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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Complex Syst.
Sec. Multi- and Cross-Disciplinary Complexity
Volume 3 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcpxs.2025.1544420
This article is part of the Research Topic Game Theory and Evolutionary Dynamics: Unraveling Complex Systems View all articles

DIVERSITY IS KEY: FANTASY FOOTBALL DREAM TEAMS UNDER BUDGET CONSTRAINTS

Provisionally accepted
Josef Gulholm Josef Gulholm 1Jil Kluender Jil Kluender 2Julie Rowlett Julie Rowlett 3*Jonathan Stålberg Jonathan Stålberg 3
  • 1 University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Västergötland, Sweden
  • 2 Leibniz University Hannover, Hanover, Lower Saxony, Germany
  • 3 Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg, Sweden

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Given a fixed budget for player salaries, what is the distribution of salaries of the top scoring teams? We investigated this question using the wealth of data available from fantasy premier league football (soccer). Using the players' data from past seasons, for several seasons and several different budget constraints, we identified the highest scoring fantasy team for each season subject to each budget constraint. We then investigated quantifiable characteristics of these teams. Interestingly, across nearly every variable that is significant to the game of football and the budget, these top teams display diversity across these variables. Furthermore, randomly assembled teams would statistically not display such diversity across these variables. Our results indicate that diversity across these variables, including salaries, is a general feature of top performing teams. Moreover, in the process of obtaining these results we developed a data cleaning (or data reduction) algorithm that drastically reduced the amount of data to be analyzed.

    Keywords: Football (soccer), optimization algorithm, Knapsack problem (KP), data reduction algorithm, Data summarization and analysis

    Received: 12 Dec 2024; Accepted: 31 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Gulholm, Kluender, Rowlett and Stålberg. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Julie Rowlett, Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg, Sweden

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.