Prompted by Jonty’s hot topic on the Fantasy Premier League’s bonus point magnets so far I thought it worth looking at their allocation in more detail to establish who the baseline bonus point stars are so far. 

Baseline BPS Explained

Baseline bonus takes a closer look at FPL’s Bonus Point System, which gives points to key player attributes and is used to allocate bonus points. By stripping out the more obvious criteria such as goals, assists and clean sheets this leaves a baseline of underlying statistics that add to a players’ BPS score. More information about bonus allocation can be found in the  FPL rules.

Here’s a recap of the positive attributes that contribute to a good baseline BPS score:

• Successful crosses
• Creating a big chance
• Clearances, blocks, interceptions (CBIs)
• Recoveries
• Tackles
• Dribbles
• Pass completion

and the negative things:

• Conceding a penalty
• Missing a big chance
• Making an error which leads to a goal (or attempts on goal)
• Being tackled
• Conceding a foul
• Being offside
• Shots off target

Essentially, being a ‘tidy’ player that is not prone to mistakes and is good at a variety of skills will increase the chances of getting bonus points. This has historically given certain players a high chance of getting points if they do something else good in the game, such as score, as well as if the game is a 0-0 bore draw.

For example Ashley Williams at Swansea always hit very high CBIs and could be confident of getting at least 2 bonus if he also got a cleansheet.

When Yaya Toure scored a goal it was usually worth at least one bonus point due to his high pass rates and overall contribution.

What is interesting is to find if there are any other players that are likely to gain these bonus points with any regularity. The best way, I think, to do this is to try to determine Baseline BPS (bBPS) by looking at players BPS from each week, and removing those BPS awarded for goals, assists, saves and cleansheets (i.e. those things that directly gain a player points anyway).

I’ve left in cards and own goals, despite them having an immediate link to FPL points, because I didn’t originally build the spreadsheet to take account of them.

2016/2017 so far

Obviously we’re only seven Gameweeks in, so still a pretty small sample size, so we must take everything with an appropriate amount of salt.

Ranking in terms of regular BPS, we can see high scores for:

1. Kevin De Bruyne – 199
2. James Milner – 193
3. Daley Blind – 178
4. Diego Costa – 173
5. Laurent Koscielny – 172
6. Etienne Capoue – 166
7. Kyle Walker – 165
8. Phillippe Coutinho – 164
9. Christian Fuchs – 161
10. Adam Lallana – 160

I fully expect Milner, Costa, Capoue and Coutinho to drop off of that list once we remove their goals from the calculations. The others may stay as they have a more rounded game. But let’s see…

So for every goal they score, we remove the relevant points (24 for forwards, 18 for midfielders, 12 for defenders. For every assist we remove 9 points. Etc etc etc.

Then we are left with the following “baseline BPS” scores:

1. Idissa Gueye (Everton) – 142
2. Daley Blind (Man Utd) – 136
3. Eric Bailly (Man Utd) – 135
4. Lukasz Fabianski (Swansea) – 131
5. Curtis Davies (Hull) – 128
6. Antonio Barragan (Middlesbrough) – 122
7. Tom Heaton (Burnley) – 120
8. Nacho Monreal (Arsenal) – 120
9. Artur Boruc (Bournemouth) – 119
10. Sam Clucas (Hull) – 119

A few unfamiliar names in that list! So how far did our previous top 10 drop?

1. Kevin De Bruyne – 109 (23rd)
2. James Milner – 112 (joint 16th)
3. Daley Blind – 136 (2nd)
4. Diego Costa – 11 (312th)
5. Laurent Koscielny – 112 (joint 16th)
6. Etienne Capoue – 85 (78th)
7. Kyle Walker – 99 (51st)
8. Phillippe Coutinho – 83 (84th)
9. Christian Fuchs – 116 (13th)
10. Adam Lallana – 79 (101st)

So obvious Daley Blind is looking pretty good. As for the others, not so much. Costa, somewhat unsurprisingly, is absolutely hammered in bBPS.

If Jose Mourinho can start getting Manchester United some clean sheets, then we can certainly expect Blind and Bailly to be getting bonus. Meanwhile, it is worth noting that Antonio Valencia is 14th in the list with 114 bBPS.

Low Minute Baseline Kings

What about if we take minutes into account? Any players out there with great baseline stats, but not enough involvement, that we should keep an eye on?

Limited to players that have played at least 180 minutes of the campaign so far, let’s take bBPS and divide per minutes played then we can multiply up to see what they might have scored if they’d played all game every game. The results are like this:

1. Lee Chung-yong (Crystal Palace) – seems to have lost his place, but could have been on 176 bBPS
2. Daley Blind (Man Utd) – could have been even higher on 158
3. David Marshall (Hull) – started very strongly so far, could have been on 154
4. Claudio Bravo (Man City) – despite high profile mistakes, his bBPS are great and could have been on 152
5. Idrissa Gueye (Everton) – has played almost every minute and has a great all around game. Could have been slightly higher on 144
6. Eldin Jakupovic (Hull) – obviously been a Hull keeper gives you high bBPS, could have been on 142
7. Jordan Pickford (Sunderland) – good metric for budget keepers apparently, could have been on 140
8. Shkodran Mustafi (Arsenal) – may well be able to convert this into bonus at some point, could have been on 140
9. Nicolas Otamendi (Man City) – seems to have made the position his own, and could have been on 139 bBPS.
10. David Luiz (Chelsea) – played 90 minutes for the last 3 games, could have been on 135 if he’d been there all season.

Conclusion

• If they get the hang of cleansheets, expect bonus for Hull defenders and keepers. We’ve seen high bBPS for Curtis Davies, plus high bBPS per minute for both Jakupovic and Marshall in goals.
• By and large, the bBPS seems to favour defenders over attackers – very few mentions of anyone that you’d expect to be scoring goals. It is mostly CBs rather than FBs that dominate.
• Daley Blind is scoring very highly in both BPS and bBPS and is probably the stand-out name from this analysis.
• Idrissa Gueye is another, but is unlikely to convert it into many points. He was 17th in the full BPS list with 151, and could well be worth a look, but probably needs to add more assists to his game to get much FPL love.