Fantabeto 26/27

Fantacalcio Bayesian Estimated Team's Outcome

SOTA Machine Learning for Serie A Fantasy Football Dominance

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Architecture Overview

Fantabeto 26/27 is a complete rewrite of the original 2023/24 codebase, upgraded with production-grade data engineering, state-of-the-art ML models, and advanced optimization algorithms. It predicts Fantacalcio Modified Scores (voto + bonus/malus), probabilistic card distributions, goal probabilities, and penalty chances — then generates optimal lineups via Monte Carlo Tree Search.

                         ┌──────────────────────────────┐
                         │      Data Ingestion           │
                         │  FBref │ Fantacalcio │ API   │
                         └──────────────┬───────────────┘
                                        │
                         ┌──────────────▼───────────────┐
                         │      Feature Engineering       │
                         │  Fatigue │ Pitch Tilt │ RAG   │
                         │  Weather │ Name Matching      │
                         └──────────────┬───────────────┘
                                        │
              ┌─────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────┐
              │                         │                         │
    ┌─────────▼──────────┐  ┌───────────▼───────────┐  ┌─────────▼──────────┐
    │   GBM Ensemble      │  │   Card Classifiers    │  │    T-GNN            │
    │ LightGBM + CatBoost │  │ Yellow/Red/Penalty    │  │ Player Interactions │
    │    + XGBoost        │  │ + Goal Probability    │  │                     │
    └─────────┬──────────┘  └───────────┬───────────┘  └─────────┬──────────┘
              │                         │                         │
              └─────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────┘
                                        │
                         ┌──────────────▼───────────────┐
                         │     Optimization Engine       │
                         │  Auction (MILP) │ Lineup (MCTS)│
                         │  Transfers │ Opponent Model  │
                         └──────────────┬───────────────┘
                                        │
                         ┌──────────────▼───────────────┐
                         │     Telegram Bot + CI/CD      │
                         │  Fri/Sun briefings │ Actions  │
                         └──────────────────────────────┘

Key Features

Data Pipeline

• FBref Scraper: Rotating proxies + Playwright Cloudflare bypass
• Fantacalcio.it Integration: API → Excel votes/stats with HTML fallback
• api-football: Real-time xG, injuries, fixtures (via RapidAPI)
• News RAG Pipeline: Italian sports news (Gazzetta, Sky Sport, Di Marzio) → injuries, suspensions, tactical shifts via LLM extraction

SOTA ML Architecture

• GBM Ensemble (LightGBM + CatBoost + XGBoost): Stacked blending with Ridge meta-learner, bootstrap uncertainty
• Temporal GNN: Player-to-player interaction modeling (winger crosses → striker goals)
• Card Classifiers: Yellow/red card probability with SMOTE class imbalance handling
• Penalty Model: Team-specific penalty taker heuristics
• Goal Probability: Poisson regression for goal count prediction
• Optuna: Hyperparameter tuning with time-series cross-validation

Optimization Engine

• Auction (MILP): Multi-period stochastic knapsack via PuLP/Gurobi
  • Budget allocation per role (GK, DEF, MID, FWD)
  • Grid Auction (Asta a Griglia) game theory
• Weekly Lineup (MCTS): Win-probability maximization vs opponent projection
  • Modificatore Difesa (defense modifier)
  • Captain selection optimization
  • Opposition weakness exploitation
• Transfer Market (Svincolati): Buy-low/sell-high via xG divergence + regression to the mean

Agentic Workflow

• Sunday Morning Bot: Telegram/Discord → auto briefing with start/sit recommendations
• GitHub Actions: Automated Friday + Sunday pipeline (scrape → predict → notify)
• Tactical Briefing: Narrated decision rationale (e.g., "Start X over Y — opponent left-back injured")

Quick Start

Prerequisites

• Python 3.11+
• Playwright: playwright install chromium
• [Optional] RapidAPI key for api-football
• [Optional] Fantacalcio.it account for vote API access
• [Optional] Telegram Bot Token for notifications

Installation

git clone https://github.com/uPeppe/fantabeto.git
cd fantabeto
make install

Environment Variables

Copy .env.example and fill in:

FANTACALCIO_TOKEN=your_fc_access_token
RAPIDAPI_KEY=your_rapidapi_key
TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN=your_telegram_bot_token
TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID=your_chat_id
OPENAI_API_KEY=your_openai_key   # for LLM-enhanced news extraction

Usage

# Full pipeline: scrape → features → train
make pipeline

# Generate matchday predictions
make predict

# Run tests
make test

# Send Telegram briefing
make bot

Python API

from src.pipeline import Pipeline

pipeline = Pipeline()

# Scrape historical seasons
pipeline.scrape_fbref(["2024-2025", "2025-2026"], current=True)

# Build feature dataset
dataset = pipeline.build_features()

# Train models
model = pipeline.train_models(
    X=dataset.drop(columns=["fantavote"]),
    y=dataset["fantavote"],
)

# Run lineup optimization
result = pipeline.optimize_lineup("data/predictions.xlsx", "my_squad.xlsx")

Package Structure

src/
├── scraper/
│   ├── fbref_scraper.py         # FBref.com Serie A scraper
│   ├── fantacalcio_scraper.py   # Fantacalcio.it votes/rosters
│   ├── api_football.py          # api-football RapidAPI client
│   ├── proxy_manager.py         # Rotating proxy pool
│   └── browser_fallback.py      # Playwright Cloudflare bypass
├── features/
│   ├── vote_processor.py        # Vote → unified database
│   ├── player_features.py       # Player-level feature builder
│   ├── match_features.py        # Per-match feature matrix
│   ├── advanced_metrics.py      # Fatigue, Tilt, Weather
│   └── news_rag.py              # News ingestion + entity extraction
├── models/
│   ├── gbm_model.py             # LightGBM/CatBoost/XGBoost ensemble
│   ├── tgcn_model.py            # Temporal GNN interactions
│   ├── distribution_head.py     # SinhArcsinh + Bernoulli
│   ├── card_model.py            # Cards + Penalties + Goals
│   └── train.py                 # Optuna tuning + pipeline
├── optimization/
│   ├── auction_solver.py        # MILP auction strategy
│   ├── lineup_solver.py         # MCTS lineup selection
│   ├── transfer_analyzer.py     # Buy-low/Sell-high analysis
│   └── opponent_model.py        # Opponent behavior modeling
├── bot/
│   ├── telegram_bot.py          # Telegram bot client
│   └── briefing.py              # Tactical briefing generator
└── pipeline.py                  # Full pipeline orchestrator

2026/27 Season Configuration

Key season data in config/:

• 26_27_teams.yaml — Teams, promoted/relegated, API season IDs
• fantasy_scoring.yaml — FVM scoring rules, Modificatore, role quotas
• news_sources.yaml — RSS feeds for Italian sports news
• name_fix.yaml — FBref ↔ Fantacalcio name mappings

Testing

# Full test suite
make test

# With coverage
pytest tests/ --cov=src --cov-report=term

Credits

• Fantacalcio.it — The game and vote data
• FBref.com — Comprehensive football statistics
• parth1902/Scrape-FBref-data — Original scraping inspiration
• amiles2233/ff_prob — Bayesian NN inspiration

License

MIT — See LICENSE