In this article we do a quick circling back on the ownership question and how it effects where we are now in the season
fantasy premier league tips – Circling back on to the ownership question
You’ll remember that I talked in quite a bit is detail about ownership in the preseason especially and that influenced some of my early transfers.
This all starts from the basic premise that firstly my ambition is all about overall rank and to finish at least in the top 30k which is the top 1% of the 3 million approximate managers that play FPL. Secondly it’s just as important every week to focus on your ranking not falling backwards as well as advancing your rank. Avoiding a backward fall in rank is primarily about identifying the players that are owned by the majority of FPL managers in your target rank zone. In simple terms if these players that are highly owned by managers in your target ranking zone score well and you don’t own them then your rank will significantly suffer.
Unfortunately as managers drop out of the game and stop actively managing their teams then the ownership percentages on the fantasy premier league site start meaning less and less. I therefore use 2 proxys for ownership in my target zone. The first is the top ten managers I follow. As you’ll know these are managers that haven’t finished outside the top 10k overall in the last 3 years all but 2 have finished in the top 1000 in the last 3 years. I’m therefore assuming that at least most of them will repeat at least a 10k finish and if I want to finish in the top 10k then at least having their high ownership players will stop me falling behind them. A good example of this is Mahrez. I personally don’t see how a guy who got 1 return in his last 10 games last season and had a consistency return rate of something like 20% is suddenly going to be a season keeper but why take the risk. the top 10 FPL managers all own him and I will as well and avoid the big ranking drops and concentrate on other players to move your ranking forward. I followed this theory with Kane last season who I totally didn’t believe in. If I hadn’t just put him in because of his ownership I would have been lucky to finish in the top 100k let alone the 2,700. The season before I backed my judgement on YYT and didn’t own him and got totally burned. I know a lot of people think that this is a bogus way of playing the game and you should back your own judgement etc. However those people who read my articles will know that I am a conservative pragmatist who’s objective is solely based around overall rank and I will play the game to that end anyway I can.
The other proxy is a site called FPL discovery. the link is https://fpldiscovery.wordpress.com
This site among other things tells you the ownership of managers inside the top 10k. Again I will use this site to make sure I own those players who are highly owned by that group of managers. At the moment given that my 900k rank is only 58 points away from the top 10k and were only in GW4 gone then it’s too volatile a group that will change around a lot to change my team for. Once I get to gameweek 10 though it will become more stable and I will buy the high ownership players from that top 10k group irrespective of my view. At the moment covering the top 10 FPL managers is a better way of tracking high ownership that will ultimately hurt you.
Interestingly the top 10k high ownership players are: Kompany 70%, Mahrez 49%, YYT 46%, Benteke 47% and Lukaku 40%. As I said at the moment I will expect that to jump around each gameweek as rank in this early stage is very volatile.
If you were to do it on the top 10 FPL managers I follow the high ownership group would be: Richards 7/10, Kolarov 6/10, Mahrez 10/10, Silva 6/10, Aguero 10/10, Benteke 8/10, Wilson 7/10
The difference in players explains the current rank difference.
A lot of the questions I get is how to move forward if you have only high ownership players. There will always be the ability to move forward as the 50/50 captain choices if you get them right will move you forward. There will always be a few fixture based players that you have that are different that have the ability to move you forward. Last season I got to 2700 after a number of weeks in the 20ks. That was purely through getting captain choices and fixture based players right. Obviously you have to get to the target rank zone to hold your place there and this season given the tough start that will be harder than previously. However last gameweek I moved up 700k places in one week so it can be done. Last season in one gameweek I moved up from 150k to approx 30k. You will get one gameweek where everything goes right and you move up significantly. you’ve just got to be patient. This season given the start then it may take a few more great weeks but there is certainly no need to panic and start taking big risks to move your rank forward.
I’ll just finish by saying there are many ways and many different reasons to play FPL and this is only my view on the game. Hopefully you found it though provoking.
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