After reading O’Shaughnessy’s recent article on captain rotations,  I thought I would have a look at the data and see whether rotating star players was a good option.

I see rotation mentioned a lot with defenders and goalkeepers from the teams in the lower half of the table, and rightly so. Sunderland at home for QPR obviously offered more points potential for the West London side than when they travelled to Manchester City. But at the top end of the player spectrum, does it really matter if Eden Hazard is playing against the top or the bottom team? He’s one of the best players in the world so the opposition shouldn’t be that detrimental to his performance.

I compared the four key captaincy candidates last season – Harry Kane, Sergio Aguero, Alexis Sanchez and Eden Hazard, making the assumption that you’d be picking from that quartet each Gameweek for your captaincy choice. I then went through each week and picked what would have been regarded as the best captaincy choice based on who had the easiest fixture.

For the sake of ease, if a player didn’t play that week, I presumed we knew that ahead of 11:45 on a Saturday and I selected what I deemed to be the next best captain choice.

In GW20, you’d probably have thought Sanchez (Saints away) or even Hazard (Spurs away) was a better choice than Kane (at home to Chelsea), but these players scored 6, 10 and 12 respectively, leaving the Spurs man as the best pick with hindsight. Note: Aguero didn’t play this week.

In total, my ‘best guess’ at captaincy, resulted in a 249 point haul over the season. Captaining Hazard each week, would have given me 233 points. So only a 16 point gain. Not a lot in it. Even less when you consider the week he missed, I’d have obviously captained someone else.

If you were somehow Mystic Meg and managed to correctly pick the best captain each week, it was worth a whopping extra 417 points. 168 ahead of my predictions and nearly 4.5 points per Gameweek averaged out over the season.

So how did I do? In only 12 weeks did I pick the best captain from my squad. Some weeks there was only a few points in it (13 weeks it cost me five points or fewer) but on a few occasions it did cost me a lot. 11, 13, 15 and 2 x 16 point ‘losses’ because of incorrect captain selections.

When I started this I was hoping that the conclusion would be that swapping your captain for one you hope to do better was a bad tactic, and to just stick with one – and I guess it depends on who you have in your team. By Gameweek 38 I had all four of Kane, Aguero, Sanchez and Hazard so I did have to make these calls. You just have to take the rough with the smooth.

O’Shaughnessy was right. Change your captain, base it on what looks to be the most profitable fixture that week. But just don’t be upset when Kane gets a hat-trick, six assists and saves two penalties at Stamford Bridge when Aguero gets the standard two points versus Norwich at home.

I’ll do the same for this season, posting update in a few months and seeing how captains perform. The data for this article can be found here.