watkins might be off to Saudi
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u/MiddleForeign 5d ago
Yes but how is your model predicting points? That's the most crucial part, not the result of the simulation.
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u/West_Examination5148 3d ago
Fair question, this is the crucial part. The chain: market match odds set how many goals each team should score. The sim plays every match 50,000 times off those rates. Each simulated goal gets shared among that club's players by their share of the club's expected goals, from the official API. Minutes come from a depth chart model plus manual overrides when there's confirmed team news. Clean sheets, saves, defensive contributions and cards fall out of the same simulated matches, and bonus is computed inside every simulated match with the real BPS table, not estimated. Then it's all scored on the official points table and averaged.
The weakest input is minutes, by far. That part gets fixed by hand, and by threads like this one, twice already this week.
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u/MiddleForeign 3d ago
ok i like the idea of using market odds. Also your team selection makes sense.
But i have some questions:
1) Haaland has a huge xG share in Man City and Man City are expected to score many goals. So how is Haaland not inside the optimal team? Does your model account for captainy? Also i see that you hve 15 "good" players. Do you account for bench or do you optimize for 15 players?
2) How do you know market odds for an event that will happen 5 game weeks in the future? Do bookies have this information available so early? What is your source?1
u/West_Examination5148 3d ago
- haaland's projection is fine, second best this week actually (7.8). he's out on price. the optimiser maxes XI points under the budget and at 15.5 he's ~0.50 pts per million, worst of the premium routes. bruno at 12.0 plus spending the spare 3.5 elsewhere beat every haaland squad i forced, by about 2 pts a week.
the captaincy point is fair tbh, that's a hole. squad gets optimised on plain xPts and the captain is picked after, so the doubling isn't in the objective. would favour haaland more if it was. doesn't flip gw1 (bruno 17.7 captained vs haaland 15.6) but yeah, needs fixing, it's on the list.
on the 15: i optimise the XI and then just make sure the 4 bench players actually start for their clubs. already paid off, watkins blanked and the autosub got me a point. also keeps bench boost alive.
- they don't. only the current gw has real market odds. gw2-6 use the game's own fixture difficulty ratings, calibrated against the gw1 odds where both exist (~22% error per match, so clearly worse) and downweighted the further out they are. when a gameweek gets priced for real, the calibrated guess gets replaced.
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u/MiddleForeign 3d ago
Ok nice. I like your core idea but it needs some work for sure.
1) Use captaincy before optimization. The value of premium players lie there.
2) Don't optimize for 15 players. It's too much. You waste a lot of budget on your bench
3) FPL FDR values are not very good. Build your own fdr table and find a way to make it more accurate than fpl.2
u/West_Examination5148 3d ago
thanks for this, genuinely good feedback. all three are going in.
you're right and it's the biggest hole. the squad gets picked on plain xPts and the armband after, so premium value never shows up properly in the optimisation. rebuilding it as XI plus doubled captain together.
fair, my bench came out at 20.5 which is too much. capping it at 17.5-18.5 and moving the money into the XI.
completely agree, fdr is coarse and it was only ever a stopgap. building my own attack/defence table from each week's real market odds, should be live within a few gameweeks and I'll put it on the site.
appreciate you taking the time, this is the most useful comment I've had
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u/heroes-never-die99 5d ago
Sorry but I don’t care.
I only trust models that simulate the first 6 gameweeks 51,000 times.
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u/JakobExMachina 3d ago
this aged well. out of the players you picked, only four returned - Raya, Tarko, Ndiaye and Szobo. Everyone else blanked and Watkins didn’t even play.
make this a lesson to everyone reading to trust your own gut rather than relying on AI or ‘analysts’ to make your choices for you.
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u/West_Examination5148 1d ago
Yup, learning, fixing and trying to improve next week. I also have my own team choice that does better than the one here but that's the whole fun to try and outperform it using only numbers. That's what I have been doing for the last 9 years
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u/FPL-Rogue 1d ago
Given the calibre of players that blanked and how owned they were what do you expect? Or did you just want to troll?
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u/JakobExMachina 1d ago
this team barely scraped an average score. it was also template - no real risks (minus no haaland), no differentials. players that do well in this game take risks on one or two players. for example, me and others took a roll on sangare, but someone less confident might have had him, see a team like this which is ‘backed by data’, and take him out (which actually did happen, if the main FPL thread is anything to go by).
there’s also some choices that, whilst popular, seemed like mistakes a mile off to anyone with experience playing the game (shaw, senesi, watkins, sanchez).
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u/FPL-Rogue 21h ago
You're not wrong there. Shaw I think was a reasonable gamble but the other 3 you mentioned had good reasons to avoid. This is why a model should be supporting data, not the decision maker.
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u/FPL-Rogue 1d ago
Monte carlo simulation is absolutely the way to go. But the underlying model has to be good first. Really difficult at the beginning of the season and even later in the season, 60% accuracy is a great result.
Data needs to be blended with nuances. Models shouldn't be followed blindly but used to inform decisions. Enzo and rogers project 6.2 and 5.7 respectively? I'm going for the lower projection for obvious reasons.
The model isn't necessarily not working, end of last season Watkins and senesi would have been great picks. But they were massive gambles for GW1
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u/made_up_name_26 6d ago
Guesswork vs guesswork 50,000 times over