With a plethora of £4.5m defender options available to FPL managers this season, I thought I would have a look at a few to see which ones can be relied upon to deliver.
For this article, I will be using the fixture sensitivity chart developed by @FPLGromit on Twitter as well as stats from the Premium Members Area.
Brighton – Leeds
A popular rotation pairing I’ve seen is Brighton and Leeds: the fixture run on paper looks fantastic but let’s have a look at both teams to see how they fared defensively in ‘easier’ fixtures.
The chart shows that Brighton registered below 1.0 expected goals against (xGA) versus ‘easier’ opposition and even as the opponents got tougher, they still managed to restrict them to 1.0 xGA – so they are almost a ‘permaplay’ defensive option.
Now we look at Leeds: they kept it tight in the so-called easier fixtures but as we see the opposition Soccer Power Index (SPI) go above 75, they started approaching the 2.0 xGA territory, which indicates they are very much a fixture-based defence rather than a permaplay one.
Was there any balance towards home/away though?
