This script picks the optimum team for the Daily Telegraph’s Fantasy Football game, combining TFF’s player stats with online injury lists. Useful so that people like me, who know nothing about football, have a chance! Note that it is only as good as the data it has access to, so it’s probably a bad idea to change your team according to its suggestions within the first few weeks of the season – wait until it has more data before trusting it.
It’s hosted here, and should run automatically every 24 hours. You can see the team it’s currently picking here:
You can also get the source code from GitHub (provided under the terms of the GPL v3 licence)
Looking for my team picker for the Premier League game instead? It’s here.
Issues with this application are tracked on Github’s issue tracker. Please sign up and report any issues you find! (The old, offline version of the TFF team picker maintained its own change log, which can be found here.)
Jose Mourinho in “Not Really Superior to Robot After All” Shocker!
08–09 Fantasy Football results prove famous football dude not really all that much better at this than inanimate lump of silicon!
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Are you putting up a new lineup for this year?
The location and format of the data have changed this year, so I need to update the script to handle it. I’m still hoping to have it ready for the start of the season!
My mistake, it was actually I memory usage issue on my server that was preventing the script running properly. This has been resolved, and the current optimum team is now being displayed again.
Intersested to see this. I did a very similar Matlab program a few years back (based on the Simplex Method) and stuck the results on the qq newsgroups for a while. After a few months I gave up because I found I could get a better score without it. The issue is that (as you say) it’s only valid as the volume of data increases — at the start of the season the ‘good value’ players from the previous season (e.g. Hernandez, Bale, and Carroll) all have their prices bumped up — the trick to winning the game is to find this years undervalued star, but the code can take too long to spot mathematically what is obvious by watching the matches.