PLFantasy

One of the key complications with player forecasting - or indeed I imagine any forecasting - is deciding which data set to use. When it comes to fantasy football, we obviously want to include as much recent data as possible but the issue is when we can exclusively rely on this season's data and when we need to look to the past seasons for guidance. I am generally quite happy to solely rely on this season's raw event data such as shots or created chances fairly early on as they tend to occur with relative frequency and thus stabilise in a short time frame. How these events get converted into goals can fluctuate a lot more though, as the key driver there - goals - happen much less frequently. With this mind, the revised player projection table below allows you to choose how you are converting the raw chances into goals and assists: Past season - uses the benefit of having a 38 game sample to see how different teams convert chances into goals. The negative, of course, is that te...

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...

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 ...