The prospect of creating the ‘perfect’ Fantasy Premier League team ahead of the 2024/25 Premier League season is causing headaches all over the globe. Millions of FPL users are in confusion over which players or combination to choose for them to get a major kick-start to their campaign and gain an edge over the majority of other managers.
But the tricky pricing of the major names as well as some other ‘must-pick’ players has made it difficult for an individual to derive what exactly the ideal team should look like for game-week one and beyond. £15m Erling Haaland looks like a must-buy even at his record-setting value, while the likes of Mohamed Salah and Cole Palmer can’t exactly be ignored either.
Amid the headache to create a perfect team, some Fantasy Football ‘expert’ websites have come up with a unique solution to the problems. This comes through the use of AI. Nowadays, AI has become a major help for many aspects of life. ChatGPT is used throughout the world by students or working people to fix their problems or complete their assignments.
What Do The AI FPL Tools Do?
In a similar fashion, some Fantasy Football websites have come up with AI to help create the ‘perfect’ team for users. The job of this AI tool is to ‘rate’ exactly how good someone’s draft 15-man squad is before the first game-week and potentially suggest the ideal changes to make it even better.
There are a few platforms that have recently introduced their own AI-tool to help users. But these features are not free. Fantasy Football Hub, FPL-tips website, has introduced their AI which will rate how good a team is from 1-100%. But if one aspires to increase the percentage of their team’s rating and get more advice on transfers, they’ll need to sign up to the website and subscribe to their paid package.
There are three different packages which includes starter (£2.25/month), professional (£6.25/month) and ultra (£15/month). The first package gives a user the ability to have their team rated by AI every game-week, get transfer suggestions, get their team’s projected points, and even chip-usage planning.
The other two gives more luxurious features such as access to discord and whatsapp communities where more FPL ‘experts’ can give them guidance. There is also access to OPTA statistics, player comparison tools and ‘expert team reveals’ that allows users to try to make their teams similar to that of the top players around the globe.
The Fantasy Football Fix website also has a similar AI that rates an FPL team and suggests transfers, albeit other features. The Fix premium subscription plan is around £3.15 per-month, and the Premium Plus plan is around £3.95 per month.
This has almost the same features as Fantasy Football Hub, with some unique features like tracking the squads of opposition players and those in particular leagues or mini-leagues. They also have this ‘Chat FPL’ feature where users can ask the bot for transfer recommendations, which is similar to how Chat GPT works.
These AI tools are actually working really well among a growing number of FPL users. Many people are unbothered abut the prospect of paying out money to basically allow the AI to create their ‘perfect squad’ and suggest the ideal transfers. This takes away the headache of having to research the performances of different players and make necessary transfers on the basis of that.
AI FPL Tools Face Major Backlash
But a lot of FPL users and ‘experts’, in particular, are infuriated about how the usage of AI tool might destroy the entire point about the fantasy game. The entire element of AI giving a certain percentage to rate an FPL team is something that is being widely mocked and condemned as something that takes away all the fun from the game.
The FPL content creators who are endorsing and promoting the use of such AI tools are also being criticized for causing the downfall of the game. That is because if the majority of people start relying on AI to pick their ‘ultimate team’ then things will soon turn very robotic and fans might not even get the same excitement that came with researching and building your FPL team.
Moreover, the point of having to pay for 12 months just to make changes to a team in FPL (which is of course free) is not worth it. Some FPL experts have also noted how by using these ‘rate my team’ AI tools, users are being fooled by particular designers who use aribtary tool to assign a guessed score for a team.
There is also no guarantee that just because an AI team creates a 100% ‘perfect team’ for a user that the individual will get a huge points return. The AI basically makes its maneuvers and guesses based on data and statistic, something which an average user can also do by just researching about players on the Premier League websites or other platforms.
Just because an individual is paying that amount of money does not mean they’ll get an average of 70+ points or so every week, as they have an equal chance of failure as any random FPL users.
This is similar to the highly-mocked Supercomputer AI created by platforms like Opta, which uses AI to predict the positions in which teams will finish in every Premier League season. These ‘predictions’ are changed every week, but still ends up wrongly guessing the finishes of certain teams. Of course, the exact accuracy of these FPL AI tools will only be tested once the 2024/25 Premier League season is underway.
A lot is actually at stake, because if the predictions turn out wrong, then it could cause major losses for the platforms. If the AI tools turn out to be super accurate though, it can cause more users to subscribe to them and slowly ruin the magic of FPL.
