Fantasy football: Can data science beat intuition to win the game?

The first footy is about to be whacked into the MCG turf to begin the AFL men's competition, and with it, laptops around the country are running hot. 

Fantasy football has become a huge part of the AFL season for hundreds of thousands of fans who play the season-long game on various platforms.

And it's not just the AFL – there are fantasy competitions for the NRL and many Australians take part in the massive NBA, NFL, and Premier League fantasy competitions. 

The game in a nutshell: pick 30 AFL players who are given a dollar value from $190,000 to $1.02 million to fit under a salary cap of $14.8 million. The players' starting values are dependent on how well they've scored in previous years.

Players accrue points based on their kicks, marks, handballs, goals and other statistical categories.

Your total score each week is based on the individual scores of the 22 players you start on the field, with another 8 players sitting on a bench.

Players' prices go up or down depending on how well they score.

The game is fundamentally about trading players each week to maximise profits and points.

The goal is to buy low and sell high so that over the season you end up with a team full of premium players who will give you the maximum points.

The tricky bit is that you also want to maximise your points early when your team has just a handful of premium players, as well as mid-priced players and basement-priced rookies, who you hope will score well and rise in value.

Selby Lee-Steere can speak about that with some authority: he won the fantasy competition on the AFL's platform in 2017, and then to prove it wasn't a fluke, won it again the following year.

«The more perfect your starting squad can be, obviously you're in a much better position to