Erling Haaland came into the season with a great career track record but with question marks being asked over whether he could reproduce those returns in the Premier League.

Thirty-eight games later and the answer is most definitely: yes!

For Fantasy Premier League (FPL), however, this led to a bit of a conundrum, with Haaland being practically undroppable from our squads and him as a captaincy selection becoming almost automatic for many. This in turn meant that trying to go against the Norwegian was a battle against effective ownership, requiring a massive sofa to hide behind.

But should we have been braver or more considerate with our choices? I wanted to delve into his numbers a bit further to have some consideration ahead of next season after his likely price rise. He’s surely got to be at least £13.0m in 2023/24, hopefully even £14.0m to force some decisions.

I wanted to look at a few different key metrics:

• How he performed against good, average and bad defences
• How he performed in the first half of the season vs the second half
• How he performed against clubs the second time he played them compared to the first (the thinking behind this was I felt there was some drop off as teams saw him and Man City play more together, then began working out ways to stop him)
• How he performed home v away

DIFFERENT DEFENCES

First of all, how did he do against different defences? I used the Fantasy Football Scout custom stats tables to look at my favourite metrics over the season for identifying bad defensive teams. These are expected goals conceded (xGC), shots in the box conceded and big chances conceded. I ranked teams based on the stats above and came up with the following over the season:

• Bad Defences: LEE, EVE, LEI, NFO, BOU, FUL, WOL, SOU
• Average Defences: WHU, AVL, CHE, BRE, MUN, TOT, CRY
• Good Defences: LIV, BHA, ARS, NEW

Of his 36 goals last season, Haaland scored 19 of these against ‘bad’ defences, a whopping 53% of his goals in only 14 of his 33 starts at 1.27 goals per appearance (inc. one sub appearance). He scored 12 goals against average defences in 12 starts at 0.92 goals per appearance (inc. one sub appearance) and only five goals in seven starts against good defences at 0.71 goals per appearance. This immediately tells me we are perhaps overvaluing Haaland as a captaincy option against average and good defences.

Of his 11 double-digit hauls, six of them came from his 14 games against bad defences. Interestingly, he got four of his nine assists against good defences, suggesting these backlines are successfully somewhat negating his goal potential but not his overall threat – something I’ll touch on again later.

Overall, Haaland scored a whopping 128 points in his 14 games against bad defences.

FIRST HALF OF SEASON V SECOND HALF OF SEASON

I felt Haaland dropped off a little in the second half of the campaign and the numbers back this up. He scored 22 goals in the first half of the season vs 14 in the second half, his FPL points dropping from 153 to 119. Interestingly, however, his assists increased, again perhaps due to teams better understanding his game in the second half forcing him to take up slightly different positions at times or being more heavily marked thus creating more space for others.

FIRST MEETING V SECOND MEETING

These stats track across when we look at how well he scored on the first meeting with a team versus the second time he played against that same side. Overall, he scored 22 goals and 157 FPL points on the first meeting versus 14 goals and 115 points on the second meeting with a side. That doesn’t tell the whole story, though, as there was a huge difference when he came up against ‘bad’ defences.

When breaking it down, he still did very well against these sub-par backlines whether it was the first or second meeting, but average and good defences were much better at mitigating against him second time around.

• Times Haaland scored more in the first meeting rather than the second: 9
• Times he scored more in second meeting than in first: 5 (notably these teams were BOU, WOL, SOU, EVE, ARS – all in bad defence bracket except Arsenal)
• On the other 5 occasions he either scored the same or missed one of the games

The findings above suggest that outside of the bad defences, teams got generally better at reducing Haaland’s output.

HOME V AWAY

So what about any differences between Haaland’s FPL production when playing at the Etihad vs playing away? Again, there is a big contrast here.

At home, Haaland produced 22 goals and seven assists in only 15 starts (and two sub appearances). That works out at 1.29 goals, 0.41 assists and 9.18 points per appearance. He also produced seven of his 11 double-digit hauls at home.

He scored well at home playing against bad and average defences but there was a slight drop-off against good defences, mitigated slightly by his increase in assists against good teams. Against bad and average defences he scored 1.36 goals per appearance, dropping to one goal per appearance vs good defences.

Away, he scored 14 goals in 18 appearances, with four of his double-digit hauls (and seven of his 14 goals in total) coming away from the Etihad. Interestingly, though, three of these were against bad defences and all ‘predictable’ against LEE, BOU and SOU (WHU being the fourth one on the first day of the season). Taking those four hauls out, it leaves him at just seven goals across his other 14 appearances on the road. He only got a single double-digit haul away against an average or good defence (WHU as per above). Haaland averaged ‘only’ 6.44 per appearance away.

CONCLUSIONS

Firstly, going without Haaland completely is a really bad plan, so you almost have to own him. It would take a brave person not to.

At home, Haaland is an FPL beast, especially against bad and average defences. He should be a definite captain against such backlines and a consideration for any home game but you could easily take the risk to be different when City play against the good defences at home, if another viable captain option is available.

When City are away, I’d be quite comfortable taking on the Haaland captaincy unless they are playing one of the bottom four of five defences in the league.

I think his overall captaincy requirement was slightly overvalued, especially in the latter half of the season. It will be interesting to see if there is further reduction in output now he has faced most teams twice; it wouldn’t be super unreasonable to extrapolate the data out from the second half of last season to think the 2023/24 campaign may be more like 25-30 goals and 10 assists or similar – obviously still a great return.

I will personally look to take on the Haaland captaincy more often next season, especially away from home, despite his effective ownership.

Good luck to the newly promoted sides in their first time out against him, though!

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