PLFantasy

We talked about this earlier in the season, but with a couple more games in the bag, I've updated the viz which attempts to help you choose your defenders. The "All Players" tab should in theory help you do this coming with a blank slate, but the r aison d'etre for the viz is to help you choose between players in the same side, once you've decided that, for example, you want a City defender. The viz can be found linked from the main menu , and here and should be opened separately to best read this piece. A few notes as of GW5 below. Arsenal I'm not sure how much value there is with this defense right now, but if you are planning to play the fixtures and take a chance with one of Emery's men, this would suggest it should be Mustafi rather than the 10% owner Bellerin who you should target. Bournemouth Cook is the man here for now, though if a clear winner emerges from the developing Daniels vs Rico battle then one of those players could topple him b...

Given his exploits last season, and a pretty healthy start to this one, it's hard to believe the thought of selling Salah is even worth exploring. But, international weeks give us time to think through less obvious solutions so let's make a case for it. But first, a few opening notes: This is a short term measure. Despite Mane's hot start and promising form from the likes of Hazard, I still believe Salah is the best fantasy option for the season. His underlying numbers are excellent, his team looks as good as ever and his playing time is assured (other than the odd rest of course). This move make more sense if you haven't yet wildcarded, but plan to do so in the next 4-6 weeks, potentially before GW9 during the international break. If you have already played that chip then using three or four transfers in 4 gameweeks to rotate one player (along with a corresponding move) might be tricky (although if you have wildcarded the rest of your team is presumably settled?) T...

As noted in other recent posts, it can be hard to know what data to rely upon in the early gameweeks. We all know that shots inside the box or those on target tend to correlate well to goals, but with only a few of those events happening each week, it can be easy to overreact to unstable data . One data point I am interested in, is how well teams are doing compared to same fixtures from prior season. This data is still fraught with issues - teams might have changed personnel or have injuries or simply suffered a bad game - but we at least have a baseline to compare against which gives a little more context to what we're looking at. The below visualization shows the Goals (G), Expected Goals (xG), Shots Inside the Box (SiB), Created Chances (CC) and Successful Passes in the Final Third (P3rd) for each team's fixtures for 2018-19 (CY) compared to the same slate of games from the 2017-18 season (PY). We'll highlight a couple of the more interesting observations below the vi...