By The Numbers Week 17
So after a couple of weeks away owing to sickness and holiday I’m back and raring to go. This week I wanted to take a quick break from my traditional goalkeeper, predictor and poisson sections and look at how you could possibly get yourself ready for Christmas.
It’s at this time of year that I find things start to get a little tricky in the world of Fantasy Football; you have a pile up of fixtures at the same time as work parties, hangovers, family get-together and, if we’re really unlucky, the odd matches stopped due to snow. The last two years I’ve actually been in Spain over the silly season so I’ve also managed to miss weeks due to poor wifi signal.
The trouble is that most fantasy football games work best when you keep a good eye on what’s going on, unfortunately that's tricky at this time of the year. Therefore I personally think that some managers could be well served by a “set and forget” option this Christmas season, if you can handle leaving your team alone that is.
The problem with this approach is working out who you think is most likely to perform well over a number of weeks and that brings me to my new, patented, never before seen “Set and Forget Matrix”. Drum roll please.
The matrix is based on the traditional business strategy Boston matrix, you can find it here. My version asks just two questions of the players you have in your team (or hope to bring in) – How tough are your next five games and how much you cost compared to your average score. Once these figures are worked out, the player is added to the matrix. The vertical access is for the ease of their next five matches and the horizontal for their average return on investment. Once your players are plotted, figuring out your "set and forget" team is simple, if they are in the green section they are definite keepers, orange section means that you need to have a very good reason for keeping them and red sectio?, Drop them like they’re hot.
So, how do you work out players scores? Easy. For their ‘next five’ score, you simply take their next five opponents and give them a score dependent on where they are in the league. Chelsea are top and therefore the strongest opponents so they get a score of 20, Man City get 19 in second, all the way down to Leicester, in last place who score just 1 point.
To give you an idea (and please bear in mind that I’m writing this on Monday before Everton and QPR face off) here is what Man City score for the next five weeks:
Week 1 – Crystal Palace 5 points
Week 2 – West Brom 7 points
Week 3 – Burnley 4 points
Week 4 – Sunderland 6 points
Week 5 – Everton 8 points
Total = 30 points
Next, you take the players average score and divide it by their cost (current or what you hold them at). Let’s take Jovetic as I don’t really see Pozo setting the world alight. He averages 9 points which divided by his cost of 9.31 gives a score of 96%. Therefore, if we think he’ll play all five games we can put him on the matrix here:
That makes him a great choice assuming that he can get fit enough before they play the next five games.
Let’s look at the opposite side of the scale, Stoke have a score of 68 and a player like Cameron who is generally a sound choice has a score of 57% putting him here:
Clearly a bad choice over the Christmas period!
If you would like to make the choices more accurate you could use the players average score over the last five games as this is more likely to show whether he is in form but I personally kept their normal average as I wanted it to be easy for you to work out.
I'd appreciate any feedback, so please make any comments you like.
