fantasy premier league tips – a few musings on rank volatility, ownership and team structure

Here’s a short fantasy premier league tips article that I thought I’d drop in despite the short turnaround between gameweeks .  It’s just a few thoughts and a table to make some points about the above which were so excellently illustrated by the last 2 gameweeks where I imagine alot of you, like me, had a massive rank drop followed by a massive rank improvement.  If you just read my top 10 FPL managers article you will see they certainly did

fantasy premier league tips – a few musings on rank volatility, ownership and team structure

To make the article is easier to follow I’ll make my point first and then try and illustrate it afterwards.

What I’m trying to say is that ownership can have a huge effect on rank and it makes sense to be aware of it.  However even  1 or 2 players of difference from the high ownership players can make a huge impression on rank as can your captain choice.  Therefore if you’re chasing there’s no need to panic and ditch everyone thats popular in a bid to make up ground.  I hope thats clear.

Firstly here’s a table to illustrate the ownership debate.  The first column shows the top 10k overall ranks team ownership structure.  That comes from a fantastic site called FPL discovery.  It’s a good proxy for active FPL managers.  The 2nd column shows the overall team ownership and obviously includes the ownership of teams long since abandoned.  The 3rd column is the top 10 managers I follow ownership

By the way these % of the top 10k aren’t as volatile as you would think.  Half way into the season they change but not instantaneously.

Before I go into this discussion I’m going to put aside the debate that goes “of course they are the highest owned they are the best players”. The debate is not why the team structures are like this it’s whether it should influence your transfers or team structure

So from an attacking players perspective the players pretty much all owned by the top 10k are Mahrez (99%), Ozil (95%), Lukaku (93%) and Vardy (87%).  These are all the easily highest owned players overall.  The top 10 managers I follow cover the first 3 adequately and did Vardy until this week.  If you assume that there is a 5th cheap midfielder that means that there are 3 attacking places up for grabs with 5 taken through high ownership.

Effectively there is a battle going on between the top 10k (who I think are a good proxy for the active players)  and the top 10 FPL managers I follow between Barkley (10k) and De Bruyne (top 10 managers) in midfield and between Ighalo (10k) and Kane (top 10 managers).  The last 2 weeks really showed the difference between the last 2 games weeks were shown by GW17  Ighalo 13 pts  v Kane 6 pts and Barkley 9 pts vs De Bruyne 1 pt.  In contrast GW18 saw Ighalo 6 points vs Kane 13 pts and Barkley 2 pts vs De Bruyne 16 pts.  Add to that the fact that the 10k captained Mahrez (15pts) in GW17 vs Lukaku (6pts) in contrast to GW18 which saw the popular Mahrez and Lukaku blank compared to Kane with 13 points.  These individual battles go a long way to showing why the top 10 managers dropped an average rank of 100k after GW17 and then made up 100k in GW18.

Team Structure

I hope GW18 illustrates that to make progress chasing you just need a few differentials to win to make up significant ground and GW17 illustrates the powerful rank effect that ownership has.  Both also illustrated how important the captain pick is when it comes to situations where there is no clear winner.

Therefore to me even if you don’t believe in the player there are reasons to own players with a top 10k ownership of 80-90% and over 50% overall FPL ownership.  Underneath those thresholds it’s difficult to say but depending on what gap you’re trying to make up then you will want one or 2 differentials.  At the moment mine are Kane over Ighalo and Firmino over Barkley.  Both due to good fixtures.  I’m still believing that 1-2 differentials and captain choices plus defence can make up the gap over 20 game weeks and don’t see the need to ditch players such as Ozil, Mahrez, Lukaku and Vardy in some huge hunt for differentials.

Defence has less risk as maximum points are often lower however they do really have the potential to move you up.  Even the much ignored GK position.  It’s no co-incidence that 3 of the top 4 of the top 10 FPL managers I follow are those with Butland in the team.  8 clean sheets in 11 games will do that to you.  Thats why I’ve recently tried to allocate decent funds with 4 defenders from what I think are the 4 best defensive teams in the league.  There’s also some question as to whether the attacking premium is worth it.  With a clean sheet added to an attacking return pretty much definitely giving you a good bonus return as well it makes some sense to pay for an attacking premium with the cheap attacking players such as Mahrez, Vardy and Ighalo about at the moment.

Captain Choice

The last 2 gameweeks really showed how getting the captain choice right can make a huge diference.  I still think that when there is an overwhelming captain favourite in the polls then it’s a risky strategy to go against it especially as there will be plenty of times as the last 2 weeks show where there is no obvious clear cut favourite and you have a real chance to influence your rank.

My own situation

My underwhelming rank at the situation is down to not getting the battles of the differential vs high ownership players right but also when the captain choice is not clear cut I’ve been making the wrong choice.  I’ve said FPL is about 50/50 choices and I definitely haven’t got those right.  In contrast to last season where I got especially the 50/50 captain choices right and that showed in my final rank of around 2,000.

Just finally it’s worth remembering that my only objective is overall rank.  Howwever you maybe playing to win a mini league for example in which case your considerations maybe totally different.

I hope you found the above interesting and it’s fairly clear what I’m trying to say.  There are many ways to play FPL and the above are only a few bits of food for thought.  I hope you find it thought provoking at least even if you don’t agree with it.  Whether Im right or not will become apparent over the season.

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