fantasy premier league review – the “double double” club

Fantasy Premier League

Here’s our fantasy premier league review article where we look at the players who have completed the “double double” of at least 10 goals and 10 assists.  We look at the players and their stats and ask if it’s a meaningful landmark.

fantasy premier league review – the “double double” club

Firstly it’s worth remembering that Opta and the PL look at assists different than fantasy premier league so you may see assists which are higher than your understanding.  The assists in this article are the fantasy premier league assists.

Why are we looking at these players?

The premier league continues to get richer and the number of player options, especially at the top 4 challenging clubs, gets bigger.  How can we identify players that  provide consistent, yet high returns and therefore avoid the need to continue swapping the heavy hitters around at the expense of improving our overall team.

One of the ways is to identify players who can provide goals and assists.  Although the American “double double” analogy is an  arbitrary line is does give a handy cut off point to see what we can learn from these players.

By looking at these players it may give us the ability to identify consistent high returning players in the future.

You may also want to read our recent searching for Mr Consistency article




The players

There are 4 players who have achieved at least 10 goals and 10 assists.  Firstly here’s a series of stats from the 16/17 season and their ranks by position of midfielders or strikers.

Remember that consistency is the % of games (subject to minimum 20 mins) that a goal or assist is scored.  Mins per FPL point is the amount of time it takes to obtain an FPL point.  The lower the better.

The rank is for players that scored a minimum number of points subject to a few exceptions.

fantasy premier league review

Comments on Individual players

Costa

The Chelsea striker was FPL’s Mr Consistency during the year returning a goal or assist regularly in over 70% of games.  A late barren run slowed that down but he looked likely from a long way off to get to the “double double” mark despite a pretty ordinary key pass rate for strikers.  Unfortunately a related issue of yellow cards and lack of bonus points didn’t really turn that into the points the consistency warranted.

Kane and Lukaku were the top points scoring strikers and neither had very flashy assist numbers.

From a strikers perspective goals are king and the “double double” watchout is probably secondary

Sanchez

The Arsenal attacking midfielder played striker for parts of the season and is primarily a goal scoring midfielder rather than an assister in the De Bruyne mode.  He also played on the left flank in 4-2-3-1 and in the 2 of 3-4-2-1 close to the striker.

Sanchez’s key pass rate was consistent with his assist output but he is primarily a goal scoring midfielder with the assists coming along as and when.  It did help his consistency rate though with 6 of the assists coming in isolation of a goal.




Alli

The Spurs attacking midfielder played fairly centrally and advanced and is a goal scoring midfielder pure and simple.  You could have called him an almost support striker.  However he wasn’t a pure striker like Sanchez and Firmino were.  Unlike Sanchez though his assists were way out of kilter with his key passes.  He over performed his key passes for the amount of assists gained in my view.  However if you’re as far forward as Alli was perhaps assists are going to come as you create better quality assists.  Again the ability to dig out assists helped his consistency rate with 7 of the assists coming in isolation of goals

Firmino

The Liverpool attacking midfielder also played a number of games as a striker or as a player in the front 3 of 4-3-3.

His ability to score goals and assists really didn’t help him points or consistency wise as he just failed to score enough goals.  His key pass output was pretty consistent with his assist rate

So what have we learnt?

With strikers we really should focus on their goal scoring ability rather than worry about assists and their double double prospects.  Lukaku and Kane were the top strikers despite a pretty ordinary assist rate.

Probably the most significant point is that the midfielders above showed that goal scoring midfielders and especially those who play striker can churn out enough assists as well to help get them in the top point scoring positions.  This can happen without them being involved in indirect and direct set pieces.

Interestingly of the set piece based players with more than 10 assists only Siggy (9 goals) Eriksen (8 goals) and Ozil (8 goals) came anywhere near the “double double” club.   De Bruyne despite 21 assists was 5th in points scored and Eriksen with 20 assists was 4th.

What is apparent is that it’s helpful if the midfielder plays striker or practically as a striker in Alli’s case to gain assists and points.  However if a midfielder starts playing striker then we should be all over him anyway.

As a caveat though alot more work would be needed to take this further to establish an argument for either goal scoring midfielders or assist based set piece midfielders are the best option.

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