Who Offers The Most Bang For Their Buck?

There is a big debate on the forums about which formation to use. Some prefer to put all their money in attack because that is where the big points are. Others may go with five reliable defenders, a top-four keeper and forget about defence for the year. And, of course, there is every other strategy in between. While no one can predict short term results, I wanted to know what the best strategy was over the long term, if everyone performed according to their pricing.

Incremental gain analysis explained

For this I made some calculations and came up with my incremental gain analysis table (See below). Basically, it tells you how many points per appearance (PPA) on average you should expect to gain if you put a little extra in a position. For example: All the keepers which cost 4.5 in the current Fantasy Premier League scored a total of 630 points between them from 170 appearances last season. This translates into a PPA of 3.7. However, if you upgrade to a keeper costing 5.0 then you will gain an incremental benefit of 0.1 PPA.

Note: I have excluded all players from the data who made fewer than 10 appearances last season.

The Results and Conclusion

The detailed results can be found here  in my incremental cost benefit table.

Conclusion 1: Buy cheap 4.5 keepers. While some 4.5 keepers will get less and others more, on average you don’t gain much by investing more in this category.

Defenders on the other hand give you steady increase in returns by increasing outlay. On average defenders will give you a little below 0.5 PPA extra for every 0.5 increase in cost.

However, defenders do not outscore the top midfielders. Also, if you exclude Yaya Toure from the data, midfielders will give a 0.4 PPA increase for every 0.5 cost increase on average. However, midfielder gains are not steady. Midfielders priced at 9.0 in the current game performed very well last year. For lower price brackets you are rolling the dice.

Conclusion 2: Defenders are a safe bet for incremental gains. They also offer slightly better incremental gains than midfielders.

Conclusion 3: Go for big hitting midfielders or duds. Anything else is an expectation of a much better performance than last season.

If you exclude Van Persie, forwards offer similar gains to midfielders. And like the midfielders, the heavy hitters are the ones to get. The exception here is the 8.5 bracket, which has Giroud, Adebayor and Dzeko, who performed well last season when they played.

Conclusion 4: Pick strikers from top teams who will play. Or pick the cheapest possible. Because strikers from other teams do not perform better than premium defenders.