For those of you who played ChampManFPL, you already know me. For those of you who didn’t – here’s a short introduction about myself and about the SRS model I will be sharing throughout the season – Link to GW17 ChampMan article.
Having said that, the SRS model is quite useless until at least GW5 or so, not to mention before GW1. So instead, I will be sharing player comparisons based on stats and my own opinion about them. This is the first article of a series that we’ll be publishing up to the start of the season. I’m going to compare players by position and price mostly. I encourage you all to follow and DM me and ask for comparisons you would like to see and I will make sure to put them out here.
We will have the SRS as well and I will publish the first article closer to Sep 12th.
Let’s start. If there’s one thing I learned from ChampMan is that we are not building zombie teams. I know it is obvious, but I see a lot of people out there already declaring “this guy is nailed season long”, “that guy will have at least 10 attacking returns”, etc…
You are not going to hold the same team season long, so there is literally no point of looking for players that will have a good season, apart from maybe 4-5 players. Matt Holland was expected to have around 8a & 8g when we started CMFPL. He hit that exactly, does that mean he was worth holding throughout the season – NO!!!.
Keeping the above in mind, what we do want is to have the best team for the next 5-6 GWs, especially at the start of the season. So, let’s start by looking on 3 expensive Forwards with good fixtures. I don’t have data for players that haven’t played in the PL last year, so those will be excluded here, but doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be looked at. The screenshots you’ll see are from a tool I built for myself, and are taken from last year’s data, so disregard prices and ownership numbers.
First I will post each player’s stats and finish with a comparison view.
First forward we will look at is – Danny Ings
As we can see, Danny is not only capable in away games, last season he had better returns away from home. Another interesting part is the game difficulty breakdown. Ings excels in the FDR2 and FDR3 games, and he is starting the season with 8 of those in the first 9 GWs.
Second forward is Raul Jimenez
Raul, or as I like to call him – Raulito (After all he has only left my team for a couple of GWs since arriving to the PL as a 5.5 FWD) – has 2 though GWs to start with, but after that it is all green till GW8 for the Mexican. He has exactly the same amount of points home and away and is also very consistent in all game difficulties. This is not surprising from mister reliable.
Third forward is Harry Kane
While the 2 FWDs above played 38 games last season, Kane only played 29. However, he is not that far from them in terms of returns. We all know what Kane is capable of doing. We all know that he plays for Mourinho. I still don’t know how to handle those 2 facts together. As you can see Kane is smashing it in FDR2 games with a massive average of 6.4. He has 6 of those in the first 8 GWs. Could be a massive differential in my opinion.
Now, for the comparison data. Check it out:
Ings was the best in terms of goals and bonus out of the three, while Jimenez had the most assists. I can’t see Ings scoring the same amount again, which means a double decrease to his bonus points as well. In terms of advanced stats, Jimenez is dominating every category here, interestingly he has taken 24 more shots than Ings (both played 38), but has only 1 more xG to his name. Another sign for me that Ings has overperformed last year.
Looking at all of this data, I will be starting the season with Jimenez, same as I did for the last 2 seasons. I never regretted that decision and I hope things will continue as is.
Let me know what players you want to see compared @TheSchachter