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...

It's been widely noted that clean sheets have been hard to come by this year and no team has really arisen as a dominant force whose defenders deserve captaincy consideration on a weekly basis (like Vidic last year and Laursen in the past). On an average week, 25% of teams are keeping a clean sheet which gives you around 5 chances at success on a weekly basis. The graph below shows how these trends have moved through the season so far: After the severe dip in weeks 5-12, we have seen a general trend towards an increase in clean sheets and the last 5 weeks have given us at least 25% of teams keeping the opposition out with a peak of 35% in week 15. However, goals per game are also up from the start of the year at around 1.44 from 1.20. This suggests that the when teams are conceding they are conceding heavily, a stat that has probably been adversely affected by the 9-1 drubbing of Wigan by Spurs and the high score draws seen in the past couple of weeks. So how does this compare to l...

Anyone who read the blog last year will know that I am huge advocate of playing the fixture list and picking players based almost as much on their matchup as their innate footballing talent. I assess a team's strength of schedule by looking at how their opponents have fared at home and on the road, for example: Arsenal face the following three opponents: @Eve, Sun, @MNU. Their strength of schedule would be calculated as the average number of goals Everton score at home, plus the average goals scored at on the road by Sunderland plus United's average home goals, divided by three. As you can see, it isn't rocket science but it can highlight some surprising insights (eg. statistically, Blackburn away is only a slightly tougher fixture in terms of goals per game than United at home). For this season, I am taking a slightly different approach and rather than just calculate a team's strength of schedule, I am combining it with the average goals conceded by that team at home/a...