PLFantasy

There seems to be an emerging narrative in the early week of the season that fantasy teams are starting to converge and a “template” has emerged for people to follow. The strong start of the elite full backs, the apparent “must own” status of pricey Salah and Aguero and a couple of budget midfield enablers (Neves and Kante) make it seem like this is the case. If we look at the prior year ownership data for GW3 though, we see a broadly similar pattern of ownership: Overall we had 14 players with 20%+ ownership where as this season we have 17, with one clear leader over 50% and a handful more over 30%. This season I think we have a couple more budget options with the likes of Wan-Bissaka, Richarlison, Neves, Kante and to an extent Zaha and Mkhitaryan, where as last year we saw just Hernandez, Hegazi and Rooney. I wonder if the the presence of these budget options here might well be what is leading folks to conclude that teams are starting to all look the same. Differentiation is a...

Previously we looked at some data from last season and tried to set a rough benchmark as to how much value you need from premium defenders in order to be worth their higher price tag. If you didn't catch that piece then I'd encourage you to do so, but if not, the TL;DR is that we estimated that you should be aiming to earn somewhere around 26 points attacking points (goals, assists and bonus points) for every 1.0m extra invested over a player in the same team i.e. Alonso over Luiz or Walker over Stones. It's also worth re-empahasising that this would exclude any playing time concerns, which further complicate things somewhat. The below graphic starts to plot the defenders from each team to quickly highlight the potential areas where the more expensive players are starting to show their value. I must note here that two gameweeks is too soon to draw any strong conclusions based on the underlying stats, but then again, we need to start making transfer decisions now so like i...

At this stage of the season, those of us who are statistically inclined face a bit of a dilemma. We know that too much weight should not be placed on the limited data that's available, but yet the alternative is to rely on no data and simply make your picks based on the one or two games of action you've seen, or worse, some voodoo about world class players not being able to score in August. With this in mind, this time of year offers a good opportunity to explore a couple of other broader topics before the games start coming thick and fast and we get lost in expected goal regressions. Though data in a wider sense may not yet be stable , we can start to take some reasonable confidence from starting lineups and some of the lessons we can draw from there. Specifically here, I am interested in (a) which players offer a discount among their teammates and (b) when would we be willing to pay for the more expensive option. This is typically most useful when it comes to defenders an...

Just a quick post today to highlight what I think is a promising buy opportunity, not currently getting too much attention. What's on offer: A proven midfielder who has averaged the equivalent of 31 games of action over the last 5 seasons Currently ranked 12th among midfielders in successful passes in the final third and 9th in created chances. Took penalties for his team last season (though that could be in jeopardy this year) Currently just the third most owned midfielder on his team. Sounds reasonably promising so far, but what if I added that he accumulated those impressive stats in just 43 minutes of action this season? We're of course talking about Eden Hazard. Not exactly an unknown quantity - indeed he's still owned by 12% of managers despite his fitness concerns - but with question marks surrounding arguably half of all midfielders valued at 9.0m or above, Hazard's return to fitness in a rejuvenated Chelsea side seems like a real opportunity. Even w...

Gameweek 1 has been somewhat less dramatic than last season. With the new Friday kick off and a solid day of Saturday action under our belts I went to bed on August 12th just like any other Saturday night. A few hours later I was woken by my wife who was in labour - 7 weeks before our due date. A few more hours later our twin girls appeared and let's just say that questions around Gabriel Jesus's playing time or Paul Pogba's xG suddenly seemed somewhat trivial. Needless to say, the past year has meant I've had less time to dedicate to fantasy football, although the early starts on the weekend make watching the 7am ET games much easier. Over the offseason I have been debating how, if at all, this blog can continue to offer value. With the prevalence of Opta's xG, my own version of a similar (but more basic) model becomes somewhat irrelevant and my absence from England means that I will never be as up to date on team news as those who live in the city, read the loca...