GW1 Review

Forty-five points against an overall average of fifty. Below par, and worth saying plainly rather than spinning: the gameweek the model spent the most words on — the armband, the concentrated triple-club exposure, the three new signings in the XI — is the gameweek where the points did not come. The record was published before kickoff, so here is the grading without the reinterpretation.

Result

The headline number is 45, not the 42 the first post-finalisation read gave us: Gyökeres and Welbeck both blanked, and the autosubs that replaced them — Lacroix for two, Beto for one — were only credited once FPL marked the gameweek data_checked. The corrected ledger sits at 45, five below the league average of 50. The points that did come were defensive: Calafiori 9, Saka 9, Cherki 8, Lacroix 6. The ones that did not were the ones we talked about most.

The captaincy is the uncomfortable entry in the ledger. Bruno Fernandes wore the armband and returned 2 (doubled to 4). Saka, the vice, returned 9 — as captain that would have been 18, a 14-point swing in a week decided by that margin and less. The model's own captain recommendation was Haaland, who also returned 2, so this is not a case of the track being right and the manager ignoring it; both the recommendation and the decision landed on the same 2-point captain, and the points were simply elsewhere. Saka was the differential the model projected 7.0 for and then did not put the armband on. That is a fair criticism and it is recorded here first.

Predicted vs actual

The predicted-versus-actual table is the honest centre of this post. The adjusted track — identical to the raw model this week, because no news-based edits were locked — averaged 2.511 points of error per player, and the external benchmark did better at 2.154. The near-zero Spearman (rho −0.013) says what a single week with outliers always says: the ranking of predicted scores carried almost no signal, because a handful of players (De Cuyper +15.5 over prediction, Mendy +14.4, Ajayi +13.4) carried entire gameweeks. No model was going to catch those, and pretending otherwise would be the first step toward overfitting to week one.

Where the week was actually lost is the XI-oracle gap: the best eleven available from the fifteen-man squad would have scored 57; we scored 45. Twelve points of lineup inefficiency dwarfs the captaincy swing and is the number this review wants on the record. The squad was legal, the structure was the locked 3-5-2, and the picks that hurt — Gyökeres and Welbeck up front, both projected 5-6, both blanking — were the same forward options the preview flagged as the risk being carried knowingly. The model was accurate about its own uncertainty; it was not accurate about which gameweek the variance would land in.

Track scores

The odds track is empty again — no bookmaker key configured, so the strength-derived pseudo-odds populate no track — and this week it cost nothing, because no track predicted the outlier gameweeks. The external benchmark, which includes captain-oracle 6 (Raya), outperformed on raw error; the captain-oracle of 2 on both model tracks confirms the captaincy was not where the model was ever going to find points this week. One gameweek is not a verdict on four tracks. The ledger is the point of the exercise: it now holds week one of thirty-eight, and the MAE column is the number that will be judged in May, not in August.

Leagues

Engleski Dopisnik

A 108-point leader in week one is a signal about variance, not about the season: Čarli's gameweek is nearly two and a half times ours, and half of that gap is the kind of outlier the model concedes it cannot predict. Our row does not appear in the fetched standings window — with 45 points we sit deep in the 550-entry table, beyond the standings page the fetch retrieves, so the honest entry here is that we are mid-pack or worse and the gap to the leaders is already larger than one week of normal scoring.

XcentricIT

Third of three in the company league, 14 behind the leader, 9 behind second. XcentricIT is the weight-1 secondary league and the deficit is fully recoverable — this is a 38-week table and the leaders' gameweeks will regress toward the mean with the same force that produced them. Engleski Dopisnik, the league we actually play to win, is where the 12-point lineup gap and the 14-point captaincy swing sting most: both are self-inflicted and both are fixable by process, which is precisely what the review ledger exists to make visible.

The plan is unchanged: ACCUMULATE, no deficit-chasing off the back of one gameweek, and the free transfer banked for GW2 is spent on process, not panic. Next entry is the GW2 preview.