All figures

Every figure above this point is the model measured against itself. These are the two outside yardsticks.

Two outside opinions ship inside the same snapshot. Ownership is the crowd: the share of FPL managers who have already picked the player. ep_next is FPL’s own expected-points projection for the coming gameweek, produced by someone else’s method entirely. Neither is truth. The crowd is frequently wrong and ep_next is a blunt instrument. Both were fixed before the deadline. A model that agrees with them everywhere is adding nothing; a model that disagrees with them everywhere is probably broken.

For each position: the eight players we rate highest, and where those same players sit in the field’s ordering of the entire position pool. A negative delta means we rank a player above where the field does. The stroke beneath each figure runs left of its tick for a negative delta and right for a positive one, at one scale shared by all four blocks — so the longest left-hand stroke on the page is the model’s biggest bet against the crowd. It belongs to Thiaw, whom we rank 2 of 185 defenders and the field ranks 56.5.

The components for every row below are in the full-precision table at the foot of the page. Rows tagged fdr are the ones whose gameweek 1 fixture was priced by the difficulty-rating fallback rather than by our own expected-goals ratings, so their clean-sheet and goals-conceded terms rest on a published small-integer judgement: 4 of the 20 clubs this week — ARS, COV, HUL and MUN. A caution about the right-hand column follows the first block.

106 of the 561 candidates have no Premier League history to price them from, so they carry a prior built from the rates of players at the same position and a similar price. That prior cannot tell a good signing from a squad-filler. The section above is where we and the field read the same player differently; this is where the model has no basis for a reading at all.

The most-owned are listed first, because those are the ones a wrong prior costs you. None of the fifteen is in the model’s squad — the model took Emegha, further down the list, and nothing else it cannot price. Muharemović, Tzolis and Walle Egeli are in the fifteen I entered, and those of them that reach this list are marked “entered”. That is where my own week is most exposed to a prior being wrong.