Diversity is Key: Fantasy football dream teams under budget constraints

TL;DR

This study analyzes how top fantasy football teams under budget constraints exhibit diversity across various variables, revealing that such diversity is a key feature of high-performing teams and introducing a data reduction algorithm.

Contribution

The paper demonstrates that diversity across multiple variables characterizes top fantasy football teams and presents a novel data cleaning algorithm for large datasets.

Findings

Top teams show significant diversity across variables.

Random teams lack the diversity seen in top teams.

Diversity correlates with team performance.

Abstract

Given a fixed budget for player salaries, what is the distribution of salaries of the top scoring teams? We investigated this question using the wealth of data available from fantasy premier league football (soccer). Using the players' data from past seasons, for several seasons and several different budget constraints, we identified the highest scoring fantasy team for each season subject to each budget constraint. We then investigated quantifiable characteristics of these teams. Interestingly, across nearly every variable that is significant to the game of football and the budget, these top teams display diversity across these variables. Furthermore, randomly assembled teams would statistically \em not \em display such diversity across these variables. Our results indicate that diversity across these variables, including salaries, is a general feature of top performing teams. Moreover, in the process of obtaining these results we developed a data cleaning (or data reduction) algorithm that drastically reduced the amount of data to be analyzed.