Fantasy Sports has become a popular pastime globally, with the most popular being fantasy football in the United States. However, my personal favorite is the Fantasy Premier League, which is also the fantasy sport with the most international reach.
The basic premise of fantasy sports is simple. Given a certain budget, you must create a team of players that will score you points depending on how they play in the real game. Higher scoring players tend to be more expensive, and your budget only allows you to bring in a few established “premium” players. This means that it is important to carefully consider options given the large array of possibilities.
Many of the top players use underlying statistics, beyond merely past performances, to predict when lesser known players can make a difference that could differentiate a user from the rest of their opponents. For example, last year, people predicted the major breakout star Cole Palmer’s massive points haul (the highest in the entire game) before he even had much of a chance to shine. They did this not by looking at his goals, assists, or even past performances, but rather coefficient statistics calculated based on his other influences on the game. Statistics that are not as well represented, such as dribbles, key passes, crosses, and distance covered all convinced a chosen few to invest in him early into the season, allowing them to reap massive point gains.
Careful analysis of existing data helps turn seemingly unpredictable occurrences, such as a given player scoring against a team, into more calculable probabilities. Given the nature of sport, there are no definitive outcomes by which an individual can create the best possible team. Never have any of the 11 Million players had the perfect team for a given gameweek in FPL’s entire existence. Regardless, taking into account how a team has been playing, their general strategies, key matchups between individual players, and individual brilliance allow for individuals to take calculated risks to climb their way up the leaderboards.
This is extremely similar to what data scientists fundamentally do. They take data from many sources to try and make sense of trends and patterns that can help either inform decisions or predict future outcomes. This is also one of the reasons why I enjoy playing FPL with my friends so much, as it is far from a luck-based game. It requires us to do what data analysts do, using information, both evident and obscure, to make the best predictions.
Data For Earth 
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