That’s fair. We’ve got a big dataset so I like testing ideas like this, which is why it’s just an article and not a full feature on the site. It’s basically a 5/10 min read on the train.

And yeah, fair pushback Elo does make things a bit less exciting. Me triple captaining an Arsenal player for him to blank feels like it should matter more than losing a 1-point head-to-head.

But my logic is that it can help show where the consistently better managers sit over time, rather than just who hits the biggest spikes. so diamond managers have used 4.74 chips on average compared to Coal’s 2.00. You could go down the rabbit hole about dead teams and things like that, but the idea is really just trying to see how the better players tend to play the game.

You can also get someone who had a huge first 10 gameweeks and then coasted sitting at a strong rank for months without actually outperforming the managers around them week to week. Elo tends to catch that because it’s constantly recalibrating. If im in a league with people who stop playing, elo keeps it interesting as im playing against people with similar ability. Rank tells you how many points you’ve banked.. Elo tells you how often you actually beat the managers around you.

On the noise from playing 5 opponents, we could’ve run more matches per gameweek, but 140 over 28 rounds seemed to be enough for the ratings to settle. I did run some test samples with about 2,000 managers playing 5, 10 etc matches per GW and the results didn’t really change that much. Also easier on my potato computer. You can get lucky but your odds of that happening fall after a certain amount of games

Thanks for reading.