Guardian Fantasy Football 2008/09

[mighty reds]

http://www.google.com/ig/adde?moduleurl ... ource=imag

shows how many teams have entered - circa 53,000

also most popular players - torres in over 50% of teams

[scouse]

thanks for the tip - actually their "team of the day" doesn't look half bad.

[harang2008]

Hi there. This game looks pretty intriguing, but - if I've worked the scoring out properly - very heavily weighted in favour of defenders. I just did a quick calculation on David Bentley, who we might imagine would be among the top scoring midfielders. His main Opta scores were:

Appearances: 37 (=74 points)
Goals: 6 (48 pts)
Assists: 9 (36 pts)
Shots on target: 36 (36 pts)
Successful crosses: 95 (95 pts)

Total: 289 pts. No doubt he had a few interceptions/clearances/blocks too, though presumably not too many, but he's probably looking at 350 pts max. Martin Laursen, according to Opta, had 739 clearances, which gives him more than twice Bentley's points tally even before we start looking at appearances, clean sheets, blocks and interceptions. Admittedly, as a defender he'll have lost a few for goals conceded. Villa shipped 51 goals, but that still leaves him way over 700 pts (since he must, by definition, have played in the games where he's lost pts for conceding)

Am I missing something here? Is Laursen's tally freakishly higher than every other defenders'?

[Spencer4]

Harang, where are you getting this data from if you don't mind me asking?

[The Saint]

If you sign up for the Yahoo game you get previous seasons opta data on some things. The clearances stat was posted by Andye on this thread.

[harang2008]

Spencer, The Guardian carried an article on the Opta stats, that showed Bentley was the most successful crosser and Laursen had the most clearances and blocks. The other Bentley stats I found on a Google search.

[stanley smith]

You'd like to think that The Guardian did a dry run using last seasons opta stats and their points system in order to derive the player prices for this season's game. But it's obvious that they haven't - consequently some major bargains to be had - almost entirely outside the big 4.

[Spencer4]

Hmmm yahoo you say

Thanks chaps...

[harang2008]

Right, I've used the Yahoo stats to revisit my head-to-head. It isn't exact, because they don't quite map on the Guardian's system - in particular, the Yahoo triv doesn't split appearances & CSs into halves, so I've had to assume that every appearance was for the whole match, or at least part of each half. What it gives us is:

Bentley: 330
Laursen: 289

Actually, Laursen's score will be somewhat higher, because there will be 1/2 CSs that don't show up in the overall CS stats, but generally they look to be in the same ball-park. Which is what we should expect, as they're both valued at 7.7m.

That is, until we add this frankly incredible clearance stat, which skews everything horribly. Tbh, so much so that I'm beginning to wonder if it's been mis-reported.

[harang2008]

Sorry, I should have added that the confusion arises because the Yahoo game doesn't give pts for clearances. Maybe we're starting to see why ...

[mongoose]

http://www.google.com/ig/adde?moduleurl ... ource=imag

shows how many teams have entered - circa 53,000

also most popular players - torres in over 50% of teams

Great find!

I've amended it so its is a google.co.uk add-in

Looks like 19% of those 53000 also have Ronaldo so that cuts the competition down a bit

[DrBunker]

http://www.google.com/ig/adde?moduleurl ... ource=imag

shows how many teams have entered - circa 53,000

also most popular players - torres in over 50% of teams

Great find!

I've amended it so its is a google.co.uk add-in

Looks like 19% of those 53000 also have Ronaldo so that cuts the competition down a bit

Nice work I've added it to iGoogle but I am running out of space now! Time to remove some of those work related ones...

[Not So Special One]

What a mess of a game, extremely overly complicated in places and stupidly restrictive at the same time. Would like to hear what a really manager would say if he was told he had a subs bench, but couldn't actual use it after being forced to pick a side on Saturday to play a game on Sunday.

I'm not sure if I've got the wrong end of the stick with this but this rule is the same as FPL, CYKI and other games.

The ESPN game allows substitutions on each game day - transfers too. Makes quite a difference. Don't know if any other fantasy football games do this.