After reading the Hot Topics on Effective Ownership and thinking about how incredibly well the top scorers have been doing this season. This is especially the case up top with forwards dominating the Fantasy points most weeks, and in the case of the likes of Jamie Vardy, at a very affordable price. In total half of the 30 top Fantasy Premier League point scorers for the season cost 7.0 or less, distorting the concept of value. I wondered what it would be like to change things up and follow one tenet: play the game as simply as possible and opt for the top scorers, with no club bias, no past experience and no underlying statistics to guide me.
I composed a brand new team on the FPL site (almost instantly deleted, never played it, in case the sentries at FPL towers are observing) with the budget of 100m and populated it with the season’s top performers. I soon found out that the top fifteen scorers cost just 99.9m.
The Dream Team
Butland 4.9 (Gomes 4.7)
Smalling 6.9 Alderweireld 5.7 Kolarov 6.5 (Dann 5.3 Sagna 5.3)
Mahrez (c) 6.9 Ozil 9.7 Barkley 7.4 Wijnaldum 6.9 (Ayew 7.1)
Vardy 7.6 Lukaku 9.1 Ighalo 5.9
So I set up the team under this basic premise of selecting by FPL points, with the captain being the overall leader.
Here’s how it went, with x donating a player that did not start, in this case Kolarov and Smalling, and with Riyad Mahrez as captain.
Gameweek 16
11 Â (7)
X 1 X (6 1)
26 6 2 2 (2)
7 9 7
78 points, Gameweek rank around 73,000
I am going to maintain this team (by hand, FPL, by hand) by changing it whenever someone breaks into the top 15 overall (two GK, five def, five mid, three fwd), even for a hit if I have to. For example, this week Nacho Monreal has leapt into fifth so I will need to switch him in for Sagna. I will also keep track of transfer value and selling value (five risers so far, though none of them doubled up) as if it really existed.
Conclusions
What does this squad, which one might call The Full Casual, prove? Well so far, nothing, but it sheds a bit of light on a few of the more bizarre components of this confounding FPL season.
The premium attackers have underperformed at a shocking rate:
None of the top 10 overall scorers started at a price more than 8.5.
Of the top 30 overall scorers, only eight of them currently cost 8.5 or greater.
Of the 30 most expensive players, all of them attackers, only 16 of them have scored more than the 30th best overall scoring defender.
Chelsea are at the top of the list for failure:
Their assets, so expensive yet such insecure sources of points, cannot possibly justify their price tags at this time, and are really challenging the maxim that form is temporary while class is permanent.
Eden Hazard, Diego Costa, Cesc Fabregas, John Terry, and Branislav Ivanovic all were among the highest scorers in PPG last season would have been counted on for a robust 5-6 PPG. Â Costa is currently the highest of the big five at 3.3 PPG, with even Ramires outpacing Fabregas, Terry, and Ivanovic.
It seems almost impossible to get a very cheap player to accompany your expensive stars:
A popular preseason strategy for FPL managers would have been the approach of loading up on attackers from the big six clubs while trying to piece together a fairly inexpensive backline.
Instead only seven of the top 20 attackers come from the four Champions League qualifying squads this season, plus Spurs and Liverpool. Meanwhile, eight of the top 11 defenders come from that group.
Even more interestingly, perhaps, only five of the top 30 defenders cost less than 5.0.
Ignoring almost all of the deeper thinking that makes FFScout such a powerful contributing force to playing the game well, such as fixture analysis, underlying stats, and the price change mechanics of the market itself, it will be interesting to see how this team fares over the season, especially when the double Gameweeks come around.
