PLFantasy

However good a player projection system is, it will always have certain assumptions built in which require some judgement on behalf of the model's creator. This might include how much weight to put on recent games versus historic data or how much to regress team or player conversion rates back to a league or historic average. One such assumption I do not currently factor into my own model is which kind of games a particularly player performs well in. For example, if Harry Kane accounts for 30% of his teams shots inside the box and Spurs are forecast for 10 SiB then his forecast will be three SiB regardless of who the opponents are. The strength of those opponents is of course somewhat baked into how we get to the 10 SiB projection in the first place, but no attention is paid to whether Kane has tended to over or under perform expectations against weaker or stronger teams, or whether he's struggled against teams who deploy three centre backs. The data below takes the first ste

If you are reading this then you almost certainly own Mohamed Salah. The Egyptian winger has been sensational for Liverpool this season and fantasy managers have responded by adding him to their teams by the thousand. At the time of writing is ownership is up to 51% and his value has increased by almost a million pounds since the game started. Today's piece is not about him though, but his colleague who hopes to operate on the other side of the field - Sadio Mane. A red card, injury and the form of Salah have pushed Mane out of many managers minds, but as teams begin to converge and differentiation becomes increasingly difficult, the Senegal star is a promising option. First, a quick word on Liverpool. I think many people might be hesitant to invest close to 20 million on two Liverpool players (assuming you already have Salah) but I might suggest that fear is misplaced. They've scored just two goals less than Man United, four more than Arsenal, five more than Chelsea and ten

As alluded to in last week's post about Guardiola's "wild" rotation (or lack thereof), I am currently of the opinion that the various City options that are available (plus a couple of other elite players around the league) are so  good that it is worth absorbing the inevitable rotation hits that come, even as those punches start to increase in number over the busy holiday period. One of the risks and possible downsides here is that with rotation generally not being something one can plan around (unlike, say, actual injuries or suspensions), the characteristics of your bench need to be tweaked somewhat. Two key points need to be changed in my own personal bench strategy. First, I need to pay more attention to it. I am generally pretty focused on maintaining a good substitute keeper that rotates nicely with the other option and then one other sub, but after that I do not prioritise having a deep bench. Second, because you won't necessarily be able to choose when

There seems to be a growing chorus that Man City players are becoming harder and harder to own due to constant rotation from Pep Guardiola. There are two key pieces of information that are useful to assess how damaging rotation can be to a player: The predictability of when the rotation happens (before of after Champions League games, away from home etc), If not selected for the first team, how often do they come on as a sub. If you have a decent bench then - while frustrating - you can deal with players not playing at all. However, if they consistently come off the bench for only 15 minutes or so then you are lowering your odds at success. Predicting team sheets is not really my forte (nor a particular interest) so we're going to focus on the second point here: We can see four of the City options have spent time on the bench this season while De Bruyne and Silva have been ever present to date. The calculation for this pair is slightly different as you're getting i

The popularity of "expected goals" as a metric has exploded over the past year or so, with mainstream TV broadcasts now starting to dip their toes in the water of advanced analytics. One inevitable, if slightly unfortunate, consequence is that there are now multiple xG models, which could potentially disagree by a reasonable amount, which to those who need a bit more persuasion as to the merits of statistical analysis, might suggest a lack of accuracy. This has somewhat been the case in baseball with the two big "Wins Above Replacement" (WAR) metrics sometimes disagreeing by a relatively large amount, especially when it comes to valuing pitchers. There is sound methodology behind each metric, of course, but for those who aren't well versed in the intricacies of the debate, the differences can be distracting and serve as fuel for those who want to dismiss analytics and focus on old fashioned "eyeball tests" etc. I, of course, have my own model which p

I don't recall there ever being a side in the Premier League with so many viable fantasy options. The 2009-10 Chelsea side that scored 102 goals had Drogba, Lampard, Anelka and Malouda all with double digit goals but there's a non-zero chance that this City side could have four players approaching those totals by the holidays plus  two of the best two creative players in the league in Silva and De Bruyne. This week they have the top five xP players - which is simply absurd - and even Sane could be argued to be higher as he's currently still being penalised for his early season sub appearances (though with Aguero back I'd personally argue they remain a risk). The real heartbreaker is that this game against Burnley looks delicious and someone is going to be benched and disappoint a lot of managers. Everyone except Aguero played midweek against Napoli so there are no clues there, but this is in theory the third game in which Aguero was fit enough play after his bro

Given the short gameweek, I only have one main topic this week: Man City (and then a couple of words on Harry Kane). Whether you just saw the goals, highlights or whole game, there was no denying how impressive City's demolishing of Stoke was this week. All six of their starting midfielders and forwards amassed at least 31 points under the official BPS system, compared to just two players total from United, Chelsea, Spurs, Liverpool and Arsneal (Bakayoko and Eriksen). Jesus was given the most points under that system (which overvalues goals in my opinion), De Bruyne was awarded Man of the Match at the stadium while Sterling earned the most fantasy points thanks to his goal, two assists and bonus points. In short, there's a lot of talent to go around here. Two things jumped out this week about this City side that need a bit of exploring: 1. It's increasingly difficult to select just three City players given the talent on offer. Silva, Sterling and Mane are all perf

Captain Notes Despite not boasting an overly impressive set of results to date, the model rates Liverpool's defense quite highly and thus perennial captain option Lukaku is well down this week's rankings. Morata  is a injury risk which is unfortunate given Chelsea's visit to lowly Palace, although even if fully fit the model is not enamored with the Spaniard thanks to so-so shot data for Chelsea on their travels. While they've racked up a very impressive 8 goals in 3 games, they've done so on just 21 SiB and 12 SoT, which makes the model cautious of future regression. For context, Arsenal have 20 SiB and 8 SoT in their three away trips and have yet to score. With Aguero out and City at home, Jesus is a very real option and I might have him second on my own adjusted list. He gets a good share of City's chances when on the pitch (24%) and while his SiB numbers cannot match the likes of Kane or Lukaku, his Big Chances per 90 minutes are right up there and

With 8 clean sheets and big performances from the likes of Spurs, United and to a degree Arsenal, there were points a plenty this week, though as we can see above, not all those performances were necessarily backed up by the underlying stats. A couple of names to focus on here: Alexis Sanchez The model liked the Arsenal man as the best performer of the week with 10 expected points on 8 shots (4 SiB) and 6 CC. The "three elite forward" strategy which was en vogue for all of 2 weeks has been devastated by injuries to Aguero, Morata and Lukaku and so managers are now looking back to elite midfielders to lead their team and Sanchez is well placed to potentially fill that role. His incredibly low ownership number of just 3%, plus his earlier price fall make him an incredible opportunity to turn a profit if (or should we say when) his actual points haul starts matching his xP. Arsenal's fixtures are good but not spectacular as they face City and Spurs in GW10 an

As we sit in the middle of another dull international week, many managers will be tempted to play (or have already played) that wildcard chip. With that in mind, I wanted to link to a few resources that I have posted over the past few weeks that might be useful Overall player projection  - projected points for the next 12 gameweeks Player share of key stats - the percentage of their team's SiB and CC that each player has accounted for Points vs Expected Points - a quick way to highlight players who have underperformed their underlying stats to date and could see increased fortunes in the future with improved conversion rates. Performance vs prior season - see how players have performed in this season's fixtures compared to the same fixture last season Team snapshot and projection - which teams are performing best and who do you need to secure coverage for? Defender selector - which defender gives the best combination of value and attacking threat within each

One of the downsides of the premierleague.com fantasy game is the fact that every manager has the same access to every player, which can cause teams to converge as the season goes on. This can lead to the conclusion that we need ways to differentiate our teams to try and gain some advantage over the pack. I would suggest there is some danger in chasing this idea too much as ultimately you need to be chasing points, not just unique points but there is of course some value to having players who offer something a bit different. The below visualization shows the standard points vs expected points chart but with the marks colour coded based on ownership. The bluer marks are the players everyone seems to own (Lukaku, Kane, Salah etc) while the orange marks show the players flying below the radar. The first observation is that the vast majority of players are in very few teams so your search for differentiators doesn't need to go too deep. You don't need to be looking at the

Readers of this blog will likely be comfortable with the idea that one way in which we tend to mis-evaluate a player's performance to date is to focus too much on outcomes and not enough on process i.e. on goals and not shots. This problem, of course, is what stats like expected goals (xG) try to combat, as does simply looking at underlying stats rather than focusing on goals or assists. Another area for caution is to adjust for the opponents an individual player has faced. A player may well be good value for their 3 goals in 3 games based on their underlying stats, but if those all came in games against Crystal Palace, Bournemouth and Swansea then it doesn't necessarily mean they will enjoy future success when the opponents get tougher. This is implicitly factored into the player projections , which are based on individual opponents but there are holes in the model that can need to be recognized. For example, the model allocates a team's projected shots to individual p

Elite forwards It was quite a week for the league's leading forwards with five of the seven 10 million pound men all finding the back of the net at least once (the other two - Jesus and Zlatan - were not in action). Kane owners were feeling smug after his 13 point haul in the early game, only for him to be eclipsed by Morata and almost matched by Aguero later in the day, while Lacazette sent a reminder to the league that he is another talented option with a brace on Monday night. There is an emerging theory that one must  own three of these elite options, and make up the difference elsewhere in your team with reasonably priced defenders and budget midfield options. While I understand this logic, I would not be so fast to dismiss the midfield elite with Sanchez and Hazard returning to their sides and the likes of Eriksen and Salah putting in quality performances every week. The wisdom of this argument will likely only be settled with hindsight. What we can review is which

The below visualization shows the share of their team's shots inside the box (SiB) and created chances (CC) each player have accounted for this season. The share represents only the games when the player was on the field so as to not penalise them for missing games. This also therefore means that the total team percentage will not add up to 100%. While shots inside the box are generally more valuable than those from outside, this data does not control for quality beyond that, so an overly trigger happy player like Andy Carroll might appear more valuable than he is, while a clinical finisher like Aguero might be underrated. Still, the idea here is provide a quick sense check as to where players rank within their respective teams. We often see people cite team A's superior fixtures to team B as the key reason to select player A over player B, but this misses the impact of the likelihood of these players benefiting from their team's favourable fixtures, which I hope this p

Over an eight day period last week, Man City thumped their three opponents by a combined score of 15-0, with Liverpool, Feyenoord and Watford unable to contend with Guardiola's men. It goes without saying that City were extremely impressive in these games and fantasy football managers are obviously taking note with Aguero and Jesus shooting to the top of many managers' transfer target lists (at the time of writing some 440,000 managers had already brought in Aguero and another 90,000 have targeted Jesus). The point of this post is not to suggest that these transfers are incorrect - indeed I might follow suit myself - but I did want to run over a few facts to maybe turn the temperature down on the need to make these moves right now. The chart below shows the expected points each of the listed elite forwards have registered through the first 5 gameweeks. You can see Aguero's terrific GW5 effort eclipsing his rivals this past week but you will also note that Kane has three

Note: I have still not figured out a method to allocate clean sheet points to players that I'm happy with, so for now the below projection is for attacking points only (plus two for playing time). Clean sheet forecasts can be found in the team projections here .

One of the key complications with player forecasting - or indeed I imagine any forecasting - is deciding which data set to use. When it comes to fantasy football, we obviously want to include as much recent data as possible but the issue is when we can exclusively rely on this season's data and when we need to look to the past seasons for guidance. I am generally quite happy to solely rely on this season's raw event data such as shots or created chances fairly early on as they tend to occur with relative frequency and thus stabilise in a short time frame. How these events get converted into goals can fluctuate a lot more though, as the key driver there - goals - happen much less frequently. With this mind, the revised player projection table below allows you to choose how you are converting the raw chances into goals and assists: Past season - uses the benefit of having a 38 game sample to see how different teams convert chances into goals. The negative, of course, is that te