FPL Gameweek 3 – Expected Goals (xG) Analysis

Template season so far, won't talk long to change.

Very interested to see how many points this yields come the end of the season.

I think there's some truth in what you say but the people who win are the managers who spot the differentials, juggle rewarding bandwagon hops and are insightful enough with their captaincy picks.

Template teams will serve you well but it's utilisation of the chips and transfer management that will often be attributed to the best managers in the game. I mean, you can't overtake someone if you both have the same team/make the same transfers/captain the same players.

10/10 good team

For me the whole point of ff is to have fun and take risks... not going to get anywhere following the crowd.

For example i have salah but not mane, however i am willing to take the risk for now and see what happens.

I do enjoy others opinions but think the decision has to be yours at the end of the day otherwise it simply isnt your fanatsy football...

The most captained player in GW2 was Salah, not Agüero.

It's no surprise that a template team will do fairly well. It's a fairly template league.
As long as managers are choosing as many starting players as they can afford from 'the big 6' and then filling in the rest with value picks (zaha/arnie/richarlison etc.) scores will always be fairly similar. Because these players are consistent 'set and forget' picks and even though experienced fpl managers may rearrange according to form and fixtures, you can never really tell when a player will haul. Ghost ships will continue to sail past because they have good players in them.

I suppose if you could track the top 10k teams (maybe using something like fpldiscovery) and try to pick their most common/ template team and captain their most common player every week, you could end up with an extremely high rank. I'm guessing within top 500 would be well within reach.

Well I have exactly 188 points myself with only 6 of the players you posted. Not sure if that makes me template or not!

I don’t think the crowd necessarily have collective wisdom and there is an element of bandwagoning going on, but on the other hand I do think the more ‘hardcore’ players on here occasionally are guilty of overthinking.

I’ve seen many times people on here trying too hard to find the ‘hidden gems’ that the casuals would never think of when in actual fact, the obvious choice was the better one. It happens with captaincy too, especially last year with Salah. Casuals would just perma cap Salah while many of us on here would study the data and go by fixtures, swapping between Kane, Sterling, KDB etc instead of the most in-form player in PL history.

This method would be more relevant if the template team was selected BEFORE GW 1. My guess is that the template team before GW 1 would look vastly different.

You have set up a team that looks far better than a template team simply because you are intelligent enough to recognize bad options at a whim.

The general template team included De Gea, KdB and Firmino. Why are they not in your template team?

That this team has scored well is hardly surprising as many on there have high ownerships because they have scored well. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's no different to noticing that millionaires tend to drive more expensive cars than the population as a whole. It doesn't mean that if you buy an expensive car you are likely to become a millionaire.

Great read. Just to add that the key has always been and always will be, transfering the next template generation before everyone else. That takes patience, skill and good timing. So those who bother to investigate stats & Facts will always shine through eventually.

I have a lot of these players.. However since I started with all of them and that probably explains why I have had such a good start (9k)

Never ever ever buy a player based on ownership if you are serious about FPL.

my main diff vs template
- Salah, Zaha, Arnautovic
+ Auba, Fimino, B. Silva

Its hurt me first 2 weeks as Auba/Firm failed to deliver but at least Salah has not exploded in that time. I believe Salah ties up way too much money and I expect to be able to exploit this in the long run.

At some point I may be forced to reverse this but it will be my decision.

Interesting but problem is assuming most of these players have an ownership in the same ballpark as gw1. AWB Mendy richarlison Mané neves and aguero have been some of the biggest bandwagons in first 2 gws, would guess 3/4 at least weren’t in gw1 template.

I have 7 of the ultimate template team.......does that make me a casual!?

Another common philosophy is to stick top only those players who are currently flying high in the respective positions' points totals, budgets allowing. This is not necessarily the same as sticking to those with high ownership, although the two tracks can be closely related

I have always wondered how much value there is trying so hard.

My wife has had a team for four years now. I'd helped her before but she's totally given up this year so I did auto pick in gw1, left formation and captain. I'm leaving it alone all season. She's 1.9m. That's top third in the world. Mid table in our work league.

That is the template now but was not the template in gw1. It changes every week.

I suggest you read this superb article on the matter:

https://fplacademica.wordpress.com/2018/07/25/vorp-value-over-replacement-player/

It really opened my eyes to how ownership works, and influenced my GW1 selection. The key for me was this paragraph:

"If you build a squad made of highly owned players, you will likely perform around the average of the weekly gameweek score. If you are at the average, and subsequently hovering around rank 50 out of 100 every week, it turns out that your overall rank will keep rising every week, and you will end up close to the top by the end of the season. I wrote an article about this in details on my personal blog. The simulation I did there showed that if your average weekly rank is 198 out of 500 teams, by the end of the season you will rank 14 out of 500. This is because you won’t be missing out on highly scoring players like Salah or Kane for example, because you will own these players, as will most of the league. This is what FPL managers refer to as the risk of missing out on a highly owned highly scoring player."

FFS and all the other scout casters have been creating a template.. Just type FPL into Twitter and you get hundreds of tips all looking similar and suggesting the same few players.. This season more then ever people are just copying these and hence why we end up with some many templated teams.. FFS are doing no favours by releasing all their teams in advance too, so you know for example by copying Joe's every move you will safely end up with a good rank.. boring yet effective and more people do this now..

After being burned heavy by not picking slags early on and then never picking him I have decided to do just that at the beginning of the season. Pick all the popular players so I’m not left behind. Then as the weeks go on to use ffs and the community to be the difference. The worst is being left behind and always chasing!

cheers tm

chances of this happening tmr night?
1) Mane rising
2) Auba falling
3) Stephens falling

Cheers mate

Cheers, TM. Eriksen 🙁 , was only a matter of time I suppose.

Auba never dropping 🙁
Thanks TM

Thx , some important changes there!

Sooo Cairney->Kante has just become out of reach..

Anymore or this the full list?

cheers

Cairney is incredibly annoying...

Mahrez to punish seller I hope