xP Expected Pointless Gameweek 2 · prediction frozen · graded Monday
A show about being wrong in public

A machine picks the team.
A human pays the price.

A machine manages a real Fantasy Premier League squad. Every Friday it publishes its team and its predicted points — frozen before the deadline. Every Monday it grades every call in public, against the game's own experts. Even the wrong ones. Especially the wrong ones.

Real team · Real deadline · Real consequences Machine vs The Experts, every week No deleted predictions. Ever.
The scoreboard
Gameweek 1 · Final · The Human Era
57HUMAN 55EXPERTS
Before the machine took over, the human edged the experts by two. Both captained Haaland. Both got two points for it. The Scout published a 15-man squad in GW1, not an XI — their XI here is implied from their own named bench and captain pick, retro-scored on actual points.
+2 HUMAN
Gameweek 2 · Prediction · The Machine Era
57.1MACHINE 50.0EXPERTS
The machine's first week in charge. It backs Haaland's armband; the experts gave theirs to Bruno Fernandes. One of us grades badly on Monday.
MACHINE PROJECTION +7.1
Season series · Machine vs Experts
0 — 0
Every gameweek from GW2 is a round — winner takes the week, and the tally lives here all season. Week one belongs to the human era; the machine starts from nil.
The format
Friday
The Machine's Team

The XI, the captain, the transfers, and a predicted score for every player — published before the deadline and frozen. The experts' team goes on the board next to it.

Weekend
The football happens

Nothing to post. The machine doesn't get to explain itself mid-round, and neither do the experts. The predictions sit there, in public, aging.

Monday
The Reckoning

Every call graded: CALLED IT or WRONG. The swing settles the week's round of Machine vs Experts. Wrong calls get the mark — no excuses, no deletions.

The mark keeps score
xP
The stat — expected points. Friday's mark.
xP
The face — Monday's mark, on every wrong call.

The flip is earned, never decorative. Upright, xP is the statistic the whole model runs on. When a graded call goes wrong, the statistic falls over and becomes a face with its tongue out — at us, not at you. When the machine is right, the mark stays a number.

The receipts — Gameweek 1, graded after the fact
Both Haaland (C)everyone's armband — two points, doubled to four 4 xPWRONG
Experts Sangarétwo assists plus defensive-contribution points — their best call 14 CALLED IT
Human White · Ødegaard · Dewsbury-Hallthree elevens the experts left out 33 CALLED IT
Human Thiago82 minutes, a missed penalty, nothing 0 xPWRONG
Experts The United double-upFernandes and Mbeumo, two points apiece 4 xPWRONG
The cast

The Machine

Picks the team

An AI running a full model — market odds, form, fixtures, minutes — over a real £100m squad. It publishes what it expects before every deadline, to the decimal, and lets Monday say whether it was clever.

The Experts

The establishment

FPL's own Scout Selection — the official site's recommended best team, published weekly. The machine scores their XI with the same model, then the football scores both of us for real.

The Human

Pays the price

Owns the actual team. Clicks the actual buttons. Went 57–55 up on the experts in week one, then handed the keys to the machine — and has to live with whatever it does next.

House rules
  1. Frozen means frozen. Predictions publish before the deadline and never change. The grade is against what was published, not what we wish we'd said.
  2. Every call gets graded. Captaincy, transfers, bench order, the lot. A quiet miss is still a miss.
  3. Nothing gets deleted. The misses stay up. The misses are the show.
  4. The experts get a fair fight. Their team is taken exactly as published, scored by the same rules, graded on the same night.
  5. The human can overrule the machine — but it goes on the record, and it gets graded too.