Introduction

At the beginning of every Premier League Season, I get engrossed in the creation of my Fantasy Premier League (FPL) team. I do a bit of research, check a few stats, make some biased and statistically inconclusive predictions and form my team, incredibly confident that this is the team that will bring me success. I then devoutly check my results over the first few weeks of the football season, only to forget about it altogether and log back in one year later, at the start of next season. This cycle has been going on for the last 3 years, and surely if I follow the same routine this time around, I’ll end up with the same results.

So this time, I have a new idea — one that will take at least a few years to accomplish, but one that I’m very interested in. This time, I’m playing not just to contest friends in mini-leagues or follow my national ranking, but also to explore techniques and strategies that deliver consistent results, with the aim of building algorithms that will process the data for me. I believe the best results come the combination of proper statistical analysis and sound tactical knowledge, both of which I’m aiming to computerize. My grand goal is to predict (or provide probability distributions for) football matches in a pretty detailed manner, but the complicated nature of such a goal (and my currently limited ability) means that is likely very, very far away.

Nonetheless, I have to start somewhere, and FPL provides a splendid (and fun) framework to do so. For the 2016/17 Premier League season, I will likely do most of the data analysis manually, and I’ll discuss the techniques and strategies I’m employing, the parameters I’m taking into account and the ones I’m not or can’t, and the inherent biases of some decisions I make. By the end of it, I will have documented what’s working and what’s not, which areas I struggled to compute manually but would be effortless for a computer, and I’ll identify dozens of aspects that I’m not aware of right now.

Sports, especially football, are not easy to predict. There are thousands of parameters, some of which are difficult to define with numbers, and complex tactics with innumerable nuances that are tedious, at best, to interpret mathematically. It’s a game of probabilities — there is no way to achieve perfection, but surely there are ways to make it more and more accurate. This is what I wish to explore over the coming years, beginning with this year’s Fantasy Premier League.

If you have any suggestions/tips/articles/any form of guidance, or would like to get in touch, feel free to e-mail or tweet me (see About page).