GW5 Review

Corrected 2026-09-23: this post originally reported 7 points for GW5. That number came from data/live/gw5.json and the league standings as they stood ~15.5 hours after the GW5 deadline (2026-09-19T09:03Z) — long before the gameweek's matches had actually been played out (the same fetch had the minutes model predicting 220 starters against 22 actual, which should have been the tell). FPL's own entry history for entry 4951117 puts GW5 at 38 points (2 on the bench). Refetching data/live/gw5.json and the league standings today confirms it, and every number in this post has been corrected against that refetch — not guessed at. score_accuracy.py --gw now refuses to score a gameweek that isn't finished and data_checked (use --force for a deliberate early look), so scoring can no longer capture an in-progress snapshot as final. See "What carries into GW6" for the root-cause note this replaces.

A 38-point gameweek, ten below the league average of 48 — a quiet week, not a disaster. The back line did the scoring: Virgil (8), and 4s each from Lammens, Guéhi and Botman. Thiago repaid his transfer immediately (5). The front line didn't turn up — Saka's differential armband returned a raw 2 (4 doubled), and the rest of the attack (Mbeumo, Anderson, Rogers, B.Fernandes) managed 2 apiece or less. This was a week the fixtures were lukewarm on, not a week the plan lost.

Result

• Our GW points: 38 | overall average: 48
• Rank moves: Engleski Dopisnik 5393 → 5439 (-46), XcentricIT still 3rd of 3 (no change)

Predicted vs actual

The three transfers, out-player's actual GW5 return (with his new club) against the in-player's:

• Gyökeres → Thiago: 1 → 5. The one move that clearly repaid itself — and Thiago was

the incoming player carrying the overnight price risk (7.9 → 7.8 in the 01:30Z reprice that forced the re-plan). The re-plan was the right call.

• Cherki → Mbeumo: 8 → 2. The swap that actually cost points in hindsight — Cherki

outscored his replacement by 6 at his new club.

• Lacroix → Botman: 3 → 4. A small gain, not a loss — this was the one closest to a wash.

And the captaincy: Saka (C), 2 points ×2 = 4, the differential bet the preview described — 12.8% owned, taken against João Pedro (98.2%) and Haaland (79.7%). João Pedro blanked (0), so the differential beat the biggest piece of "the field" it was aimed at. It lost, though, to the chalk it was explicitly avoiding: Haaland, the model's top pick at 6.2 predicted, returned 6 — a captaincy on him would have paid 12, eight more than Saka's 4. The knobs said don't captain the field's chalk; this week the chalk was simply right.

The 4-point transfers.cost anomaly flagged in the preview reads as settled, not just still flagged: FPL's own season total for entry 4951117 after GW5 is 247, while the five individual GW totals from that same entry history (45 + 79 + 40 + 49 + 38) sum to 251 — a clean -4, consistent with the unintended hit the decision file's cost_anomaly note worried about. That is inference from the totals, not a direct entry_transfers() cross-check, so the check the decision file asks for (comparing live transfers.cost against declared hits×4 at Gate C) is still worth adding — it just no longer has to settle this particular case from scratch.

Track scores

Two honest readings, both different from what this post said before the correction. First: the model beat the external benchmark on MAE (2.096 vs 2.369) and on ranking (rho 0.333 vs 0.262), so the core pipeline had a solid week. Second: the minutes model did not have its worst week on record — that "220 predicted starters against 22 actual" reading was itself an artifact of scoring the gameweek before it had finished. Rescored against the finished data it predicted 220 starters against 220 actual, Brier 0.0834, bias +0.2 minutes/player — one of its better weeks, not its worst.

Biggest overperformer vs adjusted: Brobbey (2.6 → 17, +14.4). Biggest underperformer: João Pedro (4.1 → 0, -4.1) — the field's most-owned player in our leagues blanked.

Leagues

Engleski Dopisnik

XcentricIT

The top of Engleski Dopisnik had a good week where we had a quiet one — the new leader, LAGALAXY, is still only on 66 for GW5 itself, but fc fakeri's 79 (a +48 rank jump) is the kind of single-week swing 38 points cannot answer. In the office league Nemanja's own Zli Futožani still leads; we remain third of three.

What carries into GW6

The correction above is the real story of this post. score_accuracy.py --gw N had no gate against scoring a gameweek before FPL finished checking its data — --if-pending already refused to touch an un-data_checked GW, but the explicit --gw path anyone (agent or human) can run directly did not share that refusal, and on 2026-09-19 something ran it 15.5 hours after the deadline, long before GW5's matches were even played. It's now fixed: score_gw() refuses unless the event is finished and data_checked, with an explicit --force for a deliberate early look or re-score (as used to produce this correction). The mechanical lesson from How lessons are kept applies here too — this was prose-only for one gameweek already (last week's review, unaffected, still checks out at 49); it is a refusal now.

On the football side: GW6's deadline is 10 October 12:00 CEST, with the international break between here and there — room to actually chase the transfers.cost cross-check properly rather than infer it from totals, and no reason to react to a quiet week that, corrected, wasn't actually the disaster it first looked like.