FPL Gameweek 3: Age is just a number
Every time I think about adding Jamie Vardy to the team, I have second thoughts and every time, he proves me wrong. It was an interesting weekend to say the least. Vardy scored 2 penalties against Manchester City. Not just any team but the second best team in league last season. Clinical, and despite being 33 years old, the man just seems to age like fine wine.
Chelsea m̵a̵d̵e̵ ̵a̵n̵ ̵i̵m̵p̵r̵e̵s̵s̵i̵v̵e̵ ̵c̵o̵m̵e̵-̵b̵a̵c̵k̵… err i mean.. salvaged a 3–3 draw against a much weaker West Brom side but the game contained 6 goals in it combined so there were plenty of points to be gained as far as FPL was concerned. So if you had an attacking player from either side, you were in luck. There were lots of controversies regarding the new handball rule which resulted in some questionable decisions. Oh, and West Ham dominated Wolves 4–0. I mean wow, I’m pretty sure I speak for a lot of people when I say.. didn’t see that coming.
Gameweek results can be found here.
So what do this all these wonky results mean for our weekend results? As you may expect, not so great, but not so bad either. We scored a respectable 42 pts (against an average of 43) over the weekend. FPL also had it’s lowest High Score for this season among all players with a measly 119 pts (GW1:142, GW2: 165). So we can all be glad that it didn’t end up being even more disastrous.
The Team
If you take a close look at our team for the week, you’ll notice that we could have had even more points since Diogo Jota, who as we predicted has started to show his value by scoring 6 pts. Unfortunately, we left him in the 3rd substitution spot so his points couldn’t get added to the total.
Our Changes
So for this weekend, we did indeed make one transfer in Daniel Podence from Wolves. In our previous week, we analyzed who maybe the picks worth chucking out in order to keep a more efficient team and we had a shortlist of a few names. In the end, I decided to remove Adama Traoré for a few reasons. The main one being his dip in form and his movement to right-wing-back to account for the loss of Matt Doherty to Tottenham for the first few games. Another reason is quite clear when you look at this stat. The following chart shows the deadliest points of attack that came from the Wolves team over the past 2 Gameweeks. We see only two outliers- Raul Jimenez and Daniel Podence.
What can be inferred from this is that Podence is performing far better than expectations with an expected ratio of around 0.4 which he has churned into 1.1. That is a player worth considering.
But then, something incredible happens.
Daniel Podence gets injured! Incredible that it happens on the very same weekend we pick him to do well. Now of course, we do not wish ill on Daniel at all. We wish him a speedy recovery. However, it was quite odd that none of this was talked about anywhere in the news. We would have had to been a Wolves Insider to know this somehow. Just like Wolves loss to West Ham, this was a big loss for us. That being said, the reasons why we chose Podence are quite evident.
He seemed like incredible value at £5.6 when compared to Traoré who cost almost a pound more and has returned only 7 pts for us so far.
He has had two assists so far and seemed like quite a deadly option for Nuno to choose each game.
Oh and he has the audacity to do this on Kevin De Bruyne, last year’s Player of the Year.
Thankfully, Nuno Espirito Santo seemed hopeful for a quick recovery so we’ll keep him in the team for now unless he misses one more game. So we’ll be watching Podence closely over the coming Gameweek.
Other Observations from our selections
Taking a look at our cumulative points total productivity within each part of the team over the three Gameweeks, we can see a simple breakdown as so:
We presented this same analysis last week.
Goalkeepers - 9 pts out of a possible 34 pts. (25% Efficiency | Prev: 33.3%)
Defense - 45 pts out of a possible 146 pts. (30.8% Efficiency | Prev: 35.6%)
Midfield - 36 pts out of a possible 144 pts. ( 25% Efficiency | Prev: 22.3%)
Forwards - 63 pts out of a possible 123 pts. (51.2% Efficiency | Prev: 51.2% Efficiency)
However, other than the information that our midfield has also slightly started to pick up points, this data doesn’t give us much more. It is also slightly flawed since all it does is compare total Team Gameweek score to the highest attainable Gameweek score. This Efficiency value is useless as it will continue to display a negative covariance as the season progresses — that is, the efficiency will continue to deprecate. As with all learning experiments, we are observing that there are better methods as time goes. I’ll be tinkering with the data to provide a better way to understand how effective our team is.
- Lucas Moura played quite well after not being a solid contributor with 9 pts. from midfield. We were complaining about it last weekend. So it seems keeping him over Traoré was the better choice. However, Spurs rotation system is still an issue for us in the coming Gameweeks. So I’m going to still consider moving him out if needed.
- Doucouré on the other hand has been a consistent 2 pt. performer which has really hindered our points from Mid.
- Van Dijk had an incredible game vs Arsenal yet he was only rewarded 2 pts. I do find this a flaw in the FPL points attribution. However, it consistently reminds us that we can’t rely on actions that don’t lead to either an assist, goal, clean sheet or an incredible clearance.
Valuable Picks for Gameweek 4
- Take a look at this graph below - what we’ve done is take all the current players on FPL who cost less than £8 and have a creativity>50. These players are also ones who are owned by less than 2% of all FPL players. Which means they’ve been knocking on the door and one of these have a good chance of doing well this weekend. We’ll be watching this closely.
Of all these players, the interesting one’s to keep an eye on are Conor Hourihane (17 pts) and Leandro Trossard (15 pts). Dennis Praet came off the field with a small injury last week against Manchester City so we’re not considering him. Trossard has looked dangerous in every game and still costs only £6 whereas Hourihane also costs the same. Although, Trossard seems more of a consistent performer as most of Hourihane’s points (14) came in last this past weekend. Also, Aston Villa play Liverpool this weekend so keep that in mind.
2. Another value buy to consider is when you compare the number of Clearances and the Total Points a player has accumulated. These would some value Midfielders or Defenders to consider as they may add some points in the BPS score of FPL for their acrobatics.
One value buy to consider is Cheikhou Kouyaté. Kouyaté bagged 9 pts. over the weekend as has currently a 14 pt. total. He also plays for Crystal Palace who seem to be a bogey team for some so he might be a value pick to add to the squad. Even just as a sub, he is worth considering. At £5, He is another solid pick to consider.
Alright that’s all for this week! Good luck in your picks and let’s hope for a good Gameweek. Catch you all next week.
If you’d like to follow along in this series, here is a timeline of the FPL data analytics project.
1. Introduction
2. Gameweek 1
3. Gameweek 2
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And there we go! Hope you enjoyed reading this piece as much as I did writing it. Feel free to write down any thoughts or suggestions. I’m always working on improving my analysis and my articles as time goes on so I appreciate all comments! Collaborating is fun so if you’ve got any interesting projects in mind, feel free to reach out to me personally. If you would like to follow me to keep up with updates in this series, follow me here or — — @__tomthomas
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