Fantasy premier league goalkeepers – The case for Sunderlands Mannone as your only GK

Fantasy Premier League

One of the things I’ve noticed from following the 10 top FPL managers is the increasing trend of the managers to play a cheap keeper without a home and away rotation option.  4 of the 10 managers are doing that at the moment.  I decided to do some analysis on that theory as GK is one of the few places that I can save some money in my pursuit of Sergio Aguero.

Fantasy premier league goalkeepers – The case for Sunderlands Mannone as your only GK

With the midfield of Siggy, Fabregas, Sterling and Di Maria plus Costa looking eseential in my mind during to their ownership plus Chelsea starting to hit their straps defensively I’m looking everywhere to save money on my squad.  One of the few areas appears to be the GK.  De Gea is £5.4m and I’ve noticed that 4 of the top 10 FPL managers I follow have put in a cheap GK with no rotation option.  To avoid any problem with injuries they’ve often put the reserve GK as cover.  Why wouldn’t you rotate you ask?  Well unfortunately there’s no £4.0m GK to rotate with so this is about saving that £0.5m.  If you don’t think that’s worth it then probably no point in reading further.  Yes more clean sheets are acheived at home than away so you should get a benefit from rotating it’s just whether you want to spend the money elsewhere and think you can benefit more from that.

How I’ve done the analysis is line up all the GKs and their points.  Then I’ve isolated the clean sheets and calculated the amount of non clean sheet related points that each player has got to see who is picking up the most save points and other points. That pointed to Mannone being very good value.

Here’s the table:

Player Points Clean sheets non clean sheet points
 1 Lloris (£5.6m)                 31                 3                 19
2 Speroni(£5.0m)28220
3 Mannone (£4.5m)28220
4 Fabianski (£5.1m)27315
5 De Gea (£5.4m)27219
6 Heaton (£4.6m)27315
7 Forster (£5.1m)27315
8 Guzan (£4.6m)26314
9 Foster  (£4.5m)23311
10 Begovic  (£5.0m)22214
11 Courtois (£6.0m)22210
12 McGregor (£5.0m)21113
13 Hart (£6.0m)21213
14 Mignolet  (£5.5m)20116
15 Adrian (£5.0m)19115
16 Green (£4.5m)18114
17 Szczesny (£5.4m)17113
18 Krul (£4.5m )16112
19 Howard  ( £5.4m)1218
20 Schmeichel (£4.5m)1117

Whats pretty much apprent is that their unsurprisingly is still a correlation between clean sheets and points which obviously isn’t a shock.  What is obvious as well is that Howard, Szczesny,Mignolet, Hart and Courtois are all in the bottom half of the points table.  Now I don’t expect that to continue and Courtois was unlucky with the head injury preventing a clean sheet.  Although I expect the so called top 4 challenging teams to improve their clean sheets whether you want to pay £5.5m for a premium GK with the save points available for the cheaper GKs given the above table looks questionable.

Looking at the table Speroni, Mannone and De Gea are the only GKs to have broken the 3 clean sheet part of the table.  Speroni is due to a penalty save and De Gea is £5.4m and in front of a very ordinary defense at the moment for that price.  That leaves Mannone as the standout option in that table.  At £4.5m he’s also great value.  Looking at last season out of the GKs in the table he made the most saves and had the save per minute ratio significantly lower than anyone else.  At the moment only Adrian and Green have made more saves and Speroni in bonus points although they were for the penalty save.

The main disadvantage is that he doesn’t have a £4.0m back up so you would need to use a transfer for him if he got injured.  He also has a good back up in £4.4m Pantilimon so could be rested over say the Christmas period.

Last year Sunderland got 8 clean sheets but also there were 19 games where he conceded 2 goals or more resulting in  points deductions.  That was worse than say West Ham and Newcastle.  West Ham had 14 clean sheets and only 15 games where they conceded 2 or more.  Newcastle had 10 clean sheets and 16 games conceding 2 or more.  This year Sunderland have started better with only 2 games conceding 2 or more.  Southampton are the only team to have bettered that.  However Sunderland have had fairly kind fixtures so far.

To me if I can save £0.9m on selling De Gea for Mannone then it will be worth it to invest in the rest of the team.  It’s not something I’ve done before so I’ll be interested in anyones thoughts in agreement or otherwise.  I’m more than ready for someone to argue that I’m talking rubbish!

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Fantasy premier league goalkeepers

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