PLFantasy

Quick note: One of the reasons I restarted the blog this year was that my wife and I were expecting twins in late September so I knew I would be home a lot more with plenty of sleepless hours available to mindlessly consume football matches. Well, the twins didn't think this was a great idea and decided to convert xTwins into Twins on August 13th. This means I've been a bit delayed rolling out some of the models and ideas I had to kick off the season but once we get into a routine I will ramp up the content a bit. I like to think that they are already concerned about the potential issues around small sample sizes and wanted to force me to wait until the season was a few weeks old before overreacting. Selecting defenders and 'keepers requires a different strategy to your attacking options, given that so much of their value is locked up in their team's performance. Of course, playing on a good team will help any player but while it's possible to have a lot of succes...

As democracies teeter on the edge of existence around the world and once-eradicated diseases return due to an apparent loss-of-uptake of vaccinations, we appear to be in a time where the masses are losing faith in experts. Scientists, journalists and those steeped in the scientific process are being drowned out by those who "go with their gut" and follow their id . I am here to stand up for the experts, though alas, I am not one. Those more learned than I will quickly realise that this blog is the work of a child in his father's suit trying to close business deals (actually, that might work these days). Still, you've made it this far so you might as well stay for a bit of analysis, even if my statistical base knowledge is formed from watching archived Harvard lectures and reading old Fangraphs posts.  For those just joining us, I ran this blog for a number of seasons but took last season off. I have built a reasonable, though hardly sophisticated model to try a...

With the new season upon us I wanted to get out some quick and dirty forecasts for the first few weeks of the year. The forecast data is almost entirely based on prior year data so I have not taken into account players changing teams (Lukaku, Walker) or those with new opportunities and teammates. By definition, a lack of historic data means that the new arrivals (Morata, Lacazette) are also missing for now, but will be added as soon as we have a small amount of data to go on. The defensive data looks a bit wacky for now so I would base my defensive decisions more on the team projections for now. I will also update and share some workings around how the model is going to work this year as I try to improve on the decent, but far from perfect version from a couple of seasons back. It's great to be back and I thank everyone reading this for giving the blog another chance. Please share your thoughts in the comments or on Twitter and I will make changes in the coming weeks. Good l...

I hope that the old adage about absence and fondness holds true and anyone reading this will still have some time for this little blog in this obscure corner of the internet. I took last season off from fantasy football - basically all football in fact - and now I'm back, armed with a pile of Opta stats and an online subscription to access all the live and archived footage anyone would wish to ingest. Since I last wrote on these pages I've changed careers and I am delighted to be expecting twins in a few weeks. These two factors have come together to shape the direction of the blog for the upcoming season. I am now working in the international development sector and one of the lessons I have learned so far is around comparative advantage - no one is best placed to do everything on their own. Thus I am not going to try and do everything on this site. I am not really going to cover injuries, suspensions or even expected playing time as many other sites are better at this and ha...