Fixed Cost and Player Value

Interesting read, thanks! 🙂

Good article

The values quoted in this article are not the value for the player but the value for the amount that you spend over the the base cost for that position.

True value for the player needs to include the base cost. When doing this you will achieve a more accurate valuation for the player and this will lessen the disproportionate value factor for each player, improving player comparability.

If Elliot scores 2.3PPM and he is a baseline value goalkeeper, using the suggested value calculation would give him infinite value (2.3/0), therefore you need to include base cost when calculating value.

Great article! Posted on the wrong day though probably, love the concept.

Firetog, on behalf of the respectful members of this site I'd like to apologise for the RMTs posted above. Truly excellent piece.

Excellent Article.

Great article, thanks.

Good article.
You can't choose your whole squad based on value, however. Absolute points must be the first consideration, especially for your captain candidates.
But I agree completely that the rest of the squad should be filled with value players, and this method is a very good one to use.

Good article but my instinct is it is flawed

You shouldn't have to arbitrarily change the base figures to force it to work!

You need to develop a concept of base points to go with your base costs - and then evaluate additional points over additional spend...

Marvellous stuff!
We're into the final hours here - could you give us a list of surprising or unexpected punts following this formula? I can see Hennessey who's never mentioned around here.

Choose 1 Pls:

DDG + Danilo

Or

Foster + Valencia

I think this approach is fundamentally flawed. It assumes that the baseline £4m spent on every defender, for example, is worth no points. This will obviously result in the conclusion that cheap players have the most value. You need to distribute the points accrued over the entire cost of the player or else points per £ makes no sense.
The clue is in the fact that, without arbitrary manipulations, you get a divide by zero error.

There is a lot of truth in the idea of this piece. As you mention, however, there is al limit to how many people you can (per position) select/field/captain. If those constraints were adequately modeled, using your cost over base method would make for the perfect optimization. I've seen this in other fantasy games (mainly in NBA with prices ranging from 0.5 to 5). The points per value are often greatest for the right cheaper ones. The true value of the expensive big hitters is the minimal 'team space' they claim to deliver their points per value, and of course the fact that you can't distribute the captaincy over a bunch of cheaps.

So my education is in economics and due to this and other posts, I have been thinking about how we should value players lately. It was always clear the relevant concept is opportunity cost: "the loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen."

So let's say you are interested in a 5.0 defender. You expect him to get 3.0 PPG, and for 4.5 you can get a defender with an expectation of 2.5 PPG. The oppotunity cost of the 3 PPG from the 5.0 defender, is 2.5 PPG and 0.5 million in the bank. So what do you get for that 0.5 million? It seems rather obvious and intuitive you get 0.5 PPG extra, or a 1 PPM return on the extra money spent.

I find it very difficult to get my head around the ppm concept. I find all the stats great in principle but I see the game in much more of a gut instinct and player form view. Since the game mechanism incorporates a stock market that is fuelled by these two principles, of instinct and form, I think there needs to be more to it than just running numbers. But my highest finish is 390,550, so what do I know. :/

The mathematics underlying this method is totally unsound.

The reasoning is based on the assumption that a player's value can be calculated independently of the total budget left, which, forgive me, is nonsense. I explain why:

Let's take the notion value seriously and fill the positions by values, as coming from the calculations. Try and do it yourself.
We are going to end up with a lot of money in the bank and a really bad team.

Although I acknowledge that value plays a role in budget allocation, the way to use it is much more subtle.

Thanks for this article, I think it is important to explore value in a more nuanced way than simply points per million. And I also believe that timing was a bit challenging on this post as the start of the season was upon us.

I do have to agree with many of the posters here about VORP as maybe a more accurate indicator than the sunk costs of completing a squad that you looked at here.

Another issue is that for many of us, real replacement value doesn't come from a baseline of the minimum salary for that position, but rather from a much smaller group of players: those options whom we are actually likely to pick. I wonder if the baseline for attackers might need to start at something like 5.0/5.5m for midfielders, and 5.5/6.0m for forwards.

Kane or lukaku for captain today?

First time poster - so I apologise if the logic for the above (which seems to be repeated in a couple of other posts and places) is based on something previously discussed.

Surely this is like comparing cars - the key metric being akin to the total distance a car can travel on a tank of fuel. The above calculates the miles per gallon but ignores the size of the tank! If you get 1 ppm that's not necessarily worse than 1.5 ppm if the first player is 10m you will get 10 points - if the second player is 5m then you will only get 7.5 points.

Or perhaps I'm missing something?

Also this is the first website I've been on where the posts basically don't matter and people just essentially shout RMT! Why isn't there just a RMT channel or area?

Very informative, TYVM. By reducing prices by 0.5, to negate the zero error causes a huge bias. I recalculated, reducing by 0.01. The Austin to Kane ratio becomes 1.37 to 0.83 - still leaning heavily towards Austin, but not by as much. Another example - Hennessy to Heaton (was 3.2 to 2.87 deducting -0.5) becomes 2.15 to 2.16 deduction 0.01 - almost the same, and actually just favouring Heaton.

Excellent arguments and counter-arguments.

What you are attempting to do is develop a rudimentary approach to solve a pretty complex combinatorial optimisation problem (e.g. travelling salesman). Often this is sensible because, with the number of combinations we're considering, a brute force algorithm would exceed the computing power of Excel or equivalent.

But in this case we have millions of data points, i.e. players. All you need to do is look at the best players' teams over the course of a season. See for example the 14/15 season top 1k research on FPL Discovery.

It's a few years old, but there's some valid conclusions to be made based on those top 1k teams in 14/15:
- Goalkeepers aren't a particularly important driver of overall performance AND pick cheap ones (e.g. Krul in 14/15)
- Defenders aren't particularly important either, but do require a more balanced approach, mixing premiums (e.g. Baines, Terry) and cheaper ones (e.g. van Aanholt)
- Midfielders a huge driver of overall success, but driven by premiums and mid-priced, i.e. limited evidence of outperformance in 4.5-6.0 range
- Forwards typically two premiums (e.g. Aguero, Costa) and one budget (e.g. Kane, Austin)
- Pick the main man for a given team, i.e. stop seeking value by downgrading to more peripheral players
- Transfers should be reserved for premium midfielders and premium strikers

Excellent stuff Firetog. Thanks for posting - weird to see how much of the 100 mil budget will actually have to play with. I might base next years team around some of the points raised here!

Hey guys which is the better option?

Iwobi and Jesus

or

rashford and mkhit

(I already have lukaku)

I read and bookmarked this article when you published it and I keep returning to it. Thank you the excellent read