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Week 5 By the numbers

This season (I have to keep reminding myself that we’re only 10% in) has been a bit of a nightmare really. I feel like the unluckiest guy at the race track, systematically backing the strongest of favourites only to see them flounder. In week 3 I backed Manchester City heavily only to watch them lose to Stoke, similarly in Week 4 I put Liverpool in four key positions only to see them lose to Villa at Anfield.

Last week I picked three goalkeepers who I thought would perform well; one scored 21 points, the other 18 points and the final received 0 points – Can you guess which one I selected?

Woe is me.

On the plus side, a score of 106 slightly helps me make up for the even poorer performances of the last couple of weeks and puts me on an average of 87.5 per week which whilst not good enough, isn’t so low that it makes the title race completely unsurmountable.

The goalkeeper choices for this week are Howard, Lloris, Heaton, Fabianski and Green. Personally I think that the best options from those are Howard, Lloris and Green but the choice is yours, they all seem to offer good value for money when compared to other goalkeepers. For those of you who are interested in the ever growing ROI – currently the total for my goalkeeper selections this season is 187% (on average a 10m goalkeeper pick returns 18.7 points) and for those who love the graph, here it is:

This week I wanted to just look at the overall comparison of attacking players to see where they got most of their points from. I took the top 5 forwards (it had some names I didn’t expect!) namely Costa, Naismith, Ulloa, Weimann and Sanchez.

The first thing I noticed (and something that goes against the way most managers approach the game) is that on average players scored 30% more points when at home than away. This is hardly a surprise with a far friendlier crowd, less travel, familiarity with the pitch etc. This is problematic if you play a buy-and-hold strategy within the game but if you try to pick the best players each week and only hold a couple of ‘un-droppable’ stars (my preferred approach) then it should make a significant impact to your choices. I’m not saying that all players act that way (Schneiderlin and Sigurdsson don’t) but in the main it’s relatively consistent. I should stress though that I haven’t accounted for the strength of the opposition.

The second thing which will come as no surprise is that forwards score 70% of their points from goals (including shots on target). Whilst this may sound unremarkable, it suggests that a proven ability to score goals is far more important than the potential to score goals. These top 5 players don’t actually have an enormous amount of shots on target but they have converted 74% of those shots. Players such as Rooney, Aguero, Pelle, Sturridge, Adebayor, Remy, Bony, Berahino, Vaz Te, Agbonlahor, Lukaku, RvP etc have all had as many shots or more but these players haven’t converted them and that’s where the difference lies. Whilst I think that it’s an extremely difficult job to know in advance who will actually convert their shots, I think that we can put together a few names of home-based forwards, who like to shoot (and take penalties) and who have a relatively strong proportion of those shots go in….

Aguero, Adebayor, Ulloa, Lukaku, Naismith, Agbonlahor and Austin.

From that list, if we take into account the strength of the opposition you get a far smaller list of players: Lukaku, Adebayor & Austin.

Whilst I know that 3 out of every 5 readers will already have a place assigned in their forwards to Costa (un-droppable), I think that you could do a lot worse that to bring in one of these three players this week. In a week where everyone chooses Sanchez, Costa and Rooney these choices could well give you some differential if you’re trying to catch up.