A few weeks ago, I was invited to join my newsroom’s Fantasy Premier League. As an eager new American staffer at a British newspaper, of course I accepted the chance to join in assembling an imaginary team of real-life players and scoring points based on their actual statistical performance. One doesn’t want to be rude, after all.
That’s when the problems started, chief among them that I had no idea whom to select for my team. I enjoy football as an aesthetic experience but not so much as an analytical one; I’m no great student of formations, form, the transfer market, injury reports or management politics. So I searched for the shortcut that any clueless empiricist with a laptop would these days: machine learning.
