PLFantasy

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...

Three weeks into the new season and everything is pretty much back where we expect it. Man City and their rejuvenated cross-town rivals are flying high, Arsenal fans are panicking about their perceived lack of striking options and I've decided to re-vamp the projection model a bit. Chelsea's seven goals conceded and Leicester's flirtation with the big boys, however, show that there`' still room in this league for variance (however fleeting) and it's in that spirit that I've made the latest changes. I hope the tables are fairly self explanatory, but as a quick background, the focus has been to (a) keep our search for potential flags as wide as possible and then narrow them down with narrative and (b) acknowledge that this entire process is fraught with uncertainty. On the former point, you'll see that I've included four different "projection" metrics to reflect the different identifiers we have for a player's success. For goals, we're ...

Even though we're still just seven weeks into the new season, we've already observed a number of interesting and somewhat strange happenings at the Emirates: in terms of underlying data, the defense has been more impressive than the usually explosive attack in terms of actual results though, the defense has struggled with just a single clean sheet to date Wenger did bring in a relatively big name forward - who's looked great so far - yet there still seems to be a feeling that they need more - probably in part due to the success of Diego Costa on the other side of London the team has quietly assembled the best depth they've enjoyed in recent memory yet they've suffered through so many injuries that the average bench has tended to be more Campbell and Coquelin than Giroud and Cazorla Arsenal out shot Chelsea 10 to five and enjoyed more possesion at Stamford Bridge last time out, yet lost the game (their first of the season) and now find themselves nine points beh...