Crowd Sourced Optimal Fantasy Football Team

All my fantasy football attempts have the problem that I know nothing about football. So for example Berbatov is unlikely to do as well this season as last season so picking him would seem unwise. But how does someone who knows nothing about football find out who will play well next season?

The wisdom of the crowds is the James Surowiecki about "the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group." This sort of thing does not work if the crowd has a bias in a particular direction.

I decided to look at the people is the "team selected by %" that fantasy premier league shows you. If I rerun the optimisation described in this post but instead of trying to great a team that has the maximum number of points last season I try and get the team whose players have been selected by the most other fantasy football managers.

The idea is that a team with the right number of defenders, goalkeepers, midfielders and forwards, that has at most three players from one team, that costs less than 100 and whose members have been picked most often should be really good.

The most popular team is

      Player Club Pos Price Pts people
7     Al-Habsi  WIG  GK    45 125  199410
30        Bale  TOT MID    80 118   189087
37      Barton  NEW MID    60 131   123865
69      Cahill  BOL DEF    55 105   180751
184      Given  AVL  GK    50   0   215091
205  Hangeland  FUL DEF    65 154   192333
231       Huth  STO DEF    60 138   165684
266    Kompany  MCI DEF    60  95  197352
323      N'Gog  LIV STR    55  48   279932
334 Odemwingie  WBA STR    75 171   218485
421     Suarez  LIV STR    95  68   343361
424    Taarabt  QPR MID    65   0   141086
452      Vidic  MUN DEF    80 148   172773
472   Wilshere  ARS MID    65  93   220381
477 Yaya Toure  MCI MID    80 146   167706

Some of these players were probably picked for the first few games and will be transfered out when they are about to play tougher games.

The average player is picked 26794 times. These players have been picked 200486 people on average.
This team would have scored 1415 points last season. The best team I could have picked for last season would have scored 2332 points. I have updated the dataset to include this people picked statistic.