Top 5 Career Hall of Fame End of Season Review – Part 2

Following on from part one of my end of season review, I continue to examine the moves and strategies of the five managers at the top of 2016/17’s Career Hall of Fame.  

To help out  I have deployed Fusen’s FPL Statistico tool to gain an extra insight into their seasons. I’ve also used Fusen’s Ownership Table tool, which makes it easier to see how well FPL managers timed their transfers (be sure to add your FPL ID to the URL).

CAPTAIN

The final gameweek was a fairly even split between the two most popular captain picks this year. Tottenham’s Harry Kane edged out his rival, Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah, by a solitary point – 12 to 11. However, over the season it was a very different story.

Of the eleven players to be handed the armband this year Kane was the most popular. He was chosen 43% of the time, followed by Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah on 24%. However, it was the Egyptian who proved a more reliable captain choice – his average 22 point return not far off double Kane’s 12.1 points. The Spurs talisman was also the Triple Captain chip choice for each of our Top Five.

Here are their five most popular captain picks this season.

Manchester United’s Romelu Lukaku, Manchester City’s Raheem Sterling and Chelsea’s Eden Hazard complete the most popular captain picks. Lukaku was chosen 13% of the time, Sterling 5%, and Hazard 4%. Lukaku averaged 14.3 points as captain, Hazard 14.5 points, while Sterling averaged an impressive 23.8 points.

TRANSFERS – GAMEWEEK 38

TRANSFER SUCCESS – GAMEWEEK 38

Mark Sutherns (aka Mark) made the most successful transfers in the final gameweek, with Crystal Palace’s Wilfried Zaha and Liverpool’s Virgil van Dijk contributing 15 points to his Gameweek total of 77.

Mark finished 11,458 overall, having slipped out of the top 10,000 in the final two Gameweeks. An excellent end of season surge between Gameweeks 31 and 35, in which he made bold transfer moves and good use of his chips, saw him climb from 47,814 to 5,316.  

He didn’t give himself enough credit for buying West Ham’s Marko Arnautovic on his Gameweek 32 Wildcard, a player ignored by the other Top Five managers because of a poor Double Gameweek 34 fixture. Mark was immediately rewarded with a 16 point return, as the Austrian scored two goals against a Southampton side managed by his former boss at Stoke, Mark Hughes.

After successfully playing his Free Hit chip in Gameweek 35, Mark felt he didn’t deserve to be ranked just outside the top 5,000. He’d largely stagnated for much of the season – he jumped up to 51,461 in Gameweek 16 but by Gameweek 30 he’d hardly progressed. It was a frustrating period for him in which he felt like he was “treading water”. The fact that he saw red arrows in the final two gameweeks won’t have made him feel much better.

Over that period of stagnation from Gameweeks 16 to 30, Mark completely ignored Salah as a captain option. His tendency to favour Kane was very much his undoing. Mark only finished a point behind Matthew Jones (aka Numb), but was more than 42 points behind him when comparing captain picks.

Over the same period, Matthew made Salah his captain five times, and the Egyptian didn’t blank once. Mark simply couldn’t resist the lure of Kane, and by stubbornly ignoring Salah he cost himself a place in the top 10,000.

TRANSFER SUCCESS – SEASON

Caveats to this table:

• It doesn’t reflect that Transfers aren’t made with only one fixture in mind
• It doesn’t reflect when Patience in an underperforming player finally pays off
• Points from newly transferred in players left on the bench are included.
• Players transferred in and captained have their points counted double.
• I’ve subtracted the points gained on the Free Hit chip from the total

The Free Hit chip rather skewed the figures in Fusen’s FPL Statistico tool, so I’ve subtracted the points gained from the Total Immediate Points Gained from Transfers after Hits. This gives a more accurate reflection of the type of season it has been.

Surprisingly only Graeme Sumner (aka Gregor) managed more than 100 Immediate Transfer Points after Hits.

Graeme started the season fairly badly managing a -8 when he sold Salah for Pogba in Gameweek 3, and followed that up with a -10 points loss on his Wildcard in Gameweek 4. But he soon began to turn things around with four new signings – Newcastle’s Matt Ritchie, Manchester City’s Sergio Aguero, Arsenal’s Hector Bellerin, and Kane – coming in over the next two Gameweeks and earning him 33 immediate transfer points after hits.

The points continued to flow in Gameweek 8 as Sterling and teammate Gabriel Jesus came into his side contributing a further 24 immediate transfer points. Another 20 points followed in Gameweek 15 with the additions of Hazard and Everton’s Dominic Calvert-Lewin. However Graeme’s good run was about to come to an end.

Like Jay, Graeme is quick to shift premium players who are not performing, so after three disappointing returns in succession Hazard was shown the door. The problem for Graeme is that he was saddled with two more Chelsea players who hit a run of bad form – Alvaro Morata and Andreas Christensen. Oddly for Graeme, he left them in his side for too long.

During this period Firmino and Aguero enjoyed their best runs of the season and not owning them hurt Graeme’s rank. As did Alonso, a player who eventually came into Graeme’s side after a run of 67 points in eight games. Although as soon as Graeme bought him, he became useless – over the season Alonso averaged 2.4 points per match when Graeme owned him compared to 5.6 when he didn’t.

Despite topping the Transfer Success table this season, Graeme slumped to his worst rank (152,451) since he started playing FPL in  2009/10. It’s difficult to escape the conclusion that while immediate transfer points are good, sustained returns from new transfers are better.

To adapt the business maxim “turnover is vanity, profit is sanity”, we could say that: “immediate point returns are vanity, sustained returns are sanity”… admittedly it’s not quite as catchy, but you get the point.

TEMPLATE TEAM OF THE SEASON

Players in Bold were present for more than 12 gameweeks

De Gea, Elliot

Alonso, Mee, Dunk, Naughton, Ogbonna

Salah, Sterling, Loftus-Cheek, Richarlison, Hazard

Kane, Firmino, Lukaku

Hardly surprising that Salah, Kane, and Sterling were the most popular picks this season. The Egyptian was present for an average of 33 Gameweeks in the teams of our elite quintet, and was in Mark’s team for all 38 gameweeks.

Jay, despite his incredible start, didn’t own Salah until Gameweek 10. However, as with everything Jay did in the early part of the season, his timing was spot on – Salah scored seven goals by Gameweek 14.

Including the 12 times he made him captain, Salah averaged 14 points per match in Jay’s team. This compares to 9.8 points per match in Mark’s team, although Mark only gave Salah the armband on five occasions.

Kane averaged 31 gameweeks in the Top Five’s teams. Matthew owned him the most (34 gameweeks) and Peter Kouwenberg (aka My Pretty Pony) the least (26 gameweeks). Jay’s ‘Kanexit’ move is well known about, however, Peter’s travails with Kane have gone slightly under the radar.

Not only did Peter join Jay in selling Kane before his back to back hat-tricks in Gameweeks 19 and 20, he had an awful run when making him captain. Early on Kane seemed to defy fixture logic as he blanked against supposedly weaker teams at home, while at the same time scoring on the road and in a tricky home match against Liverpool.

It was an infuriating period for Peter as he consistently tried to play the fixtures. Over the season Kane averaged only 8.2 points per match in Peter’s team, this includes captain points, compared to 10.2 in Jay’s team.

Mark unsurprisingly, giving his tendency to make Kane his captain (22 times this season), has the highest points per match average for the England frontman with 11.8. What is surprising to discover when comparing base points, i.e. not including the extra captain points, is that Kane averages more points per match in Jay’s team than Mark’s – 6.2 vs 6.1. It might only be marginal but given the flak Jay received about ‘Kanexit’ you might have expected it to be the other way around.

IGNORING PREMIUM DEFENDERS

The template team features four defenders who all began the season costing £4.5m. Marcos Alonso is the only premium defender to make the cut. Comparing this to the top three teams in FPL this year might explain why it hasn’t been a great season for our elite quintet.

Looking at FPL winner Yusuf Sheikh’s team we find that the same three players – Salah, Kane, Sterling – appeared the most frequently for him, but the next six players are either defenders or David de Gea. Significantly only one of those six is a budget defender – Burnley’s Ben Mee – the rest are all premium defenders – Manchester City’s Nicolas Otamendi, Chelsea’s Cesar Azpilicueta, Liverpool’s Virgil van Dijk, and Manchester United’s Chris Smalling.

Firmino and Lukaku, who made 16 and 14 appearances respectively in the Top Five’s team of the season, appeared only six and eight times for Yusuf.

For runner-up Paul Gee, his third most owned player this season after Salah and Kane, was Otamendi. Alonso, Burnley’s Nick Pope and Swansea’s Kyle Naughton follow the Argentine, meaning four of his top six most frequently used players are defensive picks.

Long time leader Bharat Dhody had Otamendi as his second most popular pick, ahead of both Kane and Sterling. Alonso, Christensen, Pope, Manchester United’s Phil Jones, and Arsenal’s Sead Kolasinac, all feature among his top ten players used this season.

With premium defenders making such an impact, it’s understandable that if you have only one appearing regularly, it’s not going to be a great season. Otamendi, so popular with the top three FPL managers this season, averaged under 10 appearances in Top Five HoF’s teams.

It’s not as if this wasn’t predicted – RedArrows wrote an article on the value of premium defenders in August last year. Wesmantooth followed up with research on Points Per Million in January, and again with a look at the Best Value Players just a few days ago.

While you still need to pick the right players, the winning formula seems simple – have two or three captain options, after that go for value. By having too many captain options – Salah, Kane, Sterling, Lukaku, Firmino – and ignoring premium defenders our Top Five HoF managers were destined to struggle.