PLFantasy

A long distance flight with no TV screens and only a laptop and Excel sounds pretty boring, but for fantasy nerds like me, it provided some time to have a think about better ways to process data to create meaningful statistics (like I said: nerd). The product of the flight - aside from the consumption of a pile of junk food - is a new statistic I plan to refer to over the coming weeks and months: Schedule Adjusted Points per Millions Spent (aPPMS). Previous readers, or those with some common sense, will no doubt be able to see that Points per Million Spent (PPMS) is simply Points per Game (PPG), divided by the cost of that player. The idea is to try and assess 'value' rather than just points to avoid suggesting that an 9m player who scores 4.5 PPG (0.500 PPMS) is better than a 5.0m player who scores 4 PPG (0.800 PPMS). For reference, and as a benchmark, assuming most people have budget players on their bench (say, 20m worth) you would need to generate a PPMS o...

With Cristiano Ronaldo due to return from injury tomorrow agains t V illareal , any sensible fantasy player must contemplate the possibility of bringing him into their team. Last season Ronaldo was simply incredible and anyone wishing to compete had to have him in their ranks (I was one of the stupid few who kept insisting he couldn't continue his form and I duly finished 7th in the league). As incredible as the 31 goals were last year, whats almost as fantastic was the fact that the prior year he'd accrued 244 points, only 39 less than last year's historical year. This leads me to believe he can ,and probably will, score along those line this year (minus the points for the 3 games missed already). However, at 14m he is 2.6m more than the next midfielder (Gerrard) and 2m more than any other player (Torres). Deco currently leads midfielders with 31 points but is only 7th in points per million spent (PPMS) at 0.816 (using his current value of 9.5m). Here are the top PPMS ra...