FPL fixtures – a first draft fixture ease schedule for Defenders and Goalkeepers 

Further to my fixture ease for attacking players here now is my FPL fixtures article with my first draft at a fixture ease schedule where we look at the teams with the best fixtures from a defenders perspective for the first 3, 6 and 10 gameweeks

FPL fixtures – a first draft fixture ease schedule for Defenders and Goalkeepers 

Here’s the link to what is effectively the fantasy premier league fixtures released by the Premier League.

Introduction

Last season I used the official fantasy premier league fixture difficulty ranking as the base for my fixture ease articles. That schedule divided fixtures up into 4 categories without distinguishing between teams attacking and defensive capabilities.

So for example to give the same ranking for the Arsenal and Bournemouth attack and defence didn’t seem to work for me as they both had good attacks but poor defence.

So I’ve started working on my own fixture ease schedule based on my own calculations. Here’s a bit of background on methodology

Methodology

The idea is to have 2 fixture ease schedules.

One will rank the teams by the ease of the opposition defences they face over the upcoming games. This is the attackers fixture ease schedule which I have made a first draft.

The 2nd will rank the teams by the ease of the attacking teams they face. This will be called the defenders fixture ease schedule which I am doing here.

I have made the defenders fixture ease schedule by looking at the goals scored last season of the 20 teams home and away and applied a factor against the average goals conceded of the 20 teams home and away. I have adjusted some of the factors if a team over or under performed their expected goals by a considerable margin.

The promoted teams

Obviously it’s difficult to give them a rating so I have tried to find a proxy team from 18/19 teams and used their data.

I have equated Sheffield United with Brighton as Sheffield United had a similar goals scored record in their promoted season to Brighton

For Aston Villa and Norwich I have equated them to Newcastle as again they had similar promotion goals scored although I may have been a little harsh on Norwich.  You can see my article on the promoted teams if you’re interested in more information on them.

Those factors attributed to the defence faced are then added together over various spells of games to determine a ranking.

At the moment there are no “perception” adjustments. so for example Chelsea, Leicester and Wolves away were pretty low scorers compared to my expectations.  Lastly partly due to Puel.  However I have not made any discretionary adjustments

I have a fixture graphic below which I’ve colour coded the defences home and away. It is just to improve the visual aspect of the schedule and the factors I’ve talked about above, rather than the just the colours, are basis for calculation.

It is a work in progress so feedback is appreciated. I also did it long hand so if there’s any mistakes or inconsistencies then that will also be useful information

Background information

Goals scored last season vs xG

Home games

Away games

The 2 things to standout in this are Liverpool who really outperformed their xG at home.  I suspect alot of this will be due to Mane seemingly unable to miss towards the end of the season.  I have tweaked that downwards in my calculations.

The other one is Palace being unable to miss away from home and not hit a barn door on their own ground.  Again I’ve smoothed that out.

The summary schedule for defenders/goalkeepers facing attacking teams

The list is filtered by 6 gameweeks but also 3 gameweeks and 10 gameweeks are included

The Schedule

Hope you found it useful

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