The secrets of success at fantasy football can be found in network theory. An analysis of recent top-ranked players shows that high achievement in the virtual game – in which your team scores points depending on how the players in it do on the field in real life – comes down to player choice and strategic transfers.
Fantasy football gives players virtual money to spend on a squad of footballers selected from a field of about 600, the value of whom is dictated by supply and demand within the game. Players have ÂŁ100 million to pick a squad to 15 footballers.
Joey O’Brien at the University of Limerick in Ireland and his colleagues scraped more than 50 million web pages of data from the 2018-2019 (FPL) season, which is based on the top division of English football, and analysed the decision-making of the top million ranked players.
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They found that the top players shared key characteristics. They used “game chips” – which allow unlimited numbers of transfers – later in the season. At that point, there is more opportunity to increase your budget through transferring players who score more points.
They also made better use of their choice of team captain, who can be switched each week and who earns double the points.
O’Brien and his colleagues also analysed how many previous seasons each fantasy football manager had played and found a correlation between experience and points earned. From that data they estimate that every additional year of playing fantasy football granted people an average of 22 extra points earned in a season.
Player selection gave those in the top ranks their biggest advantage. O’Brien plotted the ways in which the most commonly selected players appeared on teams in the top ranks. This network analysis showed that eight out of 15 players in the best teams were often shared by other teams. Lower ranked teams shared six of their players with other teams.
A group of 30 football players were shared by most of the top-performing teams. “Good managers sign a player early in the week, then benefit from price rises to sell them,” says O’Brien.
The most common connection among the top teams was a relatively unknown defender playing for Crystal Palace, Aaron Wan-Bissaka. “He was priced in the lowest possible range of a player. Pretty much everyone who had a fantasy sports head picked him,” says O’Brien. After his fantasy success, Wan-Bissaka moved to a bigger club in real life.
“This paper does a great job of analysing how top managers have used these parts of the game to gain higher scores, and proves that FPL isn’t just a game of luck,” says Joshua Bull at the University of Oxford, and the 2019-2020 FPL champion.
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