Fantasy Premier League
How the fantasy projections work
Two feeds and one model. What follows is every claim the numbers on this site rest on, and — underneath it — the register of which of them anything has actually measured.
What the projections are built from
Two feeds, and the half of the scoring table each of them answers. Fantasy says who a player is, what he costs and how often he scores; this site says what his club's next match looks like.
- The defensive half
- A clean sheet is the probability the opponent scores exactly nothing, read off a score matrix fitted for the fixture — not one minus an average. The concession penalty is the expected number of two-goal steps, which is not the same as the step at the expected number.
- The attacking half
- Goals and assists come from Fantasy's own per-90 rates, rescaled to the fixture: a striker's rate is moved by how much better or worse this opponent is than the ones the rate was earned against, and clamped so one easy match cannot triple it.
- Minutes
- Nobody publishes team sheets in advance. The chance of starting is estimated from recent rounds and the game's own fitness flags, and it is the largest source of error here — which is why it is shown beside every player rather than folded into his total.
- Where the two feeds meet
- A player matched to this site's own record is projected partly from expected goals measured here; an unmatched one is projected from Fantasy's figures alone. The share is stated rather than hidden, and every unmatched row is marked.
What is measured here, and what is not
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Measured The projected points
Replayed against gameweek 2 after it was played: an average miss of 1.617 points a player, against 1.842 for “predict what he has averaged so far”, over 456 players. Recorded Sunday, 6 September 2026 and refreshed by hand, so the date is part of the claim.
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Not measured The floor, the ceiling and the chance of a haul
Percentiles of a week composed from the same rates the projection uses. They reconcile with it by construction, which is not the same as having been checked against a round anybody played — nothing on this site has scored a floor or a ceiling.
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Not measured The form score
The gap between what a player has returned and the chances behind it, over the rounds stored. It is arithmetic over matches already played rather than a forecast, and no measurement here says whether a gap that wide closes.
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Not measured The squad rating
A figure out of a hundred composed from ten lines under stated weights. The weights are a judgement rather than a fitted parameter, and nothing has scored a rated squad against what it went on to take.
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Not measured The verdict thresholds
The margins under which a page declines to name a better option, or calls one close. They are set by hand at figures that read sensibly beside the model's own error, and nothing has measured what they cost a reader who followed them.
And the model underneath it
Everything above is the layer this section adds: a scoring table, a minutes model, and two feeds rescaled into points. What it is adding that layer to is the expected-goal model the whole site runs on — how a match is fitted, what the ratings mean, and what the model has been measured against.
How the model works →