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...

There seems to be an emerging narrative in the early week of the season that fantasy teams are starting to converge and a “template” has emerged for people to follow. The strong start of the elite full backs, the apparent “must own” status of pricey Salah and Aguero and a couple of budget midfield enablers (Neves and Kante) make it seem like this is the case. If we look at the prior year ownership data for GW3 though, we see a broadly similar pattern of ownership: Overall we had 14 players with 20%+ ownership where as this season we have 17, with one clear leader over 50% and a handful more over 30%. This season I think we have a couple more budget options with the likes of Wan-Bissaka, Richarlison, Neves, Kante and to an extent Zaha and Mkhitaryan, where as last year we saw just Hernandez, Hegazi and Rooney. I wonder if the the presence of these budget options here might well be what is leading folks to conclude that teams are starting to all look the same. Differentiation is a...