Gameweek 8 marks the emergence of new popular faces in the top Fantasy Premier League teams.
Harry Kane’s recent form and the easy (on paper) fixture against Cardiff made many managers consider selling one of their expensive assets to be able to afford him.
How many managers did that and how that affected ownerships in the top 10,000 teams is the focus of this article.
Captaincy
Kane does rank very competitively among the top 10k for the first time this season with 52.5% of teams in that bracket giving him the armband, Eden Hazard coming in at second with 33.2%.
Gameweek 7 was actually the first time Kane was high in the captaincy rankings, where he ranked second, but that was with just 4.7% as the majority went for Sergio Aguero that week. In a complete reversal, Aguero captaincy percentage is just 5.4% this week.
In addition, 1.01% of the top 10k managers actually played the Triple Captain chip on Kane this week.
In terms of effective ownership, Kane reached his season of 108.4% this week which makes him the second after Hazard with 128.1%.
Compare Kane’s new effective ownership to his 17.9% of last week and this give us an idea about how more managers have backed him this week.
Most Selected Players
Looking at the most selected players in the top 10k, we see that Aguero’s ownership has dropped dramatically this week, down to to just 68.9% compared to Gamweek 7’s 93.3%.
Another player who suffered significant top 10k ownership decrease is Sadio Mane, who dropped from 52.9% to 38.9%.
It seems that Hazard and Kane dominated the top 10k transfers this week, with Kane rising from 17.6% to 55% and Hazard from 84.2% to 94.8%, which makes him the most owned player in the top 10k.
Meanwhile, if we focus only on Wildcard teams activated this week, we see that it’s very similar to the most selected team. However, the exceptions are Marko Arnautovic being the more popular third striker instead of Aleksandar Mitrovic and more opting for the cheaper Liverpool defender of Trent Alexander-Arnold instead of Andrew Robertson.
Chip Usage
That being said, not many Wildcards were active this week, only 2.1% relative to 4.6% last week. The second most popular chip this week is the Free hit with 1.7% usage.
The Free Hit managers probably wanted to keep hold of Salah, Mane and /orAguero for the long run and still benefit from Kane’s potential points.
While Kane is the popular pick this week, it remains to see how Salah, Mane and Aguero will perform in their mutual clash as they suddenly became picks of a more differential nature.
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