This is my ninth season of Fantasy Premier League and my first as a Fantasy Football Scout member and after all these year’s and experience I still don’t know what the best formation to use is. Most of the time I opt for the obvious 3-4-3, or the ever-tempting 3-5-2. And then it came to me, if I can back up my thoughts with hard numbers, why not go 4-4-2 or even more daring and go 4-5-1. The point of this, my first article, isn’t to convince you to change formation tactic, but to share why after half an hour with a calculator I changed to 4-5-1, and why it is my best selection so far.
As we all know, defenders and keepers offer great value, but value can only be achieved if you pick actual point-scorers, this year, Wisdom seems great value, but he has to play, and then keep some clean sheets, I’m not so sure and very happy to see the back of him from my team.
I took the top eight point-scorers of last season from each position, and when you look at it, there aren’t too many surprises, for example in defence, Fonte aside, the other seven are all as expected, two Everton, three Chelsea and two Arsenal. The same goes for the midfield and striking choices.
Please note for the top eight strikers, I don’t have the Suarez figures, which could affect the results significantly, but the eighth best striker is Aguero, who is a good choice as he missed a lot of game time last year and he has a high points-per-game value.
So I took the top eight scorers and simply got the average points for each position: defenders 161, midfielders 178 and strikers 174, so as you can see at first glance, not a major difference between the three positions.
However, we all know that last season’s strikers were injured a lot, so I then looked at the minutes played by these top eight guys. They averaged 33 games, 28.5 games and 26.5 games respectively, so now we know the strikers are getting more points per game: 4.8 (defenders), 6.2 (midfielders) and 6.6 (strikers) per game – nothing too exciting there.
Defenders need an extra seven games to get fewer points, so for those extra seven games at six points each you can get an extra 40 points, but I would say out of those seven games, we don’t know about half of them in advance as rest and rotation hits you hard, so in reality, it could be four games and only an extra 25 points gained.
Now here is the interesting bit – I didn’t know what to do with that data. If my strikers play 30 games instead of 26 they will score 200 points instead of 160, so I then got the top eight game time players and found that the top eight defenders average 36.5 games a year, midfielders 35.7 and strikers 29.9. This shows clearly that strikers just don’t play a full season.  So, unless you can find a Suarez who bucks the trend, stock up on midfielders. They play a full season and average six points per game, and then stock up on defence. All you have to do is pick a top-eight point-scorer to be in with a chance.
So this season, my Suarez is Robin van Persie, and that’s it, I’ve gone 451, it allows me to get five big guns in my team and have a strong defence. With two weeks to go my team looks like this.
Foster – Smalling, Baines, Taylor, Davies – Fabregas, Sigurdson, Ramsey, Gerrard, Toure – RVP
As I said at the start of this article, I’m not trying to re-invent the wheel, just share that for the first time, I have convinced myself that I don’t have to play 3-4-3 and follow the template team – and if it doesn’t work, I always have my wildcard.
