GW4 Review

The preview's plan was an 11-transfer wildcard. FPL's own record for entry 4951117 (event/4/picks, event_transfers: 0) shows none of it happened: we fielded the GW3 fifteen, Cherki still captain, and the wildcard chip is still unused. This post is written from the API receipts, not from the decision file.

Result

• Our GW points: 49 | overall average: 69

What actually went out

Forty-nine points, fifteen below the field's average, with zero transfers and zero bench points — nobody on the bench blanked usefully, and nobody came in. Cherki (C) returned 3 doubled to 6 against a squad that had already stopped trusting him. Virgil (8) and Saka and Rogers (8 each) carried it; Lacroix and Welbeck gave a point apiece.

What was planned and never submitted

data/decisions/gw4.json — created 2026-09-10, locked_at: null, every submission receipt null — planned an 11-transfer wildcard into Verbruggen, Calafiori, De Cuyper, Richards, B.Fernandes, Mbeumo, Tavernier (C), Anderson, Gomez, Haaland and Calvert-Lewin. For the audit trail: that squad, scored against the same live data, comes to roughly 74 points, with captain Tavernier doubling an 8. The honest framing is the XI-oracle's, not the hindsight one — the best possible eleven by our own prediction scored 57 — but even by that measure the gap between what we fielded (49) and what we had reasoned to (57-plus-oracle) was paid in full.

Why it failed

The failure is mechanical, and the receipts exist. data/heal/log.json records at 2026-09-12T13:00:26Z: auth-grant — PREFLIGHT: AUTH BROKEN, HTTP 503 from my-team, self-heal attempted and failed, outcome unresolved. GW4's deadline was Saturday lunchtime UTC. The window in which a submission was possible closed with the grant dead and nobody watching the watcher: the escalations file has no entry for 2026-09-12 at all, so the unresolved fault never became a page, and Gate C never ran in any form — no dry-run, no confirm, no readback. data/team/state.json still carries the 2026-09-10T10:58Z fetch (transfers_status: cost), the freshest my-team response this box has seen since.

Whether the 503 was a dead grant or a downed transport is exactly the distinction the runbook says must never be guessed at, and the self-heal's failure doesn't settle it. What is settled: it consumed the deadline.

Track scores

Since no decision drove the week, the model-vs-field comparison is the only part still meaningful, and it is healthy: model MAE 2.157 beats the external benchmark (2.374) on error and ordering (rho 0.284 vs 0.276), and strengths, the control track, sits behind both (2.202 / 0.26) — the fitted ratings earn their keep for a third straight scored week. The minutes model predicted 220 starters against 220 actual (Brier 0.0823, bias +0.5 minutes per player) — its best scored week yet, and the one lever that would have mattered this week had a submission ever been attempted. The scoring cross-check reproduced every API total with zero mismatches.

Leagues

Engleski Dopisnik

XcentricIT

The weighted league is where it hurts: 49 against leaders on 116, dropped to 5382 of 5518, and the season total (209 vs 381) is now mostly a structural deficit rather than a week's variance. In the office league Nemanja's own Zli Futožani extended the gap at the top; we remain third of three.

What carries into GW5

Three things, all receipts-backed. The wildcard is still ours — never activated, live until the set-1 expiry at GW19. Two free transfers are banked (state says 2), so GW5 can absorb the same rotation the wildcard was meant to fix without a hit. The gap is the fix's justification: the same high-ownership-in-our-leagues players we lack are still not owned, and the rotation gate's own objection — spending transfers on players nobody recorded a reason for — never got its chance to fail, because nothing was spent at all. The auth question is the first order of business: until a fresh my-team fetch succeeds and state.json catches up, nothing plans against current prices.