Coworkers passing see me watching an Oxford Mathematics lecture when really I'm just planning FPL strats

To save your time, this is what he mentioned: *Team strategy* 1. 5-6 costly players + cheap fillers _over_ 1-2 costly + mid range 2. Bench substitution - players @Home _over_ players @Away. 3. Formation is not really a factor (choose best based on your players) *Tranfer strategy* 1. Form _over_ fixtures 2. Transfer out underperformer _over_ Transfer in last week's best performer/jumping a bandwagon *Captain strategy* 1. Fixtures _over_ form 2. If a tie: home _over_ away

I'm 10 mins into the video and I see myself winning it this season already

Most people try to find a way to make their work more fun. These guys find a way to make their fun more work.

“How fantasy football helped me beat cancer” - looking forward to the day you release this talk Josh, I wish you all the best in your fight against this disease.

As a Graduate Researcher and an FPL patron myself, this video was right in my sweet spot. Thoroughly enjoyed the video. Also, roasting Norwich on every other slide was epic.

Imagine being Mo Salah and finding out that no one is captaining you in their FPL cuz of a mathematical model

Good watch, a very humble and funny guy!

This is by far the best video about Fantasy i have ever seen. And Joshua seems such an enjoyable guy to be around.

thanks for doing this Josh really enjoyed it, and congratulations on last years win!

This is excellent Josh. Two of my favourite things colliding - maths and FPL. Lots of time spent modelling this I am sure! Good kuck 20/21.

Thank you very very much for sharing so much time and insight. A fascinating talk. What I found most interesting is how playing the game (I.e picking a captain or deciding who to transfer in/out) involves having a hypothesis and reviewing the outcome. New players to the game quickly recognise the factors to consider (price, player form, team form, opposing team form, home/away), but weighting these is where the modelling seems to provide a distinct benefit. One thing I thought about is whether player form is a result of past fixtures and actually isn't a good predictor of future player peformance. I also thought about whether teammate chance creation / conversion is a variable to add in a more complex model. The best of luck (and decision making) next season.

I understand the whole video as I did Maths in my Master. It turns out that's the first time that I have found what I learnt was useful.

Really interesting talk - I'm not very mathematically-minded but I've always been interested in how to use maths within FPL

Amazingly well put together, thanks so much Joshua!

This is a really valuable lecture. Thanks Josh!

Josh, what a great informative video.. Thanks for the time and efforts

I love the quote attributions!

Brilliant, insightful video - thank-you.

Really likeable guy, really well explained. Thanks Joshua 👍

This was very enjoyable, thanks a lot.

This information is valuable. Thanks for sharing Josh. It'd greatly appreciated if u could also share how u test and simulate your hyphostes ☺️🙏

Thanks Josh, enjoyed - bit concerned that all of this is based on one season, it was rather bound to prove your preferred strategies right using the data from the season you finished first no? Would be much more interesting to test these (form/fixture/home&away etc) strategies over multiple seasons, see whether they hold firm throughout and/or whether there are any trends over the years.

Great video. Thank you

Great video Josh. Thank you for sharing. Did your transfer strategy simulations take into account the 3 players limitation?

Great video, would have liked to see an analysis of set and forget captains vs changing captains.

Fantastic lecture! Loved the quotes as well - I never knew Ada Lovelace was such a keen FPL player!

Great video Joshua!

Brilliant video!

Science 😍 .. thanx Dr. Jushua

I loved the quotes on the bottom xD. Btw , how did you notice how the bias in the new set and forget model came. Like once u saw that more defenders were doing better in your model, how did you know the reason for the bias? Thanks

Basically, what I learned from this talk is that a block of wood is worth the same as a community shield

Really interesting talk! Lots to consider going forward. Good luck to you this season, Josh!

The most useful and helpful talk on FPL that I've ever listened to 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

First, congrats Josh on an amazing achievement! I came to this lecture in the hope of improving my FPL performance (time will tell 😜), but left with a facinating insight into a way of using maths that I haven't come across before. Kudos. Very keen to pick up on the simulation aspect of modelling as this seems to be where the power lies. How do you go about simulating 10,000 results? Does it require specialist software only available to university mathematicions, or is this something that anyone can do using excel or other free software? Also are you just feeding in raw fpl data, or are you inputing odds based data to guide the simulation? Would love to know how to get started with learning this!

This is brilliant

23:44 .... A violin plot... clearly

Fantastic and engaging, thank you from Chili

Enjoyed this, this is the first season I'm actually taking FPL "seriously". I'm taking a conservative approach but trusting my inner scout instincts. Imho, we can't control the uncontrollable. So, we control what we can. The only constant/data that we can control in my humble opinion is : (1) Fixtures (2) Player Prices (3) Team Setup ; tactics - offensive, pragmatic etc. So this season I've set up my team according mostly 'pro fixtures' and considering player swaps with similar prices ranges. I definitely think fixtures play a bigger role than form because teams nowadays tactically better, defending better as a team etc. Other than that is up to the players to perform. I hope I get to top 10k this season. 😁

In Vardy's example, can you tell what is the way that you can get the distribution and avoid overfitting when one has less data points?

Great video!

I love maths now. I used to find it “hard” and this quote 8mins in blew my mind: “If people do not believe that maths is simple, it’s because they don’t understand how complicated life is” Nowadays I love mathematical modelling and solving problems using a good spreadsheet and thinking this way definitely helps. Had my best ever season last year top 25k and won a few MLs. My problem is I take too many unnecessary differential risks and my capt choices have been terrible eg this year gw1 I capt mane instead of Salah - backfired spectacularly.

This is excellent

Thanks for great content. Regarding the home/away choice as tiebreaker not doing much difference, isn't it be as home/away is already taken into account in the FDR? A home 2 might be a 3 away, so the home team might be playing a worse opponent than the away-team, for them to be facing the same FDR-rated opponents. Hope it makes sense =)

Good video very informative.

Hi, I think a nicer way of modelling budget would have been assigning a value of 0 for minimum price - that is 4.0M GK/DEF and 4.5M MID/FWD cost 0, then 1 extra value for each 0.5M extra. For example 4.5 defenders have a cost of 1, 6.0 defenders cos of 4. 10.0 midfielders a cos of 11. This almost perfectly models the actual budget in the game and is easy to implement

This straight up hurts my brain , and my chances of winning my league

I think it is important to figure out an exact number of "expected points" a player will get. I'm quite surprised there is no discussion about this. Maybe he didn't want to go into the numbers too closely.

Alright, notes were made, plan is set. I'm keeping this lecture secret from my mini league rivals. :D Time form my revenge because of 19/20 season

Hi, great presentation and super interesting. Any thoughts on players new to the premier league? (Transfers from abroad) 😅

Dear Joshua/Oxford Mathmetics, are you willing to test certain hypothesises by playing the game with multiple accounts? For the science to see how beneficial it is in practice? As I get that with statistical/Mathmatical modeling you can have probabilities which are most likely to perform based on 10000 monte-carlo experiments. However with the data based on last year it would be interesting to see a season played out by comparing your own personal account VS the university accounts who are restricted by set conditions from the start.

My takeaway: I need to get into Oxford to win FPL.

The first sir bobby quote had me like Whaaaaat😂

Is home fixtures over away fixtures really still a factor with no fans in the stands? Is there any research on home vs away fixture during the restart period?

My dad's best friend from Cambridge university formulated the abc conjecture after his phD, and is now Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Basel. He's good at Maths. Wonder if he'd be any good at FPL?

"I transfer in players who wear prime numbered shirts" 😂

I wonder how COVID-19/No - limited fans affects home/away performance over the course of the season. The problem I see with the team I chose is it’s too balanced.

Do you have access to the fpl api for this or whatever in order to make these models?

Don't want to take away, as obviously made some really smart observations. But seems very manual, and not data crunching enough-looking at sns violin plots, rather than letting algos learn these things. Would be really quite interesting to apply Machine Learning with some operations research type constraint theory, added in. I imagine it is similar to how renaissance technologies or successful current algos are doing the stock market. Obviously this would be taking it to an extreme level. I imagine reinforcement learning running simulations on past seasons, and keeping very specific weights for teams current form. But more than the stock market the way football has evolved, rules have changed etc. would be interesting, so would have to weight learning a lot for last few seasons. Also the data avaialble in previous seasons wouldn't be as strong, as I'm sure it is now.

Josh I'm interested to know. What is your FPL history like in terms of rank finishes? How many top 10k finishes, how many top 1k finishes etc?

There's one main number they're getting wrong though, the intro says around 8 million players, then Joshua says about 7.5 million. The reality is it's a fraction of that. You'll find thousands of teams created by sites that aim to win the highest score for just 1 gameweek and the manager of the month, there's prizes for both these. I'm not saying this makes it easier, but if you model the people you're competing against you need to remove the noise.

Nice video

Lovely Guy, 💕

Some nice ggplot work there Josh!

Gonna let you lot in on a secret strategy that I devised Chose players in pairs, normally a midfielder and attacker from one team. Son scores? Kane more than likely assisted him. Vice verse. James and DCL. Grealish and Watkins is my inside shout this year. It means when you get a goal it’s likely that it comes with an assist as well. One team has a stinker one week, at least you have other pairs to hopefully compensate.

sir i have question to you i want buy a best book for Differential equations. Please tell me which book bast for me .I am 2nd year student

Thank you Joshua. Very interesting video. I could not catch the name you thank at the end of the video for posting all the data you use on github. Would you mind telling me please?

33:00 What are those “diagrams” called now again. Completely forgot

how does he sim the games?

Jeez this guy is smart

'Pick Kevin De Bruyne' - attributed to Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662) an axiom that has stood the test of time...

De ley salgo campeon ahora, crack!!

As a Fantasy Football manager I also have a question. Is there a mathematical model to determine how much time is wasted playing this game? Edit: Enjoyed the talk, the humour, great stuff!

HOW MANY POINT DID HE END UP GETTING

Josh, can I have your FPL ID for the new season? I like checking certain peoples teams every week to see how people are doing 😄 thanks

Let's see if he wins it again before we all put our faith in this. A lot of it is common sense, but the notion that modelling alone could secure you a win in FPL seems specious given the unpredictability of the game. That said, most people would perform far better than they do now if they were to emulate this approach (myself included).

Mmm I have just seen Josh's FPL history which leaves a lot to be desired. In the 4 seasons prior to winning it, there isn't one rank finish inside the top million which makes me think that winning it last year was more down to a lucky one off season rather than some mathematical formula.

What was the code

great lecture josh, cancer beware.

To be honest my first GW 20/21 can't BELIVE I captained Werner instead of salah those fpl pundits kind of talked me into it I could have been flying by now

Watching this 10 times and I will still pick the wrong captain

Whats ur squad this season 👀

16:18 You meant Lundstram.

hi Oxford Mathematian

24:20 anyone would help me to tell whats the diagram called?

im a coach im hope that i can learn something

I definitely wouldn't have called that a "violin plot"

0:32 sounds like the miaka guy

Can you model this into a software?

Why am I late to this party... :)

The Var decision makers, have a higher chance of supporting Manchester United and Liverpool. Biased Penalty decisions proved this theory

GW 1 n 70 points , now give me math strategy 😅 for all weeks

I thought this guy was Paul Dano in the thumbnail...

Hi ..

For a mathematician the F.A cup bit shoulda been easy peasy lol.

No wonder he won it, he had 10000 teams entered.

This video should not be free, its the game theory optimal approach to fantasy football broken down expertly. thanks sir

He exposed us 🤦🏻. Mathematicians shouldn’t talk about these things 🤫

Can we use data to win another game? Cricket

Josh was actually beaten by an angry teenager initially 🤣🤣