Gameweek 13 Preview
Team Attacking Forecast
Team Defensive Forecast
Individual Player Forecast
In anticipation of the inevitable "why do you hate van Persie" questions, I thought I better add a quick note on his unexpectedly low ranking here.
If I'm honest, if I owned both players and hadn't looked at the above data, I would undoubtedly have captained van Persie but while many are quick to point to the drawbacks of stats, the above numbers are fairly self explanatory and thus I feel fairly confident standing behind them. Rooney currently has 2% of the captain vote at Fantasy Football Scout, to van Persie's 66% but I'm sure you can find your own 'following the crowd' quote here depending on how you feel about the above analysis. Any logical suggestions as to why van Persie might actually be better than Rooney would be more than welcomed below or at @plfantasy.
Comments
I think the main benifit RVP owners will cite over Rooney is the easy cap option he provides most weeks. Your data suggests the same with Rooney having worse stats away from home while RVP does well both Home and Away. Is this enough to justify the current 2 mil difference? prob not in terms of pure value but at some point you just have to pay for points or we would fill our teams with Maloney type players.
Team values are high enough now that owning RVP doesn't auto break your team anymore and I think alot got him when he cost 13 mil and not the 13.7 he costs today. I noticed you have quite a low team value but if you were given an extra 3 mil in the bank would you pick Rooney over RVP?
RvP is in 35.7% of teams, while Rooney lags way behind on 6.3%.
I bet the difference is even bigger amongst the self-selecting population of those who frequent the FFS website.
I'm not making any comment on their relative point scoring potential for this gameweek, mind!
I don't put much emphasis on team value, which in a vacuum is foolish, but I've just found that to make huge gains you generally need to be following the crowd (which I generally don't) and I've done just fine in the second half of seasons without a big budget.
As I say, the model likes Rooney to simply out score van Persie, regardless of cost. Now, I'm not saying the model is necessarily correct, but I don't think it's making any outlandish claims that more shots, particularly those inside the box, lead to more goals and thus Rooney looks a touch better.
I'm not confident (or arrogant) enough to say I'm right, in fact I assume I'm wrong, but I've yet to see a reason to support Van Persie definitely being better than Rooney, other than some vague "he's better", which just doesn't really show up in any of the stats.
Fulham have outshot the opponent adjusted average team this year by 25%, so we're giving them 11 SiB based on Stoke's form. As for Fulham themselves, they've averaged 9 SiB on the road, with Stoke performing slightly below average at 7%. Hence, both measures expect Fulham to get around 10 SiB which they've converted to goals at an 18% rate, a touch above the league avg of 15%.
Berbatov has accounted for at least 18% of his team's SiB in every game this year, averaging 32% away from home. So we expect him to get perhaps three chances in the game, which gives him a decent shot at a goal (behind Ba, Rooney, Giroud and Aguero). He then has a decent shot with assists too, so he gets a bump to push him up the rankings.
The danger with saying "Stoke have conceded X goals at home" is that if in those games they've given up massive shot totals, the sustainability of that success is questionable.
On the data point, I am only using current year data, other than for the % of times a player hits the target with his shots, as I've shown this rate to be sustainable over the years and based on something other than random variation.
There is an issue with small sample sizes for sure, and I hope I make that caveat enough during my ramblings, but I don't see an easy way round it, especially for players like Berbatov who have changed teams. Given that the season is only 38 games long, and the fantasy season is massively important for the first half (after which teams become homogenous), if we waited for a reliable sampel size, the season would be over.
This data is NOT a magic bullet and if you believe Berbatov will struggle without Kacaniklic, or that City will concede more goals with Maicon at right back, feel free to make that adjustment. I don't do so as those views as largely subjective and I don't want to force my own biases down the reader's throats. I worry that those narratives are applied after the fact to confirm our own biases, but that's just my view, so I let the data talk and then investigate where things go wrong.
Sorry for the long reply, and thanks for the questions
Great article and thanks for replying to the comments above because the same questions came to my mind regarding Van Persie vs Rooney and Berbatov vs Stoke.
But as you point out this is what the Stats say, and you are only highlighting what the raw data implies without adding a personal or biased interpretation.
Personally, I like to analyse your data and then put on my own spin on the results based on my own gut feelings. For instance, I transferred out Ba this week for Lambert even though the numbers probably don't recommend it but I personally fear for the Newcastle squad over the coming busy weeks.
So please keep on providing the raw, untainted data and I'll interpret it as I see fit :)
Cheers
Tony