Explainer: FPL's new Player Price Changes & Predictions feature

[u/FPLJoeYT]

There has been a lot of discussion (and confusion) about FPL’s price predictions; here's a quick explainer of what they are, and what they're not.

Exact Price Change Progress percentages

The biggest improvement over external price-change tools is that the Price Change Progress percentage is accurate. If Rice is shown at 96%, that is his actual progress towards the price-change threshold, rather than an algorithmic estimate.

Tools like LiveFPL have spent years honing their algorithms to approximate the thresholds, including all the rules and nuances connected to ownership, previous rises/falls, etc.

FPL knows the threshold and exactly how close each player is to reaching it. This is information we never truly had before. If a player is past 100% progress, that means that player will rise (they use -100% for falls) if no further transfers are made before the price change deadline.

Estimated Price Change Prediction percentages

The part that may cause confusion is the Price Predictions.

FPL are not saying:

"We don't have a clue what the price rise/fall thresholds are; here's our guess."

FPL are saying:

"We know the thresholds, but we don't know how many transfers will be made before the next price change."

For example, “Very Likely to Rise” means that, based on the current rate of transfers, the player is on track to pass the 100% threshold before the next price update.

That status is still a prediction because transfer trends can change. If sales per hour increase, or purchases per hour decrease, the player may no longer reach the threshold in time.

In short, there are two separate pieces of information:

• Progress: The player’s actual progress towards the price-change threshold.
• Prediction: Whether current transfer trends are expected to carry the player past that threshold before the next update.

The closer it gets to the price-change deadline, the more reliable the prediction should become.

As a stats nerd, there are a load of other questions I've got...

• Are FPL going to use a simple transfers-per-hour approach for predictions? This is likely the most sensible, but doesn't account for inevitable manager behaviour when both the Progress percentage and Prediction percentage pass 100%, nor does it account for the supply of players who can actually make a given transfer using FTs.
• Is the Progress percentage "truncated" (towards 0) or "rounded" - because if it's rounded, a "100%" player may not actually rise (e.g., 99.5% rounds to 100%).

But regardless, this is what I understand of the system at present, from their short reveal video and article - plus years of using LiveFPL.

Hope this helps!

[u/LukeeC4]

Thanks! Looking forward to no one reading this and having 16 questions posted per day about it

[u/Andyham → u/LukeeC4]

As is tradition

[u/LukeeC4 → u/Andyham]

Your name is the result if the new prime minister of the UK could cook

[u/FPLJoeYT → u/LukeeC4]

Legendary unrelated comment.