PLFantasy

Over an eight day period last week, Man City thumped their three opponents by a combined score of 15-0, with Liverpool, Feyenoord and Watford unable to contend with Guardiola's men. It goes without saying that City were extremely impressive in these games and fantasy football managers are obviously taking note with Aguero and Jesus shooting to the top of many managers' transfer target lists (at the time of writing some 440,000 managers had already brought in Aguero and another 90,000 have targeted Jesus). The point of this post is not to suggest that these transfers are incorrect - indeed I might follow suit myself - but I did want to run over a few facts to maybe turn the temperature down on the need to make these moves right now. The chart below shows the expected points each of the listed elite forwards have registered through the first 5 gameweeks. You can see Aguero's terrific GW5 effort eclipsing his rivals this past week but you will also note that Kane has three ...

The visualization below plots the expected fantasy points arising from expected goals versus those arising from expected assists. The idea here is that this is a quick snapshot of how a player has performed to date and where their points are coming from. It should be noted that xG and xA numbers used to generate the xP are based on shot, created chance and possession date for the 2017-18 season only but the conversion rates to convert those raw events into goals are regressed using team and league rates for both the current and prior seasons. I hope this eliminates some noise from the small sample sizes of the early season but it's still worth noting that this is a snapshot based on three games so should act as a data point for your transfer assessments but not an all encompassing answer.

Given the number of transfers already made (290k at the time of writing), this post is potentially too late, but for those Aguero owners who haven't yet pulled the trigger on a replacement, here are a few factors to consider before you do. The Argentinian's absence seems to be being pegged anywhere between four and six weeks, which means he will almost certainly miss gameweeks 17-21 and his absence could potentially extend through GW22 or even 23 (with good squad depth City should be mindful not to push their talisman and risk further injury as seems to have been the case with Kompany in the past ). With his return therefore scheduled to coincide with the middle of the second wildcard window, the cost to buy Aguero back should essentially be ignored and value for money for right now  is  a factor. This contradicts the situation if he was missing for just a week or two, in which case it might be worth eating his cost to sit on the bench rather than lose 0.5m when you ar...