🧠 How It Works

FPL's own official next-gameweek projection, floored by recent points-per-game so a single lucky/unlucky projection can't dominate. Points-per-game itself is ignored below 900 minutes played — too small a sample to trust.

FPL's own rolling recent-form stat — how hot or cold a player has been lately, independent of their season-long average. Ramped down early in a season (or after injury) when it's only 1-2 games of history, not yet a real average — otherwise a single freak game reads as sustained form.

How favourable the upcoming run of fixtures is, decayed so nearer matches matter more. Position-aware: defenders/keepers care about the opponent's attacking threat (clean-sheet odds); attackers care about the opponent's defensive solidity (scoring odds) — two different things a single 1–5 difficulty rating conflates.

Over/under-performance vs expected goal involvement (xG + xA). A player consistently outperforming their underlying chances is more likely to regress; one underperforming is more likely to catch up.

FPL's Influence/Creativity/Threat stat. Zeroed for goalkeepers — it's driven by save volume, which tracks facing more shots (often on a worse team), not the clean sheets that actually earn a keeper points.

Each team's underlying expected goals conceded per 90, while this player was on the pitch. A stronger defense genuinely means more clean sheets, beyond what season stats alone capture. Zero weight for MID/FWD, where clean sheets barely matter for points.

+0.75 for the confirmed primary penalty taker (+0.25 for backup), +0.15 for primary direct free-kicks, +0.10 for primary corners. A different evidence tier from the rest — not backtested, since its real value is catching a player who just inherited duty, which a season-long backtest can't see (an established taker's value already shows up in their normal scoring stats).

Valued by a horizon score: each of the next 5 gameweeks scored individually using that week's specific fixture, discounted 15% per week further out (HORIZON_DECAY = 0.85) to reflect growing uncertainty. A rough week ahead of a strong run isn't undervalued, and vice versa.

BENCH_WEIGHT = 0.15. A bench player only scores when actually subbed in, which is rare — especially a backup keeper. Without this discount, the optimizer once priced a strong second-choice keeper as if he were a nailed-on starter (see change feed below).

TACTICAL_WEIGHT = 0.5. Controls how much "hot right now" matters relative to "good over the next few weeks" when deciding who starts vs sits.

HIT_COST = 4 — FPL's actual point deduction. A hit is only taken when the projected gain clearly clears that bar, not a hand-picked "feels worth it" threshold. How many hits it's allowed to take in one week is effectively uncapped (MAX_EXTRA_HITS = 14, the true ceiling being squad size) — it doesn't take reckless hits just because it can, since each one still has to individually clear its own cost, but it's no longer artificially blocked from proposing a bigger rebuild when the numbers genuinely support one.

TRANSFER_FRICTION_COST = 1.0. A free transfer still isn't a costless one in real life (churn, price-change risk, giving up a transfer you could've saved) — without a floor here, the optimizer would take literally any transfer with positive expected value, however tiny. Every transfer, free or paid, has to clear this bar to be worth making at all.