Fantasy Premier League 20/21 | GW21 Memo

Fantasy Premier League Gameweek 21Memo, Team Yin AubameYang

The past few weeks have been extremely encouraging for my 20/21 campaign, with an improvement from a season-low of 5.6M in GW7 to season-high of 900K in GW20.

The latest team earned 66 points, and a game week rank of 399,086:

It’s been a great team, but problems are surfacing, and other opportunities are calling my name.

Problems

1. Kane is injured. He requires a transfer.
2. Kane has been instrumental in Son’s goal threat this season. What to do with Son?
3. United look exhausted, with only 2 days rest between GW20 and GW21. They will face ARS, SOU, and EVE next.
4. Bench doesn’t perform well, with all value on the field. Bench boost chip still available.

Opportunities

1. Fill out the bench for a bench boost
2. Leicester has nice run of fixtures through GW35
3. Trent Alexander-Arnold is getting back up to speed and looks to be providing more in the attack than Robertson at the moment
4. Third City asset, either offensive or defensive

So — with all this being said — I’m considering a wildcard.

To help with wildcard decision making, I’ve been trialing a new data view: points-per-million-value-per-minute-played.

points-per-million-value = points / cost

points-per-million-value-per-minute-played = minutes played / (points / cost)

The idea is to find those diamonds-in-the-rough who are recovering from several weeks out of the team due to injury, strategy, form, etc.

For example, Crystal Palace’s Benteke has played only 686 minutes this season. In that time, he’s scored 39 points.

His points-per-million value isn’t so hot compared to other players, but when we take into consideration the number of minutes he’s played as well, his value starts to look great!

Consider the top 20 forwards, by value:

Benteke is #20 out of the top 20.

Now let’s sort this table by our new dimension: ppm_value_per_minute:

Now that’s a different story all-together.

Benteke, Antonio, Rodrigo… three players definitely worth considering. Now we have to look at this decision through the lens of form, fixtures, and risk of playing. Assuming all are healthy,

• Benteke — likely to play as long as opponent isn’t top 5 team; WOL, NEW, LEE, BUR, BHA
• Antonio — likely to play; LIV, AVL, FUL, SHU, TOT
• Rodrigo — likely to play; LEI, EVE, CRY, ARS, WOL

Gundogan is another example of a player that might fly under the radar if we only consider points-per-million-value, but using this new metric, he is top the charts for ALL PLAYERS who have played at least 1000 minutes this year.

If we filter for players who have played at least 1000 minutes this year, our table looks like:

It’s up to you to guess if the form will continue or not…

Wild Card Team Selection

There are a few points guiding my decisions at this moment:

• Goalkeeper and Defense offer greatest point-per-million value upside
• Bench boost coming soon, and require a good second keeper for this move
• I HATE taking hits, but still wanted to get rid of Rashford, Kane, and Son this week, and wanted to bring in TAA.
• staying in touch with the intuitive side of the game; the wild card “felt” like the right decision, and I’m pretty sure it’s not an emotional, reactive decision.

The starting lineup:

The bench:

1.9 in the bank, with an opportunity to upgrade Sterling to Salah in the upcoming weeks.

Good luck this week!