Accountability

Every prediction, graded

Before every round locks, we publish our picks as a frozen, timestamped snapshot. Once the round finishes, we grade that exact snapshot against the official FIFA World Cup Fantasy points — no do-overs, no rebuilding the model after the fact. Misses are shown alongside hits.

1Rounds graded
3.80Mean captain MAE
-0.13Mean rank correlation
By round, newest first

Round 5

Results pending

This round is still in progress — matches have not all finished, so we have not graded it yet. The published prediction snapshot is already frozen and will be graded automatically once the round completes.

Round 3

Final

Our top captain pick, Amad Diallo, was projected 8.6 pts and actually scored 1.0. The published best XI projected 72.8 total points; it actually scored 72.0.

ArticleMAERank corr.MatchedTop pick (proj.→real)Best in list (real)
Best Value Xi4.44-0.618/11Amad Diallo (8.6→1.0)Orlando Gill (10.0)
Best Xi4.18-0.2611/11Amad Diallo (8.6→1.0)Leandro Trossard (17.0)
Blowout Transfers3.170.3215/20Crysencio Summerville (6.6→1.0)Bellingham (14.0)
Captains3.80-0.0118/20Amad Diallo (8.6→1.0)Leandro Trossard (17.0)
Differentials4.830.1718/20Amad Diallo (8.6→1.0)Leandro Trossard (17.0)
High Ceiling Xi4.87-0.3910/11Amad Diallo (8.6→1.0)Leandro Trossard (17.0)

Name-match coverage vs the official FIFA fantasy feed: 41/52 players.

Honest misses

  • Round 3 best-value-xi: our ranking was negatively correlated with reality (Spearman -0.61).
  • Round 3 best-xi: our ranking was negatively correlated with reality (Spearman -0.26).
  • Round 3 captains: top pick Amad Diallo scored only 1.0 pts (projected 8.6).
  • Round 3 captains: our ranking was negatively correlated with reality (Spearman -0.01).
  • Round 3 captains: left 16.0 pts on the table — Leandro Trossard (17.0 pts) outscored our top pick Amad Diallo (1.0 pts).
  • Round 3 high-ceiling-xi: our ranking was negatively correlated with reality (Spearman -0.39).

Method. Market odds (de-vigged) → Dixon-Coles scorelines → 50k Monte-Carlo simulations, scored on the official FIFA World Cup Fantasy points table. Grading: MAE compares our projected expected points to realized official points across matched entries; rank correlation (Spearman) checks whether our ordering matched reality, not just our top pick; captain regret is the gap between the best-scoring player in our own published list and the one we actually named captain. A round is graded only once every one of its fixtures has finished.