As the season ticks on, we're starting to get a bit of data to work with, albeit sometimes in small samples. This season I am not working with a relatively complex player model but am really interested in trying to "play the fixtures" as much as I can. A couple of sources of frustration, therefore, have been as below: 1. Sites which provide the difficulty of fixtures often seem a bit simplistic. For example, the Premier League site shows Wolves as an average "3-rated" opponent, both at home and away yet the reality is more complicated. While at home they have been very solid defensively, with ..read more

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 raison 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 defens ..read more

Given his exploits last season, and a pretty healthy start to this one, it's hard to believe the thought of selling Salah is even worth exploring. But, international weeks give us time to think through less obvious solutions so let's make a case for it. But first, a few opening notes: This is a short term measure. Despite Mane's hot start and promising form from the likes of Hazard, I still believe Salah is the best fantasy option for the season. His underlying numbers are excellent, his team looks as good as ever and his playing time is assured (other than the odd rest of course). This move ..read more

As noted in other recent posts, it can be hard to know what data to rely upon in the early gameweeks. We all know that shots inside the box or those on target tend to correlate well to goals, but with only a few of those events happening each week, it can be easy to overreact to unstable data. One data point I am interested in, is how well teams are doing compared to same fixtures from prior season. This data is still fraught with issues - teams might have changed personnel or have injuries or simply suffered a bad game - but we at least have a baseline to compare against which gives a little ..read more

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 ..read more

Previously we looked at some data from last season and tried to set a rough benchmark as to how much value you need from premium defenders in order to be worth their higher price tag. If you didn't catch that piece then I'd encourage you to do so, but if not, the TL;DR is that we estimated that you should be aiming to earn somewhere around 26 points attacking points (goals, assists and bonus points) for every 1.0m extra invested over a player in the same team i.e. Alonso over Luiz or Walker over Stones. It's also worth re-empahasising that this would exclude any playing time concerns, which fu ..read more

At this stage of the season, those of us who are statistically inclined face a bit of a dilemma. We know that too much weight should not be placed on the limited data that's available, but yet the alternative is to rely on no data and simply make your picks based on the one or two games of action you've seen, or worse, some voodoo about world class players not being able to score in August. With this in mind, this time of year offers a good opportunity to explore a couple of other broader topics before the games start coming thick and fast and we get lost in expected goal regressions. Though ..read more

Just a quick post today to highlight what I think is a promising buy opportunity, not currently getting too much attention. What's on offer: A proven midfielder who has averaged the equivalent of 31 games of action over the last 5 seasons Currently ranked 12th among midfielders in successful passes in the final third and 9th in created chances. Took penalties for his team last season (though that could be in jeopardy this year) Currently just the third most owned midfielder on his team. Sounds reasonably promising so far, but what if I added that he accumulated those impressive stats in ju ..read more

Gameweek 1 has been somewhat less dramatic than last season. With the new Friday kick off and a solid day of Saturday action under our belts I went to bed on August 12th just like any other Saturday night. A few hours later I was woken by my wife who was in labour - 7 weeks before our due date. A few more hours later our twin girls appeared and let's just say that questions around Gabriel Jesus's playing time or Paul Pogba's xG suddenly seemed somewhat trivial. Needless to say, the past year has meant I've had less time to dedicate to fantasy football, although the early starts on the weekend ..read more

However good a player projection system is, it will always have certain assumptions built in which require some judgement on behalf of the model's creator. This might include how much weight to put on recent games versus historic data or how much to regress team or player conversion rates back to a league or historic average. One such assumption I do not currently factor into my own model is which kind of games a particularly player performs well in. For example, if Harry Kane accounts for 30% of his teams shots inside the box and Spurs are forecast for 10 SiB then his forecast will be three S ..read more