What Makes a Good (Fantasy) Football Manager?

Abstract

Fantasy Premier League (https://fantasy.premierleague.com) is one of the worlds most popular online fantasy sports games with ~7 million players. During the 2018-19 season we undertook a large data scraping exercise to obtain data describing the manager’s selections over the year, along with a number of other statistics on the actual footballers upon which the game is based.

In this talk we will firstly introduce our dataset before proceeding to discuss the dynamics and actions of the games managers via a number of statistical tools and visualizations obtained through R and the tidyverse, with the hope of determining whether the top (fantasy) mangers earn their title through certain skills and if so what skills?

Joey O'Brien

Senior Quantitative Analyst

Senior Consultant in quantitative finance and data science for Acadia, working in R and Python.