PLFantasy

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...

I was away last week visiting beautiful Whistler (highly recommended to all) but we're now back on track with this week's Fanning the Flames piece. We're not too far removed from the Gameweek 3 piece so there's some familiar names and narratives here, but let's press on regardless. Alexis Sanchez continues to produce shots at an alarming rate but simply cannot catch a break. The Chilean's 28 total shots and 21 SiB lead the league and come close to doubling the totals of his fellow midfielders. His production is a microcosm for Arsenal's "struggles" to date with the team leading the league in SiB by a distance (ARS 79, SOT 59, MCI 51) yet only having five goals to show for their efforts. Sanchez has had a large amount of his efforts blocked which is somewhat tricky to explain, and a quick look at last year's stats tells a similar, if less dramatic story (42/121). Last year also tells us that he was able to convert 13 of his 71 SiB into goa...

& lt ;a href ="#">& lt ; img alt="Dashboard 1 " src ="http://public. tableausoftware .com/static/images/Ga/Gameweek3Preview/Dashboard1/1_ rss . png " style="border: none" />& lt ;/a> Powered by Tableau We are still limited to subjective views on the captain picks for the week as stats for this season are too few while stats for last season are outdated for most players. Rather than arbitrarily focus on just one of two players, I've added some rough notes for all the main contenders below, including an overall summary of where my thinking is leading me for the week. In terms of playing the fixture, it's City players - by a distance - wh...

P90  Points per 90 minutes at home/away based on the player's fixture  QG  Number of quality games for the season (6 or more points)  BG  Number of bad games for the season (3 points or less)  %  Percentage of team goals scored or assisted  SD  Standard deviation of player scores (risk)  Rating  Percentage of team goals accounted for multiplied by expected team goals for the week. <a href="#"><img alt="Dashboard 1 " src="http://public.tableausoftware.com/static/images/Ca/Captain_0...

For the first time this year, I have included data based purely on the current season as 12 games appears to be a relatively useful sample size. I apply a small adjustment to try and account for the strength of schedule already faced (ie. have you played, and been destroyed by, City yet?) but I'm not sure that is tough enough to make the data really reliable. Hence, I am still leaning on the hybrid (current and prior year) data but it's useful to start factoring in the pure current year rankings at this stage. Without running through each difference individually, I just want to highlight the difference a season can make. City rank 14th in this week's rankings but would be number one based purely on their 6 road games this year (in which they've scored an astonishing 23 goals despite travelling to Old Trafford, Craven Cottage and White Hart Lane). Given the way the team has changed in personnel (hello, Mr Aguero) and also tactical deployment (hello, attacking play)...

Dealing with the red half of Manchester is easy when you compare the available options to the depth of talent available for City this year. Once you lock Rooney into your team and compliment him with either Nani or Young (likely not both), you are basically left with the decision of grabbing a pricey defender like Evra, a budget defender like Jones or going all in on the front line with Hernandez. Things aren't that simple for City. As with United, let's run through the viable options on offer and then attempt (perhaps with some futility) to apply a ranking to the best Citizens to own for the short-medium term. Man City Goalkeeper / Defenders It's always nice when you start to write something with an idea in mind and then find stats to back up your premise, but it can be equally useful (perhaps even more so) to be so overwhelmed by the evidence that your original proposition is reversed. My impression of the City defense this season was that they remained an elite unit...

A couple of weeks back, we looked at the correlation between shots on goal and goals scored and (unsurprisingly) found a pretty strong link between the two. This ground breaking research probably won't make it into the next Freakonomics book but it might help illustrate players who are getting good looks at goal but not converting their chances. I went on to mess up my explanation of regression to the mean (h/t to mustardking for correcting me) but in essence, while players who have yet to capitalise on a number of shots on target, don't suddenly find themselves 'due' a goal, if a player continues to get in good positions and take good shots, over a period of time we would expect them to score at their historical rate going forward (normally around a goal every three shots on target for elite players). Building on the shots analysis, we can now move onto to trying to predict assists. This is inherently trickier as the inputs we need to use will almost certainly invo...

The pre-season is the most hectic time for this blog, as setting a good initial lineup is a big - though not essential - step towards a good season. I had hoped to be able to take it easy for the first few weeks, assess some potential targets and start crunching numbers again after we've seen a few trends. Then all hell broke loose. There's no need to rehash the week's events but the end result is basically a press of the reset button with a few people enjoying an advantage of having a decent opening week (personally I was able to make the changes I wanted and just made a couple of picks that didn't work out). In case you missed any of them during the week, I will shamelessly plug the previous pieces on week one lineup lessons , a bit of chalkboard analysis , contrarian views to the most targeted players and potentially cheap links in team defenses . With that behind us, let's get onto this week. All the below rankings are for this week only so if you're s...