One of the perpetual problems of Fantasy Premier League (FPL) is working whether you should follow the crowd and jump on bandwagons or whether you should trust your own judgement and pick players you like.
If you want to do the latter because you think its more fun or because you don’t like the idea of following others then that’s great and we aren’t going to tell you not to have fun your own way.
For us, we are looking for an edge to win our mini-leagues. We like winning. And we don’t mind factoring in what others are doing to get there.
That’s actually what won me my mini-league last year on the last day of the season. But that was me putting myself in someone else’s shoes and then doing the opposite. It was risky for my OR but gained me the chance to win my mini-league so I took the gamble.
This article is about something different though.
We want to know if we should be considering what moves the majority of managers are making when making our own moves.
The premise underneath it is quite simple: do we, as individuals, think we are better at predicting the future points of players better than the combined wisdom of millions of other managers?
And that’s where the wisdom of the crowds comes in.
What is the wisdom of the crowds?
The wisdom of the crowds is a concept that suggests that large groups of people collectively make more accurate and insightful decisions than individual experts or a small group of specialists.
This phenomenon is based on the idea that when a diverse group of individuals with different perspectives and knowledge pools their insights and opinions, the collective result tends to be more accurate and reliable than any single individual’s judgment. Even better than experts…
The wisdom of the crowds is often applied in various fields, including finance, science, technology, and decision-making processes. Here’s how it works:
- Diverse Perspectives: The strength of the wisdom of the crowds lies in the diversity of the participants. Each individual has unique knowledge, experience, and biases. This leads to a wide range of viewpoints and approaches.
- Independent Decision-Making: For the wisdom of the crowds to be effective, each person should make their own decision or prediction without being influenced by others. This ensures that the collective intelligence is not dominated by a few dominant voices.
- Aggregation: The decisions or predictions of each individual are aggregated or averaged together. This process smoothes out individual errors, random biases, or outliers, resulting in a more accurate and reliable overall assessment.
- Accurate Predictions: Studies have shown that, under the right conditions, the collective prediction of a group often outperforms the majority of individual predictions. Crucially, aggregated novices predict better than experts in the field.
However, it is important to note that the wisdom of the crowds is not infallible. Certain conditions must be met for it to work optimally. These conditions include:
- Diversity of opinions and perspectives among the participants.
- Independence of decision-making, with individuals forming their judgments without being influenced by others.
- Decentralisation, where no single entity controls or dominates the decision-making process.
If these conditions are met, the wisdom of the crowds can harness the collective intelligence of a group and lead to more accurate outcomes.
Does the Wisdom of the Crowds Exist in FPL?
This is a key question for us here at Full 90 FPL this year. We will be trying to ascertain the extent to which the Wisdom of the Crowds exists in FPL.
BUT! For the time being, it is our belief that wisdom of the crowds does exist in FPL. And that is for two reasons:
Firstly, we talk a lot about the emergence of a template team. That is, according to our own FPL Glossary, the set of the most highly owned players in the game. The template was very strong last year and is normally pretty strong anyway.
And secondly, Kneejerk United, which is run by a community of individuals on Reddit, has a pretty good OR ranking for the past five years:
- 18/19 – 81,460
- 19/20 – 274,970
- 20/21 – 48,063
- 21/22 – 90,917
- 22/23 – 845,195
Okay, last year is not as good as the rest. But, if that was my last five season’s rankings, I would be happy.
And, it is likely that these individuals are more careful when making decisions for their own team. So, in theory, those decisions should be better as they are more considered. And, it’s those decisions we will be assessing.
Why we Might be Wrong…
I’m sure you have noticed this already, but the perfect situation to apply the wisdom of the crowds is where everyone independently makes decisions. If you are reading this, listening to podcasts or watching youtube videos then you are being influenced in your decision-making.
Regardless, we still think it is probably true because of the reasons above and a couple of others:
- Individuals are basically anonymous in this game. You don’t know who the top 10 are in the world and neither do I. You definitely don’t know the top 10k. That reduces pressure and encourages individuals to make their own decisions.
- FPL is played by an incredibly diverse group of participants. People coming from different backgrounds bring different perspectives and help maintain a broader range of ideas and insights.
- Individuals usually make decisions about transfers on their own. They might consume content, but the autonomy of clicking that button is left up to them.
How We Will Try to Assess the Wisdom of the Crowds
We will start the season and look at the top 10 owned players. We will monitor their performance over 3, 5 and 10 gameweeks. If they perform well, then we will use this as evidence that the crowd is wise.
We will continue this throughout the season. Then, we will look at the top 10 most transferred in and top ten transferred out players every week and look at their performance over 3, 5 and 10 gameweeks.
We are picking 3, 5 and 10 gameweeks a bit arbitrarily but it is for the reason that some players are bought in for short periods of fixtures and some for longer.
At the end of the season, we will bring all this data to you and try to analyse it. You might be better at analysing it than we are so we will give it to you raw too. We are not statisticians… we have humanities degrees… we recognise our limits…
That’s it
If you are intrigued about our project then don’t forget to follow us on Twitter! We will try and post regular updates on it on there and Reddit. We will also include some stuff in our weekly previews.
Love it !! I’m in.
Thanks Funky!