GW3 Review

Correction (2026-09-10): this post originally reported 6 points. That number came from data/live/gw3.json fetched at 09:03 UTC on publish day — right at the data_checked flip, before the live-stats endpoint had actually caught up (the same file showed 22 total starters across the league, when a full gameweek fields 220). Every table below is rebuilt from a fresh fetch and a rerun of score_accuracy.py; the real score was 40.

Forty points against an overall average of 51 — nine off the pace, not the washout the first version of this post described. The captain and vice both underperformed their projections without blanking, one defender comfortably beat his number, and the minutes model's calibration problem cuts the other way this week: it undercounted starters rather than overcounting them.

Result

• Our GW points: 40 | overall average: 51

Cherki (C) returned 3, doubled to 6 — down from a 7.2 projection but not the zero the broken data implied. B.Fernandes (vice) was never needed: Cherki played 65 minutes, so the double stands as scored. Guéhi was the best returner in the fifteen at 8 against a 6.7 projection (clean sheet plus bonus), with Virgil (6 vs 3.8) and Rogers (6 vs 4.5) also clearing their numbers. Nobody blanked outright among the starting eleven — the bench trio of Dubravka, Keane and Beto did, but none were needed; all eleven starters played their full or near-full minutes and the total (40) is exactly captain-doubled Cherki plus the other ten, no autosubs involved.

One receipt still holds from the preview: the transfer mess resolved exactly as reasoned. The Beto→Barry move died on the selling-price mismatch, no transfer was made, the free transfer is banked, and nothing in this scoreline would have been different had we forced it through. Beto stayed dead on the bench where he belonged.

Predicted vs actual

Track scores

Spearman recovers to +0.195 after GW2's inversion, and the model's MAE (1.954) now clearly beats the external benchmark (2.481) on both error and ordering — a much healthier week than the one first reported. The captain-oracle line is unchanged by the correction: Mundle, the model's single highest-projected player leaguewide, genuinely scored 0, so no captain switch would have rescued this week regardless. The XI-oracle of 57 (up from a bogus 19) says the best possible eleven by prediction scored 57 against our 40 — a real but modest 17-point gap, not the near-total miss the broken data suggested.

The minutes model is still off, just in the opposite direction from what the first version of this post claimed: it predicted 156 starters against 220 actual (Brier 0.1316, −8.6 minutes bias per player), meaning it under-called who would start rather than over-calling it. Both errors point at the same underlying issue — the per-club start-probability normalisation is not yet well calibrated on live data — but the direction matters for GW4's lineup calls, and this week it argues for trusting borderline starters more, not less.

Leagues

Engleski Dopisnik

XcentricIT

Third of three in the office league, unchanged. In Engleski Dopisnik — the league we actually weight to win — a below-average week dropped us 268 places to 5307 of 5518, though the gap to the top (289 vs our 160, 129 points after three gameweeks) says more about three weeks of variance than about GW3 on its own. The structural point from the preview still stands regardless of this correction: several highly-owned players in our leagues sit outside our squad while we're at the three-club cap elsewhere. GW4, with the free transfer banked, is where that gets addressed.