PLFantasy

Anyone who has followed my  Twitter  feed over the past few months knows I am big baseball fan, specifically with regards to the statistical side of the game. I am also a big proponent of trying to use lessons from one sport to help us understand or improve another (the Premier League’s stubbornness in ignoring the success stories of officials, salary caps, transfer rules etc from other sports is a huge source on frustration for me). The statistical awareness in baseball is possibly the best of any sport in the world, with legions of fans (and team employees) dreaming up new ways to measure players and hopefully identify undervalued assets and commodities (the now over, and often incorrectly, used term ‘moneyball’ attempts to convey this thought process). One term you will quickly come across if you ever decided to visit a statistically leaning site like  FanGraphs , would be ‘regression to the mean’. I am no statistician so I apologize to anyone that is if the below is...

A quick reader request. For reasons unknown, the powers at Premier League towers have decided to remove the match data from their once reliable website instead opting for an unordered list of random facts including goalscorers, yellow cards etc. To calculate the various data I use on this site I need a listing of player stats each week including minutes played, goals, assists, bonus points and fantasy points and then I need that cross referenced by opponent to establish where (home/away) and against whom (good /bad teams) a particular player is scoring their points. I can get goal and assist data from ESPN, who provide full match data but they obviously do not include fantasy or bonus points and annoyingly use full names rather than surnames, which requires some excel shenanigans just to get into a readable state. Does anyone (a) know of any sources which list match data including minutes played or (b) have a reliably maintained spreadsheet with the data included?

Arsenal Szczesny, Jenkinson, Djourou, Koscielny, Traore, Ramsey, Coquelin, Rosicky, Walcott, van Persie, Arshavin. Subs: Fabianski, Oxlade-Chamberlain, Chamakh, Lansbury, Miquel, Ozyakup, Sunu. No need to pile on Arsenal's misery here. For the first time that I remember, I don't own a single Arsenal player, and no one even registers on the shortlist. Van Persie took his goal well to remind us of his talent but the surrounding cast compared to Rooney and Aguero is just not there. We can reassess this team when Gervinho and Song return from suspension and (hopefully) new signings arrive. Aston Villa Given, Herd , Dunne, Collins, Warnock, N'Zogbia , Petrov, Delph, Agbonlahor, Heskey, Bent. Subs: Guzan, Ireland, Albrighton, Delfouneso, Makoun, Clark, Bannan. Luke Young has surprisingly moved to QPR leaving a hole to be filled at right back. If it is to be Herd (who played very well against Wolves) then this case is closed as he classified as a midfielder, but the situ...

Two weeks is a long time in both fantasy and reality. If it goes well you could being talked about as title contenders with the world at your feet (Mancini) but if things go wrong, even the strongest of resumes will be ignored (Wenger). Hopefully you find yourself in the former camp, but if not, don't panic, decide who needs to go then start trying to rack up some points, starting with this week. Clean Sheet Rankings It's always tricky at this point in the season to determine how much attention to pay to prior year and how much to focus on the current season. I have avoided the tough decision by simply adding/averaging the data to give hybrid values. The GPG conceded will therefore be over the 19 home/away games from last year plus this year's single game while clean sheets/ failed to score numbers are simply added together: [Defensive Pick vs Opponent - goals per game conceded (clean sheets kept - opponent failed to score)] Liverpool vs Bolton - 0.93 GP (9 - 7) Ast...

The Gambler's fallacy is a well documented theory which, loosely put, sets out that just because something has happened 20 times in row, the chance of it happening again is not diminished. In gambling we limit this to non-dependent events like coin tosses or roulette spins, but there is an application to fantasy scoring too. Fantasy scoring is not totally non-dependant as players get in form and teams gel as a unit, but there is certainly a case for not waiting through 8 barren gameweeks on the basis that a player is 'due' for a big game to turn it all around. With this in mind, I am introducing a new list of players who I have no problem cutting loose at this point in the season. I am not suggesting that they have no value for the year, but based on the immediate future, better options can be found and holding them may cost you weeks of wasted cash. Following this strategy may cause you to miss a big week from a player as any downturn from a top player is temporary, but...

As the saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. We speculated in the pre-season about what differences the new bonus system might produce, given that it was now to be based on a scientific and objective formula. The EA Sports index is based on six categories of contribution, which combine to give a player's overall contribution to a game. The approximate weighting appears to be as below: Scoring a goal: 90% Winning the game: 10% Other: 1%* *Rounding difference of +/- 1% is possible Only two of the top 12 scorers in GW1 failed to find the net (Kompany and Yaya Toure) while all found themselves on the winning team. In GW2 an incredible 13 of the top 20 scorers all benefited from having a goal to their name while the top 17 scorers all won their respective games.  The top 20 scorers to date gives us 6 players who are yet to find the net - Richards, S Taylor, Adam, Yaya Toure, Bosingwa and Kompany. Four of these names are already highly prized f...

I've touched on the new SimPrem game before, and now we're a couple of weeks into the season, I thought it was time to meet the teams and see how the draft went. We start with one of the co-founders, John Wright, owner and manager of Oglethorpe FC. What was your strategy going into the draft? As one of the two founding members of the SFP, I felt like I had a decent feel for what I would need going into the draft and perhaps a leg up on the opposition. Last year, I favored players who would receive more guaranteed playing time, only to find my team lacking quality at times. If not for a couple of lucky hits like Robin van Persie and Ben Foster, I probably wouldn't have won the league. This year, I came into the draft favoring quality over quantity. The biggest constraint in the current SFP system is that you are limited to 90 minutes of action per week at 11 team places, just like real football. With 25 players to fill those spots, I knew that each week, I would h...

Arsenal Szczesny, Koscielny, Vermaelen, Jenkinson, Sagna, Frimpong, Ramsey, Nasri, Arshavin, Walcott, van Persie. Subs: Fabianski, Oxlade-Chamberlain, Chamakh, Miyaichi, Lansbury, Miquel, Bendtner. Not too much to talk about here as Wenger basically picked all the first team players who were available to him. Anyone who reads this blog knows how much I like Wenger and respect Arsenal but it's becoming increasingly hard to get enthusiastic about anyone in this team from a fantasy perspective. For all the talk this week of Torres v Aguero v Rooney, Van Persie was conspicuous in his absence. I have no doubt he will have success at some point this year but I would bail for now and come back when this team can string some consistent performances together. Aston Villa Given, Young, Dunne, Collins, Warnock, N'Zogbia, Delph, Petrov, Agbonlahor, Bent, Heskey. Subs: Guzan, Ireland, Albrighton, Delfouneso, Makoun, Clark, Bannan. On this evidence it would seem that McLeigh might st...

I've posted at length before about the GK rotation strategy , with the basic idea being that good keepers with great fixtures tend to perform better (and score more points) than great keepers with average fixtures. To maximise the strategy you need two teams' fixtures to 'gel', that is, maximise the number of home fixtures and weak opponents and minimise the number of times both teams face a tough opponent. Though I have always focused this strategy on keepers, there is no reason it cannot be used for defenders, and I'm sure many of you do it already. The availability this year of players from good mid-range teams for a budget price suggests that this strategy might be even more fruitful this year. With that in mind, I have expanded the GK-ranking combinations to include all teams which contain a regular starter available for 5.0m or less (thus excluding 6 teams - Man City, Man Utd, Arsenal, Liverpool, Everton and Chelsea). I know Liverpool do have a 5.0m starter i...

The pre-season is the most hectic time for this blog, as setting a good initial lineup is a big - though not essential - step towards a good season. I had hoped to be able to take it easy for the first few weeks, assess some potential targets and start crunching numbers again after we've seen a few trends. Then all hell broke loose. There's no need to rehash the week's events but the end result is basically a press of the reset button with a few people enjoying an advantage of having a decent opening week (personally I was able to make the changes I wanted and just made a couple of picks that didn't work out). In case you missed any of them during the week, I will shamelessly plug the previous pieces on week one lineup lessons , a bit of chalkboard analysis , contrarian views to the most targeted players and potentially cheap links in team defenses . With that behind us, let's get onto this week. All the below rankings are for this week only so if you're s...