When we say a number, how close does it land?
Every projection is graded after the final whistle against the points that actually happened — the good weeks and the bad ones, because this page is generated from the grading, not from marketing. The short version: our typical miss is about a goal’s worth of points smaller than FPL’s own projection across a quarter of a million minutes of graded football.
For the stats people · “typical miss” is mean absolute error (MAE), the standard grade for a points model — every prediction counts, so it cannot be gamed by only calling the easy ones.
Week by week: whose number was closer?
25/26 · 19,421 GRADEDTwo lines, one question: whose guess landed closer to what actually happened? The engine was closer than FPL’s own projection in 76% of gameweeks, closer than “just follow recent form” in 84%, and closer than a season-average guess in 92%. The weeks it lost are on the chart too — that’s the point of the page.
How close we get, position by position
The bar is our typical miss in points — shorter is better. Keepers are the most predictable players in the game; defenders the least, because their returns arrive in lumps of clean sheets.
When a player actually scored, who saw it coming?
CLOSER IS BETTEROne average buries the question a manager actually cares about: when a player returned, did the model see it coming? So here is the same record cut by what happened on the pitch. Misses are naturally bigger on haul weeks for every model in existence — the column to read is the last one: how much closer we were than FPL’s own projection, in points.
| WHAT HAPPENED | PLAYERS | OUR MISS | FPL'S MISS | WE'RE CLOSER BY |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Steady returns 3–4 pts our biggest edge — we see the quiet contributors coming | 1,126 | 1.53 | 3.13 | +1.60 pts |
| Big hauls 5+ pts the hardest thing in FPL to call, and where we beat FPL furthest | 1,630 | 5.96 | 7.50 | +1.54 pts |
| Blanks 1–2 pts we flag the weeks a player does nothing | 4,419 | 1.19 | 1.48 | +0.29 pts |
| No-shows didn't play FPL wins this band by projecting ~0 for everyone doubtful — a safe bet we deliberately don’t make | 12,246 | 0.87 | 0.34 | -0.53 pts |
Same 19,421 graded predictions as above, cut four ways instead of averaged once. Positive means our number was the closer one.
For the stats people · “miss” here is RMSE (root mean squared error), which weights the big misses hardest — the strictest grading available.