Points Per Million Revisted

Thanks for posting. Really shows how much value there is in the 5-6m defender category.

I should note that the table showing value with games as criteria is not correct. Seems like defenders have the same averages as midfielders due to a mistake when creating the table. These are the correct stats for defenders.

All Defenders 0,59
At least 15gms 0,6156
At least 20gms 0,6266

"nailed on" defenders are noticeably better than mids.

This article is savage. No idea how you've compared things historically. That's bonkers. Good work.

wow this is brilliant, i've tried doing the same too on my own and always came up short in terms of my maths.

i'm sticking with my 4-5-1 for sure now 🙂

This article is based on original price not current price therefore largely irrelevant ? Value is a moving target throughout a season and simply has to be measured against current price.

The ‘value’ tab on the FPL site for Value has completely different order compared to the lists above
Fab top keeper
Alonso top defender
Doucoure top mid
Ayew top forward

Also why use points per million per game ? Value on FPL site is simply points per million and redefining ‘Value’ for the purposes of an article to something different in the FPL game is misleading ?

Sorry for being negative but such an article has to be based on the latest game week or atteast benchmarked to GW23 rather than ‘at the time of writing’?

Other than that generally quite interesting 🙂

Thanks for the diligent work. Appreciated!

Wonderful update.
Just wondering when I will have the guts to start a season 5-4-1.

This is outstanding work, and your historical findings are particularly interesting.

It's not too surprising that value generally lies at the back, with keepers better value than defenders on average, who are in turn better value than midfielders, with forwards providing the least bang for their buck as a group.

You make a decent case that a 5-4-1 is the 'easiest' way to guarantee allocating 100m in a cost effective way. However, I think there a few compelling reasons to think that a 3-4-3 or 3-5-2 are still the 'best' approaches to take over the course of a typical season. I have no doubt someone could play a 5-4-1 and very consistently finish in the top 50k, with a 1k finish possible in a particularly strong year, but I would say it's very unlikely that FPL will be won by someone adopting that strategy.

The main reason is that the trend doesn't mean much to the individual. We only have 15 spots in our squads - 2 keepers, 5 defenders, 5 midfielders and 3 forwards. Defenders offer greater value than forwards on average. However, that doesn't mean there aren't Forwards who can provide stronger value than most defenders. For example, your spreadsheet shows that Firmino (0.67) and Wilson (0.73) are offering greater PPGPM than the average Defender this season (0.59). There are 54 Forwards in your spreadsheet, but how many are fantasy relevant? Only the small handful that provide enough value for us to seriously consider them - that's how templates are formed. On the other hand, because of defensive 'coverage', where any of the three to five starting defenders can be viable fantasy assets when their team picks up a clean sheet, there's a much larger pool of picks for us to consider.

There's also the captaincy to consider, which, by doubling your points for a particular player, also doubles their value. The greater a player's points per match, the greater the increase in their value. For that reason, we want to be captaining the highest scoring player every week, as obvious as that sounds, it's really about getting the most value out of your captain. For example, if you captain Harry Kane every week, he's giving you 1.06 PPGPM, rather than 0.53.

The final signficant factor for is that we are restricted by the limits of the game - we have to pick 2 goalkeepers, 5 defenders, 3 midfielders and 3 forwards. That's where VORP (Value Over Replacement Player) comes into it - when you need to pick 5 defenders anyway, it's not just about Points Per Game Per Million, it's about how they compare to the alternatives, given that you have to own someone. For example, there's a minimum spend for each position of 4.0 to 4.5, but if you want to pick 15 starters, that minimum spend will increase, and realistically, will get higher the further up the pitch you go.

What I think this exercise is really useful for is providing benchmarks for what makes someone a good value fantasy asset, depending on their position. For example, looking at your numbers, I would say you don't generally want to own a goalkeeper providing less than 0.75 PPGPM, a defender or midfielder below 0.60 PPGPM, or a forward under 0.50 PPGPM. With those benchmarks in mind, the next step should be to get ourselves a couple of prime captaincy options, namely, two or three of the best players in the game for PPG.

Beyond that, you fill out the rest of the squad however you like, adhering to PPGPM and VORP if you like. If you were doing this by random selection, you would pick 5-4-1, because of the greater value defenders offer on average. However, we don't have to pick blindly - when a player with much greater value than the average for their position (such as Firmino, or this season's outstanding value midfielders in the 8-9m bracket like Salah, Sterling and Pogba), we all jump on board.

We also get a free transfer every week, which allows us to buy in-form attacking players with an enticing run of fixtures. That offers an opportunity to chase an even higher PPGPM than a midfielder or forward will average over the course of a season. Premium defenders offer a steady investment - keep faith in them long-term, and they'll provide value. Those value attacking players also tend to earn more price rises than anyone else, and so team value can be built more easily with this style than the slow and steady 5-4-1 approach. Playing fast-and-loose with a 3-4-3, trying to find that value in midfielders and forwards, either for a short spell or a whole season, is what most of us do intuitively. That said, I still think there's great worth in taking a step back every now and again like this, and looking at the deeper logic behind how we play without thinking about it.

This article made me chuckle, given that I've had 3 premium forwards all season so far. Firmino is as low as I've gone. This is very unusual for me, but not a single one of the cheaper forwards have temped me yet.

That said, my cheaper (value) players like Gross, Lingard, RLC etc seem to be grinding to a halt, so I may need to free up funds imminently.

That's interesting, and a little surprising.

As it's ppgpm do you include every available player from every team, or eliminate those below a certain number of minutes played?
Just wondering if results could more reflect the extent of 'surplus' in every position - both in terms of RL squads/managers & fantasy picks.

It's an interesting angle but I don't think it's necessarily as cut and dry as that. What would happen to these for example if every single player was £5m more at the start (so cheapest defender and keeper £9m, and attackers £9.5m). Would that skew the results given the differences are now proportionally less?

Maybe a different angle would be to say that the cheapest possible team we can produce is 7 x £4m + 8 x £4.5m = £64m so we only have £36m of discretion. How much additional benefit do we get therefore in this discretion, from every additional £0.5m increment in each position?

Love these kind of articles. One suggestion. For even more granularity, I'd prefer to see "points per minute played", rather than "points per games played".

Any chance you could whip one up in future?

Who to play in place of Arnie this week?

A) Lingard
B) Jones

Arnie Lingard Gross > Mahrez Obiang Willian for -8

Yay or nay?

This tells us who's doing well. But you can already see that. How do we predict the future?!

Does this tie in at all with the recent article/discussion about obtaining the Dream Team?

I guess the method is to stick defenders in for long term and then chase form up front.

The creators of the game have really thought it through to make it tricky and engrossing.

A) Smalling, Mbemba, De Bruyne
B) Valencia, Stones, Lingard

Great article. I am considering changing my team formation up and this will really help to inform my decision! I think your argument for a different formation definitely caries some merit. Your results clearly show that midfielders offer better value than strikers at each price range bracket (unlike in previous seasons).

Deciding whether to invest in defenders or midfielders (or strikers) is a little trickier, however. This is because you cannot compare ppgpm across different priced players without also comparing ppg = ppgpm * price. In other words, higher priced players may offer a higher ppg but have a lower ppgpm.

Ultimately, we are trying to maximise ppg subject to the budget of 100 million. This is subtly different to maximising ppgpm.

Hope this adds to the discussion and makes sense. Apologies if already been covered above. And again, great article!!!

Cracking article! Totally enjoyed reading through each and every single comment.
Very informative and extremely good information to have on-board.

Some interesting debates sparked.
Thanks again to all the contributors.

great article. gives more reason to have faith in expensive defenders like alonso. i think finding the odd magic bean that performs well enough is key to getting a good value to top players ratio.

This is a very interesting article thank you. The one thing I have noticed personally is - playing 352 or 343 allows you to have, as you said, two fantastic value players on your bench in the form of defenders.

As a current 451 player, I have noticed I have more money tied up in the bench and much poorer value coming from the bench in a time when benches seem more important than ever. Instead of a nailed 4.5 defender I have 4.5 to 5.5 mil non nailed attackers which is a downfall I guess.

Has the idea about adding in the age of a player been considered?

Catching a forward/midfield player at 24-27 he is likely to be scoring more point each season. With defenders, especially centre backs, getting better later. Then as players naturally decline physically their high scoring past seasons will reflect high cost, but their output will naturally decrease.

Great read and confirms my intention of working on a switch to 442.

Kudos

This makes total sense, thanks for the article. I've gone five at the back before, but the problem is that we aren't taking account of jumping on form players - usually attackers. This article is more about keeping the players all year round. I've considered 442 but I just hate the way it looks. Saying that I will probably move to it from 352 or to 451 when I remove Kun in a few weeks. Stones looked good as a fourth defender but now with their buying this new fella I might go Monreal who seems to have become a new player post-Sanchez

Awesome article, WesMantooth! Always good to see some number crunching.

Wesmantooth, thanks so much for revisiting this in such great detail. Your analyses are so much more thorough than mine ever could have been. I don't mean to suggest for a moment that people hadn't thought along these lines before I wrote my piece (they surely did) but it is great to have people working on the data and a methodology. It's all really interesting and what an effort to fold in all the historical data!

One thing I would suggest is that you may want to tailor the players in the dataset so that you have more or fewer places depending on the number of players for that position. So your subset of midfielders may want to be, say, 4x the subset of keepers as there are so many viable options in the midfield bracket and not many goalkeepers.

I would be very interested to see if you take this further. Happy to work on something collaborative. I'm not amazing with statistics and modelling but I can certainly help think of some logical research methodologies!

Thanks again

RA

About three seasons ago, there was a debate on how best to assess value. I proposed the use of ppg/m then. There were a lot of naysayers.