So with time on my hands here’s my first in a series of fantasy premier league players articles where we look at each clubs most disappointing FPL player so far this season and see whether they can rebound this or next season. In this article we’ve started with Arsenal and Aston Villa.
fantasy premier league players – Each clubs disappointments and can they rebound?
Arsenal – £9.3m Fwd Lacazette
You’d think playing as a centre forward with Arsenal that it would be rich fantasy pickings with Aubameyang, Ozil and Pepe as your attacking team mates.
However, this season though has been a disaster for Lacazette with a miserable 3.9 points per match and only 78 points before GW30. What’s more he was sub in the last 3 matches before the suspension after starting 7 matches without scoring. The real ignominy was being replaced by 20 year old Nketiah who scored in 1 of those 3 games.
So what’s wrong. Alot has been put down to confidence in stuff that I have read which seems to imply that he could bounce back given a goal or 2. To me the problem isn’t that simple. Volumes haven’t changed that significantly so it’s not that.
Also his underlying xG/xA numbers the last couple of seasons have been very similar. However for me at the levels of the last 2 seasons they just don’t match up to his price unless he’s able to outperform them. On the xG side he has no history of doing that. His excellent PPM of last season were down to his incredible 12 assists. However these came from only 4.1 in xA which positively distorted his numbers to an unsustainable level. Even allowing for the difference in fantasy and real football assists we won’t see anything like that assist number again. Even at Lyon he only averaged 4 assists per season.
The season before 17/18 his xG was better at 0.50 but boosted by penalty responsibility to 0.56. Penalty responsibility is now Aubameyang.
I can’t see a rebound here for Lacazette. To me he’s just not getting and finishing enough quality chances to prove his worth and has no history of outperforming his xG to make up for it. Also it is questionable whether he can even retain his place. If you were being hopeful you’d hope Arteta can make them a more effective attacking team to create more chances for Lacazette. but that seems a long way off at the moment.
Aston Villa – £6.0m Fwd Wesley
It’s hard to pin point disappointments in a newly promoted sides as expectations are tempered by the unknown factor of the Premier League vs the Championship.
However a player new to the League is always someone with some type of expectation. Whether this applied to a £22m signing from the Belgian League is questionable. However his goals and assists per minute numbers were good. Also knowing he was going to be Villa’s number 1 striker then surely that in itself had to mean there was some expectation on him from the Villa fans and hierarchy. For that reason he’s going to be my focus for Villa
To be honest it couldn’t have gone much worse. A pretty ordinary return of 5 goals in 21 starts 2 of which came against Norwich. If that was supposed to be where he kicked on it couldn’t have been less of a omen. He then proceeded to not score in the next 12 games. His underlying stats are very poor and his shooting volumes for a striker and key pass volumes for a target man are absolutely terrible.
He’s now injured until the end of August. If Villa manage to stay in the Premier League surely they need to sign another striker or hope new boy Samatta can fill the position.
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