Our projection's job is to rank players by the points they'll score. So we measure it the honest way: take the projection, compare it to the points players actually scored, and report the rank-correlation. Higher is better; 0 is noise; 1 is perfect.
The 4-gameweek projection correlates with real outcomes at r = 0.35 (Pearson). The single-gameweek projection at 0.23 (Spearman, among players who actually featured). A single week of football is genuinely noisy, which is why the 4-week figure is the more dependable read — and why our player pages lead with it.
Both numbers come from a leak-free walk-forward test: the model is trained only on earlier gameweeks, then scored on later gameweeks (the back third of the 2025-26 season, ~3,000 held-out player-gameweeks) that it never saw during training. No peeking at the answers.
An earlier version of this model reported r = 0.43. That figure was in-sample — the model was graded on the same data it was trained on, which flatters any model. When we re-tested it properly on held-out gameweeks, the real, out-of-sample number was 0.35. We publish 0.35, not 0.43, because 0.35 is the one that's actually true.
The model is also deliberately conservative: it pulls projections toward the average for each position rather than making bold individual calls. It ranks players better than it spreads them apart — good for ordering who's likely to do well, modest at predicting an exact score. We'd rather under-promise on precision than overstate certainty.
Four position-specific models — one each for goalkeepers, defenders, midfielders, and forwards, because what predicts a defender's points isn't what predicts a forward's. Each takes eight inputs from public FPL data: recent expected goals and assists (xG, xA), minutes and rotation, recent form and bonus-point pace, and rolling team strength. It outputs a projected points total.
The data is all public and reproducible — three Premier League seasons of gameweek-by-gameweek FPL Draft stats. No paid feeds, no proprietary sources you can't reach yourself.
The discipline: validation criteria are written down and locked before results are seen, and changes ship only if they clear a pre-set bar. Several proposed improvements were tested this cycle and rejected for not clearing theirs — that's the process that keeps the number on this page honest.
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