Patrician's Crystal Ball

[BobMem]

Looks like some serious thoughts on posts above. Just posting to remind me to read and comment later. Thanks for the link Ruth.

[Bobby Fetta]

Interesting article about Gross and how an apparent change in the way BHA are playing might affect him:

https://www.football365.com/news/bright ... negligence

From a footballing viewpoint, that article was interesting as it reaches an almost diametrically opposite conclusion to a Statsbomb article I read recently that said about Gross "his sheer level of activity on the defensive side of the ball is breathtaking" (https://statsbomb.com/2018/08/early-pre ... -and-more/). Not sure if that has any consequences on FPL returns though.

[Patrician]

Just a quick check in. on holiday with the family. looking like another solid week. On 67 with Ings left to play. Wilson was my transfer for Arnie which didnt quite pay off, but I am happy with the long term potential of that transfer. Annoying to miss the Fraser haul as he is a target, but super happy with the wild card picks overall. Goal is to average more than 65 so job done again wih 1 to.play.

[Joccki_10]

Keep it going, Patrician. Well done.

[Patrician]

GW5 Review, 74 pts GWR 339,860, Pts 380, OR 2,317

A very solid gameweek, and another green arrow. Missed the Hazard captaincy bonanza, but in truth he was my third choice for Captain behind Aguero and Alonso, so I was never going to be on that one. Shame that I didnt have Fraser in the team, as I have had a couple of opportunities to bring him in and pretty much flipped a coin. I will probably remedy that for next week (Walcott > Fraser), as he looks like a true bandwagon to me.

No spreadsheet at hand to crunch the latest data, so I will do a big forecasting update after the next set of games. I have a feeling that this is a season to have a good bench. Wan Bissaka is doing the business for 4.0M. Kante after a bit of early promise is not, he probably becomes Richarlison after the next set of games, which will leave enough in the bank for another 4.5 GK.

Faith in Salah remains high, and I continue to love that people are starting to transfer him out.

A few concerns for the next GW around Mendy, Aguero and Ings not playing. Gut feel is that Mendy and Aguero will play, so happy to roll the dice.

I have not done the sums but I think I am about 40 points up from my Wild Card so far.

[Patrician]

Dropping a Super Premium


One principle I identified before the season, just one Super Premium, I have ignored. I have three. Based on the data so far, and especially with the emergence of Hazard let of the leash for even greater returns than normal, I believe that dropping one of Agüero or Salah is the smart move, since this will also allow two upgrade elsewhere.

Lots of gnashing of teeth about Salah around the forum. I am less concerned. Agüero on the other hand is really disappointing me, hat trick aside. With City’s unprecedented easy start, he should have much better stats and points. City are just one of those teams where the attack can come from anywhere and so the points are spread around.

The other player I am concerned about is Mendy. I think he is a bit of a liability. Discipline, injury, cavalier approach to the defensive side, droppable to give Sane game time.

Possible transfer combo:

Mendy > Doherty
Agüero > Vardy
Kante > Mane

All this can be done with perfect timing for the fixture shifts coming for Liverpool and Leicester, leaving me with Fraser and W-B/Doherty as strong bench. My forecaster predicts this to be a strong improvement, pending more data from Vardy. It also makes a move for De Bruyne a one transfer swap later in the season


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[Smurphy Paw]

Vardy (Arnie): I have just made the observation on NWJs thread that whilst having Vardy (Arnie) as the most expensive forward does benefit the midfield there’s a downside. Yes, KDB in one move is appealing, but you already have that through other midfield switches. However one would need two moves minimum to get in any of the premium forwards should any of them present a compelling case for inclusion.
That said, I also concluded that Hazard plus one of Salah and Kun/(Kaku) is the way forward. With Dilva in your Schneiderlin spot the available budget and choice of player differs somewhat, but the principle holds.

[Patrician]

Indeed. Currently I can’t do De Bruyne in one move because I have three City, which is part of my thinking


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[Aldershot Rejects]

Interesting, I'm in a similar place - currently 3 super-premiums in my side, when I was only going to get one. I'm encouraged that you identify Aguero as the one to go. Personally, I'm wondering about going with Firmino rather than Vardy although that probably limits my ability to get Mane in as well.

Also interesting re Mendy. I think that like you I prefer Laporte although Mendy's high ownership worries me somewhat.

[Patrician]

I have discounted Firmino for the same reason. I want three Liverpool, and the three I want are Salah, Mane and Robertson


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[Smurphy Paw]

Indeed. Currently I can’t do De Bruyne in one move because I have three City, which is part of my thinking


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I guess that De Bruyne’s lack of action any time soon makes it all a non-conversation as well. When he’s back I imagine that I’ll have to review Silva’s position, but that is still weeks away.

[Patrician]

So the Mendy situation puts me in a bit of a pickle, what with Ings also out. Having already brought Fraser in this week, it would mean a hit. I cant find a transfer that is worth four points over selecting Kante, and I don’t lose any value from a price drop.

I’ll roll with it and hope the rest of my team plays. Bit of an uncomfortable one. I will most likely Mendy > Doherty this week. I don’t even consider it a downgrade as I am currently forecasting Doherty to match Mendy for points.

[Ruth_NZ]

Any chance you could do Eriksen/Alli/Pogba for me, Pat? Cheers if that's possible.

[Patrician]

Will have a look in the morning.


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[Patrician]

Here is my take on the 8.0M plus midfielders, including your three.

Premium Mids.PNG

[Ruth_NZ]

You are a beautiful man.

Thanks a lot, that agrees with my reading. I'm keeping Salah, at least till GW15 when I might engineer a Salah out Kane in kind of switch.

[Patrician]

GW6 Review: 67 pts, GWR 402,185, 447 OP, OR 1,295

Another solid week above the 65 per week average I am trying to maintain, and a third green arrow in a row to put me just shy of the top 1k, 2nd in the FISO league (behind Stemania of course, who has had an astonishing start to the season). This week was all about the defensive performance, with a full house of clean sheets.

Next week is looking a lot less promising with my team consisting of a lot of LIV, CHE who face each other. Likely transfer is Mendy > Doherty, as previously mentioned. The current plan is to get Vardy (for GW8) and Mane (for GW9) in for Aguero and Fraser, then Mitro/Arnie for Wilson at some point. once those three transfers are done, my first XI will be pretty much set, and I can turn attention to my bench (which is pretty weak).

This week I will publish a series of posts with my latest forecasts, which I am confident in after 6 weeks of data.

Might as well throw out a bold comment: I now set my sights on trying to win the whole damn thing from this position.

GW6.PNG

[Ruth_NZ]

And why not. I am 24 points behind you so I guess I can dream as well.

Interested that you are of a Vardy frame of mind, he is in my thoughts too.

Will look forward to your projections and appreciate your sharing them.

[baganboy]

Pogba eh?
Hmm....
Good stuff.

[Patrician]

FPL Disciplines to Master

There has been some emotional reaction on the main forum about the effect on FPL of the amount of statistics available via Opta in the last few years. This has resulted in a new breed of manager that makes decisions based primarily on data. Much lamenting of the good old days follows, when FPL was about football knowledge and a keen eye for watching football. This is a trend that goes way beyond FPL. There are parallels with investment banking, where in the good old days traders made millions from good stock market instincts, based on contextual understanding of the effect of a drought in one part of the world impacting the stock prices in an industry dependent on crop yields. Now, those traders are largely out of work because algorithms do the job better and don't expect bonuses. So is this the future for FPL? Can a very knowledgeable football fan beat an algorithm of the sort I advocate?
I think that question is the wrong way to think about it. Better to view FPL as a challenge with three distinct disciplines to master. You need to be good at all three.

Discipline 1: Statistics

I have put this first, because I do think it is the most important. In the end, this game is more of a math challenge than it is a football challenge. The data is available in massive depth of detail, and if we are not able to use that data to produce a decent points forecast for a player I believe we will be at a major disadvantage in FPL now and in the future. The other advantage of this discipline is the ability to assess every single player in a matter of minutes. To do the same by watching football, you would need to watch the full 90 mins of every game, every week. In fact you would need to watch every game more than once focussing on different players each time. It isn’t feasible!

Discipline 2: Contextual awareness

This is second most important, from the basics of fixture runs and injury news, to the more challenging aspects of reading the impact of personnel and tactics changes throughout the season. This discipline addresses the main weaknesses of a stats based approach which looks at averages of what has come before, and can’t predict the new points expectation when a player changes their role in the team, or the impact of a new manager, or a player comes back from injury. This is the weakest aspect of my game, and the one I will look to be better at this year.

Discipline 3: Watching football, but differently

Finally watching football. The key to this discipline is that you need to watch football with an FPL lens. As a fan I want to see players try the spectacular for the thrill of it, as an FPL manager the spectacular is just a shot with a low chance of success. We need to be able to watch a player miss chances, and not assume that means they are wasteful. We need to look for the number and quality of chances, the positions a player is getting the ball in. The eye test for FPL purposes is full of pitfalls that can lead us make bad decisions if we don’t watch the game right.

Bringing it all together

Let’s use Harry Kane as a case study. Normally a prolific striker, FPL gold in the last few seasons. Often a slow starter. This season he gets off to his normal slow start. What has been different though is the underlying stats are also poor across the board which to the statistician means that his poor start looks like it will continue. Contextual awareness includes the obvious impact of the injury last year, world cup, coming back too soon, and a new team mate in Moura. Watching Spurs play we can observe that Moura is making a lot of runs into the box providing an additional outlet for passes from team mates and from Kane himself when he might otherwise have gone for goal himself last season.

Master all three disciplines, that’s my plan.

[Dazzab]

Patrician

Being an FPL rookie I found your post very interesting. Watching a game of football is now a totally different experience for me. I can’t say however that I totally enjoy it from a supporter’s point of view. I never thought I would be hoping a player (who I don’t have in my fpl squad) would miss opportunities and not score goals, but at the same time hope his team wins. This seems ridiculous! And assists, I’ve never seen them as anything other than just a pass unless it’s a pin point cross to the head of the goal scorer. To me assists were something you only read about in basketball.

Living in Australia and not been overly motivated to watch the epl for a few years, I will say fpl has given me a great reason to get back in to watching games. Lately, lying in bed watching games on a device in the middle of the night has been my weekends.
The first few weeks of fpl I thought this was the best way to notice players who I could consider. I had done no real stats research and thought the player who stands out would be best to have. Or, players I saw playing in the World Cup I figured would be good. (I hear everyone laughing but that’s all good). I know now in fpl this doesn’t work. Take Chelsea v West Ham for example. When I picked my team originally I had Jorginho. I knew he played well and could control a game. He did this against the hammers but got no fpl returns. Chelsea were by far the superior team but couldn’t break them down. The bigger issue here for me is that all of the bonus points in that game went to west ham players. How?? Well, the stats. I suppose this is the evidence I need to prove researching stats is vital if you want to do well in fpl.
What I need to consider after watching that game is, is it worth considering west ham defenders as Chelsea, a team who have managed a few goals this year and bombarded the west ham defence couldn’t get through, or do I now more strongly consider non Chelsea attackers as they couldn’t score goals yesterday?

It will be a long time until I get the hang of your contextual awareness strategy. I just don’t understand how clubs manage themselves yet. City particularly.

Anyway, this probably sounds like a heap of rambling by someone with limited knowledge of fpl but if anything it’s agreeing with your ideas and thanking you for your input as it helps people like me with my team strategies.

Cheers
Daz

[Patrician]

Glad to be helpful, and happy to share

I think your post highlights good points!

1) Try to avoid making conclusions based on just one match, and especially the scoreline. The score may have been 0-0 in this case, but from the 17 shots that Chelsea had, on average that should have resulted in a couple of goals. If anything, conclude to avoid West Ham defenders because conceding a lot of chances normally results in conceding a lot of goals, and vice versa for Chelsea attack. For this reason I completely ignore how many goals were scored, and focus entirely on the number of shots (especially inside the box).

2) Fixture context is more complicated than it looks. When there is a big difference between the quality of two teams, the weaker team may well employ a counter attack strategy where they pack the defence and hope for a breakaway goal. This means that you can't necessarily assume that a strongly favourable fixture for a top 4 team will necessarily be a goalfest. Leicester in their title winning season tended to do better the stonger the team they faced. Their counter-attack style worked better against teams willing to attack them.

3) A good player is not necessarily a good FPL asset. You don't get points for being the best player on the pitch, you get them for scoring goals, assists and clean sheets. For these reasons the defensive midfielder has never been a good fantasy football asset, but nor is the playmaker that passes to the assister.

[Dazzab]

Thanks for addressing my observations patrician and giving a helpful fpl response.

That game yesterday really frustrated me as I had hazard as my captain. I finished with a reasonable 61pts but hoped for a better return from hazard as I overlooked Aguero for the captaincy. The more the game went on the more I felt Chelsea were not going to score. From my point of view of chances created, west ham had the better ones and probably should have won, despite conceding 17 shots. This comes from an epl watching point of view however and not an fpl view, and I suppose blinds me of what you have pointed out and what I should be looking for.

[Aldershot Rejects]

2) Fixture context is more complicated than it looks. When there is a big difference between the quality of two teams, the weaker team may well employ a counter attack strategy where they pack the defence and hope for a breakaway goal. This means that you can't necessarily assume that a strongly favourable fixture for a top 4 team will necessarily be a goalfest. Leicester in their title winning season tended to do better the stonger the team they faced. Their counter-attack style worked better against teams willing to attack them.

I was thinking this last night whilst consoling myself with Hazard's 3 points. Liverpool's style may well suit him more than West Ham's packed defence. Or am I just clutching at straws

[Patrician]

Top 10 Players Overall.

First in a series of points forecasts based on the first 6 weeks of data. This table shows the top ten players, irrespective of price or position based on my own algorithm. Highest expected pts/game on the left, descending to the right.

Top 10.PNG

Interesting points to note:

• 1) I predict Salah to be the highest points scorer in FPL by some margin once again
  2) Even if I am overestimating Ings (likely), he is almost certainly a must have at his price
  3) I expect Vardy to outperform Aguero for the rest of the season
  4) Aguero is some way behind Salah and Hazard, so a two super premium strategy means losing Aguero. Especially if Vardy manages to match him
  5) Lukaku only just makes the list, and Kane is nowhere to be seen. I believe there are only four viable players >10M
  6) Man City players are not dominating the list despite being in the most attacking team. The points are shared around and rotation abounds. In fact I mentally downgrade them more as they have had a very easy start (contextual awareness)

Out of these ten, I have seven in my team (unsuprisingly, as I base my team on my projections, duh!)

[Patrician]

I was thinking this last night whilst consoling myself with Hazard's 3 points. Liverpool's style may well suit him more than West Ham's packed defence. Or am I just clutching at straws

My reading of Hazard is that he does best when he has space, so yes! May well do better against more attacking opponents.

[jack1092]

Patrician, just to confirm, do ou forecast Kane to have some sort of terrible season this year?

I might be missing the point a tad, but he's likely to hit 190+ with ease i'd have thought.

[Patrician]

Well, not terrible. I am forecasting him to hit 170 or so. Not a terrible score, but definitely not worth 12.5M of my budget. I do believe that Kane 18/19 is not the same as Kane 17/18.

[blahblah]

I was thinking this last night whilst consoling myself with Hazard's 3 points. Liverpool's style may well suit him more than West Ham's packed defence. Or am I just clutching at straws

My reading of Hazard is that he does best when he has space, so yes! May well do better against more attacking opponents.

I tend to think Morata and William, well Pedro and Giroud have more to do with this. It would be intersting to see how Eden has done with them ie mins, opps and points with the combinations of the 4. My money is on Pedro being his best accomplice, as he provides more guile, and Giroud is more selfless than Morata, who is really struggling with confidence..

The lack of guile against a packed defence is always going to be a problem, especially without going wide and crossing as an option. Into this guileless claim I'll toss in the midfield 3: who just don't have it, from what I have watched. Admittedly I haven't studied every second.....

I have a feeling the Lpool match could be similar to the CS, so Alonso could well be on my bench, as it could be worse.

[Aldershot Rejects]

Well, not terrible. I am forecasting him to hit 170 or so. Not a terrible score, but definitely not worth 12.5M of my budget. I do believe that Kane 18/19 is not the same as Kane 17/18.

I'm not convinced that 2017/18 Kane is worth 12.5m either unless you happen to catch one of his very hot runs.