Sun Dream Team player tips – a few stats to start you thinking

Sun Dream Team

Here’s my Sun Dream Team player tips article where I produce a few different stats to help shape your initial team.  It is just a prelude to more definitive player ranking articles

Sun Dream Team player tips – a few stats to start you thinking

This is the 3rd of my Sun Dream Team articles adding to the new rules article and the article with my first draft team

Top 15 points scorers 16/17

Here’s a table of the top 15 point scorers in Sun Dream Team with their price for the 17/18 season

 sun dream team player tips

Nothing surprising here.  All 15 are from the top 7 clubs.  Chelsea and Liverpool this season have European competition as well




Top 15 points per game 16/17

 sun dream team player tips

Ignore Diame who’s stats are from 1 game and ignore Ederson who’s stats are presumably from 2 European games involving premier league opposition.  Same point as total points.  All 13 apart from Van Dijk are from the top 7 teams

Best value players comparing cost to points per game

Here’s a table where I’ve compared the cost of the player to their points per game to get a very rough indication of how good value they are.  The 2 numbers are compared and the table sorted by the highest ratio.  It obviously doesn’t look at their total points potential but is just a starter to indicate potential value.  It’s not statistically perfect by any stretch of the imagination but gives you some food for thought

 sun dream team player tips

Jesus stands out like a beacon as does Lukaku and even Kane holds his own.  The other premium strikers in Costa was £6.0m vs PPG 5.0.  Aguero £7m vs PPG 6.8 and Firmino £5.5m vs 4.6PPG.  These 3 are the strikers in my first draft team article.

Davies of Spurs and Holgate stand out on the defensive front but both are their only due to injuries and are on borrowed time.  Both have made my initial team to be monitored.  The only other defenders are McAuley who could be a gametime risk and replicating his goalscoring will be difficult.  Then there’s the Southampton pair.  Van Dijk is a steamy price but loved by whoscored.com who do the ratings.  He could also be on the move to a top 7 club which would be interesting.  Southampton have great fixtures to start and are a good initial defensive bet.  None of the regular defenders in the top 7 teams make it.

Butland is the only GK albeit on limited games.  He is a quality GK who will make a ton of saves I expect.

The midfield ratios

The interesting thing is the midfield where there are no premium players only value players.  Now I won’t be going down the value road but it is interesting.  Lets take a look at the ratio’s of all the midfielders in the top 15 point scorers for the 16/17 season.

Hazard £7m PPG 5.9

Eriksen £6.5m PPG 5.2

Coutinho £6.0m PPG 5.6

Mane £6m  PPG 5.1

De Bruyne £6.0m  PPG 4.4

Pogba £6.0m  PPG 4.6

Alli £6m  PPG4.4

Ozil £5.5m  PPG 4.6

Son £5.5  PPG 4.4 (albeit distorted by sub appearances)

This table doesn’t mean we should rip up our squads.  The above midfielders despite that stat will be our 3 if possible.  A similar point is for the defenders.  What it does do is help us to identify a few players for our squad who have potential to be good value.

Stats on the top 20 who scored players from 16/17

As you probably know the excellent site whoscored.com priovide the player ratings and man of the match ratings for Sun Dream Team.  So while not the entire points making they do play a part.




I though it would be worth looking at the top 20 whoscored.com rated players from last season from 2 angles.  Firstly, is their any correlation between who scored ratings and PPG to help us in selection.  Secondly what type of players does whoscored like

 sun dream team player tips

The striker ratings are pretty much related to goals.  Midfield is a bit more mixed.  Players who are highly involved and have set piece responsibility seem to feature highly.  Pogba is a bit of an outlier as is Herrera.  Zaha is the only non top 7 midfielder.

Apart from Alonso the defenders are CB’s.  Whether Alonso being the most used wing back is significant or not is hard to say.  He was a bit by himself in that category.  No GKs.

The correlation between the ratings and the PPG is interesting .  The outliers are De Bruyne, Firmino, Otamendi, Zaha, Herrera and Mustafi.  To me De Bruyne, Firmino and Zaha didn’t score enough goals to turn their whoscored rating into PPG.  Similar but with clean sheets for Otamendi and Mustafi as Man City and Arsenal had poor clean sheet tallies in the league.  Herrera is a defensive midfielder primarily so is never going to rate on PPG.

So is whoscored.com useful?

So what does that tell us?  I think the who scored ratings are quite useful for PPG and even for total points if you remember to adjust the ratings for non European competition teams.  You’ve just got to do some filtering and interpretation of the stats

If you play fantasy premier league buy our 57 page EBook ” a guide to FPL in 17/18″. There’s loads of graphics and stats on 150+ players from last season. There is a small Sun Dream Team 17/18 tips section in the book too. It’s only £3

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