Metrics – The Bench Boost and Free Hit

In our latest dip into the Fantasy Premier League metrics, we look back at the results of the chips employed for Double Gameweek 34 before looking ahead to the much-anticipated use of the Free Hit for the blanks in Gameweek 35.

As we’ve seen, Gameweek 34 was a relatively high-scoring one, with the overall average score being 64 (not including transfer hits).

I calculated that the top 10k and 100k averages with hits factored in, and the results are a massive 84.3 points for the top 10k and 81.2 for the top 100k. Pretty impressive.

The effect of using Bench Boost chip helped many to beat even this high average.

Managers in the top 100k reached as high as 134 points this week, while one 10k manager scored 131 points.

Granted, we have seen higher scores in previous Double Gameweeks, but this week was not as bad as it was threatening to be, with many managers scoring 90+ points and a rash of green arrows.

To quantify this more, let’s have a look at the points the top 10k managers gained by using the different chips this week.

We see that those who used Bench Boost were the only ones to beat their rivals, while the other chips helped managers gain over the “chipless” managers, though they still lost out on average compared to the teams around them.

Bench Boosters scored an impressive average of 94.9 points, which gave them a 20.1 points edge over normal teams and a 17.1 points gain over everyone who didn’t use that chip.

Meanwhile, those who turned to the Triple Captain scored an average of 83.3 points, which is lower than the remaining top 10k managers average of 84.5, meaning that they appeared to lose some ground.

This makes sense as the the main Triple Captain choices this week – Harry Kane, Romelu Lukaku and Jamie Vardy – scored just a single goal over the two fixtures, while another, Alexis Sanchez, managed only two points.

Managers who tried something different and went for the use of Free Hit lost even more ground having scored an average of 80.2 points, compared to 84.4 points for the managers around them.

So, it has been a real success for most Bench Boosters this week. But was it because of their bench, or did they just select more wisely?

To examine this, I checked the substitutes of all Bench Boosters this week to get an idea of how much their reserves contributed.

Many managers left some big hitters on the bench because it doesn’t matter, so for a fair comparison, I rearranged every team so that the bench contained the players who didn’t feature, plus the cheapest assets who would normally not be in the starting XI.

The result was that, on average, the bench added 18.4 points for Bench Boosters in the top 10k and 17.8 points in the top 100k.

This is not a bad result, but also not spectacular, given that, under normal circumstances, we’d expect two points per fixture for each bench player will result in a Bench Boost of 16 points.

Still, those 18.4 points were the determining factor in the 20 points gained by the Bench Boosting managers this week.

In fact, many did better than that average bench.

For instance, look at this  impressive 41-point bench in the top 10k.

However, if you feel that your week didn’t go well, don’t worry: you are not alone.

You couldn’t be doing worse than Bench Boosters who got exactly zero points from their bench, like these top 50k teams here, here and here.

There is also this manager who saw his rank drop from 17k to 128k in one week by scoring just one point total 65(-64).

So, don’t panic yet; there are more opportunities for big scores on the horizon.

Speaking of which, let’s now have a look at the Gameweek 35 blanks and the opportunity open to managers who still own their Free Hit chip.

They are not at all a majority in the top 10k, with a percentage of just 33% as we can see in the updated chip use figure below.

But it seems certain that most of the managers with Free Hit intact will activate the chip for Gameweek 35 to help navigate the blanks.

Many of the managers who don’t have the chip used it for the other blanks in Gameweek 31; at that point, there was some extensive debate on whether that was the correct decision.

This is yet to be decided, but in any case, here are some statistics to help both managers plan for their Free Hit moves or transfers this week.

Teams that already used Free Hit currently have an average of 7.4 players with a fixture in Gameweek 35, so with 1.17 free transfers that could raise their number to 8.57 players without hits.

The distribution of current players ownership for non-Free Hit owners is shown below.

So, it seems that the majority have eight players, which could be raised to nine or 10 with transfer hits; that’s hardly disastrous in a Gameweek with just six fixtures.

But, of course, it’s quality not quantity that really matters.

The Free Hitters will have the advantage of picking players with absolute freedom this week to counter potential rotation and form fluctuation.

Therefore, let’s check on the current most owned players in the non-Free Hitter teams destined to start for them in Gameweek 35.

The most likely players to be very popular in non-Free Hit teams will include Nick Pope in goal, Andy Robertson, Nicolas Otamendi and Matthew Lowton in defence, while Mohamed Salah and Luka Milivojevic populate midfields.

The three main strikers are all without a fixture and that could be the area where managers will use their transfers.

Not shown in the image are the duo of Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang (36.6%) and Roberto Firmino (35.6%), who are likely to lead the lines of many non-Free Hit teams, but the remaining percentage of managers will look at other striking options too.

Finally, we check on the Premier League teams that are most represented in managers’ teams without the Free Hit chip to play.

We see that Liverpool is the team most represented in non-Free Hit teams, with an average of 1.8 players.

Burnley are second (1.4), and after that, we find an average of one player per team from Manchester City, Crystal Palace, Arsenal and Newcastle.

These figures might just help the current crop of Free Hitters when it comes to player selection as they bid to get an edge on rivals who have already activated the chip.