Our team of Hall of Famers and guest writers are offering regular contributions throughout the 2023/24 Fantasy Premier League (FPL) campaign. Here, former FPL champion Simon March debates the decline of Fantasy defenders.
Now that we’re just beyond the halfway point of the season, it seems like a good time to look at some of the big talking points from the first half of the campaign and consider what lessons we can draw from them for the Gameweeks to come.
One standout theme from the season so far is the stark absence of clean sheets. For example, my last clean sheet points from a defender came in Gameweek 17 and, before that, Gameweek 13 (and don’t even get me started on goalkeepers…).
It’s possible that I’m just bad at picking defenders but, looking at the ownership percentage of the defenders I do own, that would mean that almost everyone else is too. So what is going on?
More goals, fewer clean sheets
So far this season, we’ve seen clean sheets in about 21% of fixtures compared to 27% for the whole of last season. This means that we’re seeing about 22% fewer clean sheets than we did in 2022/23.
We are also witnessing more goals in 2023/24, pro rata, than we did last season, an increase thus far of around 8%. When you combine these statistics, it doesn’t look good for defences.
What is interesting is that many of the backlines you’d expect to perform the best, such as Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester City, are currently performing at a very similar rate as last season with a clean sheet every three or four fixtures. This is still a far cry from the 2021/22 campaign when the likes of Man City and Liverpool were racking up shut-outs at a rate better than one every two fixtures.
Of course, looking at the defence only tells one side of the story. At this point, we are on course to see nearly 100 more goals this Premier League season than in the last one. So the decline in Premier League defences might, in fact, owe more to improvements in Premier League attacks than defensive deficiencies – as well as all that added injury time.
But, from an FPL perspective, the decline in defenders as viable Fantasy assets has been occurring for some time. This was obfuscated in the stats somewhat last year by a very strong performance by Manchester United with 17 clean sheets, something they look unlikely to repeat this year.
What is striking when looking at defences in the Premier League right now is the lack of consistency, not just in terms of keeping clean sheets, but in the relationship between the teams keeping the most shut-outs and the teams conceding the fewest goals. These are two things you’d expect to correlate quite closely. For example, Aston Villa have conceded among the fewest goals this season (27) yet they have fewer clean sheets than Bournemouth (four and five respectively). The Cherries have conceded eight more goals than Villa, in one fewer fixture.
These seemingly paradoxical relationships are quite typical of Premier League defences so far this season and, what we’re left with, is little substantive reason to trust any team or player when it comes to delivering clean sheets.
Little value in defence
It’s worth noting, of course, that we are only halfway through the season and, historically, we’ve seen teams perform very differently in the second half of a campaign, especially defensively. Newcastle, for example, began 2023 with five clean sheets in a row and Man City are notorious for going on long runs of defensive shut-outs when they need to.
So maybe we shouldn’t rule out defences just yet but, given the decline in FPL output from defensive assets over several seasons now, it raises questions about the value available in defence, particularly as defender prices don’t seem to have dropped at a rate equivalent to their decline in points scored.
In fact, what seems to have happened is that defenders, in general, have seen perhaps a moderate discounting in terms of price while those defenders who are known to deliver attacking returns, such as Liverpool’s Trent Alexander-Arnold (£8.5m) and Newcastle’s Kieran Trippier (£6.8m), have seen an additional premium added to their price, essentially for being attacking.
This premium makes sense given attacking points are often seemingly the only way to get returns from defenders these days, but it does raise a strategic question: is it worth paying a premium for an attacking defender, if they are not also delivering clean sheets?
Take Alexander-Arnold, for example. The Liverpool full-back has six attacking returns so far this season which is, of course, impressive for a defender, but it still only puts him equal on points with Newcastle United’s Anthony Gordon (£6.1m) and only slightly ahead of Aston Villa’s Douglas Luiz (£5.5m), midfielders who are £2-3m cheaper than Alexander-Arnold.
In fact, neither Trippier nor Alexander-Arnold, the two best-scoring defenders in the game right now, make it into the top 10 list of defenders in terms of value for money. Neither would make the top 25 if you combined forwards and midfielders. This does not paint a particularly good picture for defensive assets and particularly not premium ones.
Thus, one viable strategy would be to get as good a defence for as little as possible, cross your fingers for a clean sheet or an attacking return and funnel all the money saved into attacking areas. If we look purely at the stats, this seems to be the direction they are pointng us toward.
The challenge, of course, is finding somewhere to spend the money saved on given the absence of premium players currently in the game and the abundance of cheap attacking players such as those mentioned and the likes of Chelsea’s Cole Palmer (£5.6m). Defenders might not currently offer as much value per million as midfielders, but you do need to own defenders and, if the extra money isn’t currently gaining you any greater advantage in attacking areas, you might as well spend it in defence and hope for an explosive return or two or, even better, some consistent clean sheets.
Thus we shouldn’t necessarily rule out premium defenders, particularly as they do score points, but we should acknowledge that, as things stand, they offer something of a false economy in the game.
Conclusion
Naturally, when you’re looking at small data sets, you can only rely so much on the story they tell. But if teams are scoring more goals and keeping fewer clean sheets, and this has been the direction that things have been trending in for at least a couple of seasons now, you don’t have to be an economist to figure out where the value for money is likely to be, should this trend continue.
Looking at data without context can, of course, be misleading and, there is still a benefit to spending money in defence in terms of absolute points, even if it doesn’t currently yield the same value for money as when it is spent in midfield or up front. Defensive solidity can change and often does, particularly for the top teams, in the second half of the season.
However, if you’re debating where to prioritise spending your money, the strong indication right now is that it should go toward attacking areas first and, only once the advantage here has been maxed out, should you consider investing more of your budget in defence.
