The Numbers Game – Burnley

Is investing in the third striker berth wise?

Lord forgive me, for I have sinned in creating this monster. For those of you who can't be asked, there is a TL;DR at the bottom. 🙂
For this little piece I will be analysing budget and mid-range attackers separately, comparing them with budget defenders/mids and mid-range defenders/mids, to see whether a 3rd attacker is better to invest in than a 5th mid or 4th def. The prices are not their original pricing which they started off with but the pricing which they finished the season on, which may see us miss out on options that exploded out of their price range, but I believe this is more fair as it cuts out any anomalies each group might have had.

Subjective price range:

Budget Defender: 4.9 - 3.8
Budget Midfielder: 6.2 - 4.1
Budget Forward: 6.7 - 4.3

I’ll start with Budget players.
In terms of average points taken from the top ten scoring players in each price section (as seen below, rounded to 1 sig. fig.), we quickly see that forwards were emphatically not the way to go last term, with the worst points per million and the highest cost to buy out of the three options. Midfielders have the best ppm and raked in the most overall points, but cost only marginally less than the third forward option. Thus, they seem to me to be the best option for those who have some cash to splash on their 5th mid position, but for those with money in mind, a 4th budget defender is by far the best route to go as for 0.8 mil less you can avail yourself of a 22 ppm player (2 less than the highest, 24 for mids). Overall, the choice last season appeared to be spend more for a 5th budget mid and their points surplus (compared to the other two), or go all out budget and opt for a cheap 4th defender to free up other funds. Going with a cheap 3rd forward was not the most efficient route.

Budget Defender average points: 106
Budget Midfielder average points: 132
Budget Forward average points: 110

Budget Defender average ppm: 22
Budget Midfielder average ppm: 24
Budget Forward average ppm: 19

Budget Defender average price (top ten scoring players): 4.8
Budget Midfielder average price (top ten scoring players): 5.6
Budget Forward average price (top ten scoring players): 5.7

Subjective price range:

Mid range Defender: 5.4 – 5.0
Mid range Midfielder: 8.2 - 6.3
Mid range Forward: 8.7 - 6.8

Let’s move on to the mid range.
*Before we begin, there were not enough Mid-range forwards to actually get ten of them which had scored more than a handful, so I opted for five instead, even though this makes the average less accurate.
Looking at the stats below, it is clear that mids are the options to look for in the mid-range. Whilst defenders have the same ppm as mids, they trail by over 40 points, and embarrassingly for the mid-range attacking options, they are 30+ behind mids as well.
There are multiple reasons for this, I believe, but perhaps the most pertinent one is simply the one I previously disclaimed; there were too few forward options in this bracket for it to truly be viable for continual usage last term. The forwards I had to use for the average were Defoe, Benteke, Giroud, Slimani, and Rooney, of all people. This must showcase the dire state of the mid-range attacker; for me to include someone who played more than 80 minutes of gametime all of 12 times all season as the fifth highest scorer of this group is pretty bad.
It also meant that filling the third striker berth with a mid range striker was a hazard when one player stopped performing, a la Defoe in the final third – who could people use to replace him as a viable option? Only a much more expensive option like Lukaku or Costa who was more reliable, or a cheap budget option; both of which would have required a re-structure of the team and several precious transfers.
Even though there was a small sample size to choose an average from (or perhaps because of), there is no excuse for forwards costing 7.9 on average getting a mere 7 points more than a mighty 5.2 defender; much better that this money were invested elsewhere in the team.

Mid range Defender average points: 108
Mid range Midfielder average points: 149
*Mid range Forward average points: 115

Mid range Defender average ppm: 21
Mid range Midfielder average ppm: 21
*Mid range Forward average ppm: 15

Mid range Defender average price (top ten scoring players): 5.2
Mid range Midfielder average price (top ten scoring players): 7.0
Mid range Forward average price (top five scoring players): 7.9

Of course, this isn’t to say that a third striker is simply not an option. Even if investing money in a mid-range defender is seemingly a better idea than signing a mid-range striker (there are myriad other factors to consider, not just these most basic ones), many of us put the position to great use last season, and sometimes it was a great source of points – for example Benteke’s haul during his DGW – but to be honest, wasn’t that very third striker berth the one which was the source of the most consternation on the site? Think Gabbiadini, Negredo, Rondon, Origi, think Rashford and Wilson and Austin. I’m quite happy that for the large part I avoided most of those problems with a general 3-5-2 for most of the time.
Whether we can extrapolate this into next season or not, I can’t say yet for sure. I imagine that FPL could do something to fix up the mid-range striker problem, or that we’ll get lucky with any transfers that occur during the summer transfer window and find the spot teeming with options and no longer stagnant, but I find most likely that we’ll find ourselves in a similar situation next year. I, for one, will be spending my third striker money on my midfield and defence again, barring a significant change to the status quo.

TL;DR
I'm going to invest in my midfield and defence before I touch my third striker slot. You can do what you want 😛