A lot of Fantasy managers’ thoughts are starting to come down to the last couple of spots in their team as they asking themselves something along the lines of “will I spend big on on this striker and a cheap midfielder, or will I go expensive in defense?” Whether it’s which positions provide more bang for your buck to help to determine your formation, or who the best guy is to fill up your team with only 4.5 left in the budget, it all comes down to this: who is the best value for money?
It was when I started considering this that I noticed I had been completely ignoring value when picking a squad. Using the value data already available in the Fantasy Football Scout members area I thought I’d develop some further research into value and find out which players offer the best and worst value.
METHODOLOGY
I adapted this concept from a baseball statistic, Value Over Replacement Player (VORP). It basically tries to compare everyone’s performance to some notional baseline of a replacement player that costs you nothing to help comparisons of different positions relative to each other, as they all have different baselines.
So, for Fantasy Premier League, I picked out baseline players at each position (all calculations will be dependent on your baseline, and as such can vary wildly according to this choice):
GK – Foster – WBA – £4.5m – 127.5 points
DEF – Yoshida – SOT – £4.5m – 104.4 points
MID – McCarthy – EVE – £5.0m – 95.4 points
FWD – Jutkiewicz – BUR – £5.0m – 81.7 points
RESULTS AND CONCLUSION
I found that more expensive goalkeepers and defenders in the 5.5 and 6.0 price range are worth the price compared to other positions. Low-priced strikers offer the best value overall, but are difficult to pinpoint at the start of the season.
The best players for value I found were:
Leighton Baines and Romelu Lukaku (Everton), Jonjo Shelvey and Gylfi Sigurdsson (Swansea), Christian Eriksen (Spurs) and Pelle (Southampton)
The worst players for value were:
Mathieu Debuchy and Santi Cazorla (Arsenal), Oscar (Chelsea) and Robin van Persie (Manchester United)


