With Gameweek 3 finishing on a Sunday, it meant there wasn’t time to include the revised stats for Sunday’s matches in Fantasy Premier League (FPL).
Maxence Lacroix (£5.0m) ended one defensive contribution (DefCon/DC) short of the threshold of 10 required for defenders to earn two extra Fantasy points.
Unfortunately for his owners, once Opta had reviewed Crystal Palace’s win at Aston Villa, he was bumped up to 10 DefCons – but he didn’t gain his two DC points because the Gameweek had already closed.
In order to accurately reflect a player’s performance in Fantasy, Player Stats > Fantasy Stats now show DefCon points taken directly from the FPL website:
However, Player Stats > Defending is unchanged: it still uses our Opta data to calculate DefCon success.
Ultimately, it’s not Lacroix’s fault that the Gameweek closed early; had there been another match on Monday, the stats would have updated and he would have gained his two DC points.
He reached the required 10 DefCons and therefore maintains his 100% record. As Fantasy managers looking to recruit players, it’s better that the stats reflect what happened in the match rather than cutting off early, before Opta match reviews have been completed.
Lacroix is one of six players to have hit the DefCon threshold in each of their appearances this season.
We’ve also added a new stat to Player Stats > KPI Defending, namely ‘Minutes per Defensive Contribution’.
When setting the ‘Minutes per Appearance’ filter to greater than 45 minutes, we remove players who tend to feature late on from the bench, and the resulting table gives us a good idea of who does well in DefCons.
For those of you who like to build custom stat tables, the following DefCon stats are now available:
And for DefCons taken from Fantasy, use the stats starting with ‘FPL’:
The two new delta stats – ‘Defensive Contribution Delta’ and ‘Defensive Contribution Points Delta’ – compare our Opta data with FPL.
They reveal that it’s not only Lacroix who has missed out on two additional points this season, but Bruno Guimaraes (£6.5m) as well. The Brazilian had 11 DefCons, one short of the threshold of 12 required for midfielders, when Gameweek 2 closed following Newcastle United’s Monday night defeat to Liverpool. Following Opta’s review the next day, he increased to 12.
There are differences in the underlying stats for a number of players. Michael Keane (£4.5), for instance, is two DefCons worse off, but none of those changes were consequential as no-one failed to reach their positional threshold because of them.
It works both ways, of course.
Palace’s Will Hughes and Leeds United’s Ethan Ampadu (both £4.9m) have two DefCons more on FPL compared to Opta’s revised match data.
So far, however, it’s not caused any player to gain two DefCon points that they didn’t merit. Although it’s surely just a matter of time before it does.
