I see a lot of comments from Fantasy managers concerning coverage. Often a manager will talk of “needing some Spurs cover”; others will say that coverage is a useless concept, “just pick each player on their own merits”. Actually I think the idea of “cover” is more subtle and less black-and-white than that. So I thought I’d make a small appraisal.
One element of this question is to what degree you are buying the team when you get a player? And that’s where I will start.
Defenders
With defenders it is fairly obvious. Clean sheets (CSs) are the key component of defender points and they don’t rely on the one individual. However, Fantasy Premier League bonus point potential and attacking potential do vary between defenders of the same team.
Take Everton; Leighton Baines with his attacking threat has 72 points so far, Ashley Williams has 61, around 16% lower.
Or Southampton; Virgil Van Dijk has the attacking threat and 72 points, while fellow centre back Jose Fonte 58, around 20% lower.
So, could we say that defender choices are perhaps 70% the team and 30% the individual?
Maybe something like that would do as a broad estimate, I’m sure that someone with the time and interest could work out a deeper price/performance based variation between defenders in the same team. Although sometimes you have to pay more for certainty of selection of course.
As an example here, I’d be delighted with Manchester United’s Phil Jones recently if I had brought him in. But I am dissatisfied with his team mate Antonio Valencia. Same team, same CSs but the full back hasn’t added the value expected of a player in a more attacking role.
So, obviously coverage makes sense when it comes to defenders. It’s not just that you are actually buying the teams as much or more than the individual defenders, it’s also that if you are wanting to make the best use of defender rotation then having five teams’ fixtures to choose from every week. This is not to say that a double-up is bad; obviously it isn’t if you can pick a team that gets loads of clean sheets. But still that mean you are double-covering that team in effect. So I’d say that coverage is a clear element in picking defenders, When it comes to attackers it is more nuanced, however.
Attackers
With attackers it is different, but not entirely. If a team creates few chances and scores few goals then that impacts a player as well. It is rare that a player scores a goal that does not depend on his team-mates to at least some degree.
So you are still buying the team. However, individual performance does have more of an influence here than with CSs, for example.
Buying any Hull attacker would seem an exercise in futility were it not for the fact that Robert Snodgrass is so clearly their key player.
He has been involved (goal/assist) in 53% of Hull’s goals this season (67% over the last 6 weeks). As a comparison the likes of Kevin De Bruyne of Manchester City and Tottenham duo Christian Eriksen and Dele Alli are at around 30% over the season (though Alli has been around 53% in the last six Gameweeks). Snodgrass has a bigger slice of a smaller cake in other words.
Team performance is therefore still influential for attackers but individual performance (of which goal involvement can be a measure) can mean that a player out-performs or under-performs their team more than a defender will. Maybe it reverses as far as 30% the team and 70% the individual for attackers but even that is variable. Dimitri Payet created tons of chances for West Ham earlier in the season but with no striker to finish them his individual performance level counted for little. You might have thought you were buying Payet but essentially what you got was West Ham.
All in all, I think that team performance is therefore a more significant component than we might imagine it to be when selecting players, even attackers.
RISK v REWARD
Essentially what coverage often comes down to is risk v reward. Take Alli and Eriksen as an example:
- You can decide which you believe to be the best bet and get them. That will be costly if the other does much better but beneficial if you pick the right one.
- You can get both, which reduces risk and reward in terms of the Spurs coverage. Essentially you then even out the points between the two. You do better than having the “wrong” one but not so well as if you chose the “right” one, not unless Spurs do really well and both players out-perform similarly priced options.
- Or you can have neither, either on the basis that you don’t think Spurs will score enough goals or because you think the points will be too spread to make any one player great value.
When you pick, say, one attacking player each from the six teams you expect to score the most goals you are therefore playing a high risk/reward strategy at the player level because you have all variations possible between getting the best six players from each and getting the worst six from each (among the realistic choices). But you are reducing risk/reward at team level because you are not ignoring one of the high-potential teams.
When you double up on attackers from a team (say, Alli & Eriksen) you are reducing risk/reward within that team but increasing it in relation to the team(s) you decided to ignore.
Doubling evens out the variation with the one team (reduced risk/reward) but increases it in relation to other teams (if the team you double on has a sticky run while other teams you ignored go big for example, or of course the reverse).
The fact that we only have maximum seven attackers means that we are always facing such decisions. So “coverage” and deciding what to do about it, is an ingredient of how the game works actually. Isn’t it?
Conclusion
Nobody consciously picks a player they think is going to get less points than another player simply for “coverage” – that is clear.
But the fact of the matter is that often it’s far from clear who the better pick is.
Gylfi Sigurdsson v Adam Lallana was a realistic either/or choice back in Gameweek 15. Both players were similarly priced and had fair fixtures, one the key player, on penalties and set pieces in a weaker team and one a lesser light in a better team. In this case it was those that backed the more prolific team that won out. Managers that thought “Liverpool are going to score a bagful of goals, I’ll get in on that by taking Lallana” were rewarded with 45 points from the next six games rather than the 28 from six accrued by Sigurdsson.
Essentially what this is saying is that coverage (and our decisions about it) is an inherent part of the FPL game, whether we choose to call it that or not.
It also relates to our captaincy options (and how we play that risk/reward game) and the way we deal with ownership levels (which also have risk/reward implications and are another element of coverage). I studiously ignore ownership myself but that doesn’t mean that I’m not aware of how much of a factor it is.
Managers sometimes use all kinds of mantras and maxims in order to simplify FPL for themselves.
Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. But underneath, FPL has subtleties that are not immediately obvious. Coverage is one of them.
7 years, 3 months agoThanks for this. I've certainly been caught out many times by investing in the wrong player to cover a teams fixtures. Yes Harry Kane against Burnley and Hull - I'm looking at you!