Last season I posted an experiment, called In Search of the Dream FPL team, looking at the Fantasy Premier League’s top players at around the half way stage to find out how much value and consistency they offered.
This article will revisit that experiment and apply it to this season with a close eye on pricing.
Cheap As Chips in 2015/16
At the Gameweek 16 stage I found I could purchase an entire Dream Team squad of the top scorers in every position (2-5-5-3) in FPL for just under the preseason starting squad budget of 100m.
Butland 4.9 (Gomes 4.7)
Smalling 6.9 Alderweireld 5.7 Kolarov 6.5 (Dann 5.3 Sagna 5.3)
Mahrez 6.9 Ozil 9.7 Barkley 7.4 Wijnaldum 6.9 (Ayew 7.1)
Vardy 7.6 Lukaku 9.1 Ighalo 5.9
99.9m spent
In essence, the article asked what would happen if you started playing the game in Gameweek 16 using the form of the first 15 gameweeks as your guide. The experiment ran for several more weeks and those Dream Teamers fared reasonably well, as the subsequent weekly updates in the Comments section show.
Premium Problems in 2016/17
A year later, and the set-up is staggeringly different. Here is this season’s Dream Team squad through the first 17 Gameweeks***.
Courtois 5.8 Heaton 4.8 10.6
Azpilicueta 6.4 Cahill 6.3 Walker 6.2 (Alonso 6.4 Van Dijk 5.7)
Sánchez 11.8 Hazard 10.4 Mané 9.4 Walcott 7.8 (Eriksen 8.6)
Costa 10.9 Ibrahimovic 11.3 Defoe 7.8
119.6m spent
***The maximum number of Chelsea players is exceeded here, so substituting the next highest scoring goalkeeper and defenders (De Gea 5.4, Daniels 5.1, Gibson 4.8) to replace Courtois, Cahill, and Alonso would still take the total spend to 116.4m for a buildable but unaffordable Dream Team.
What can we take away from this tale of two seasons beyond a Dickensian sense of longing?
With the relative costs of the back sevens for each season being so close (especially if you de-Chelsea your defense down to one instead of four, the costs are almost the same for each season), the incredible difference in price for the front eight merits a great deal of attention.
If you are looking to define this season, then one possible explanation is that it is the Year of the Premium Attacker. No fewer than five of the Dream Team’s seven starters were priced this preseason at the premium level. Last season only Mesut Ozil and perhaps Romelu Lukaku could have been considered thusly.
Meanwhile, the cheaper players this season are not sustaining their performances for very long. For example Watford’s Etienne Capoue, Stoke’s Joe Allen and West Brom winger Matt Phillips have each neatly taken turns every five Gameweeks or so chipping in with unexpected hauls.
Catching any of these would be a success, catching more than one requires plenty of luck and surely must be doing wonders for an overall rank. This is in marked contrast to last year when Leicester’s Riyad Mahrez was available for peanuts, so too his budget friendly team mate Jamie Vardy and Watford’s Odion Ighalo types.
In short this season there are no “he’s playing like a 10m premium” bargain and no midpriced or budget attacker has emerged as a longterm source of points.
But with so many Premium players doing well over the long haul, any short term plays like a close decision on finding a replacement for a big hitter will have significant consequences. This makes the secret of success, based on class, form and fixtures, even more tricky to fathom.
Just two weeks ago, the question of Harry Kane vs Zlatan Ibrahimovic could have been answered reasonably with either player as the pick: stats favoured the big Swede, form slightly favored Kane, fixtures favored Kane…the result: Ibrahimovic 23-Kane 4. With captaincy, that is close to a 40 point swing if you went for Kane and gave him the armband, which more than a few managers just might have done.
When the Premiums go cold, they are an absolute polar vortex in your team: Eden Hazard, Kane, Ibrahimovic, Sergio Aguero have all gotten hauls but have been heartbreakers as well, blanking in fixtures that looked ripe for a 20+ point captaincy performance.
Diego Costa stands alone as the warmest, most reliable asset in FPL, with perhaps the performance of Alexis Sanchez getting back to back returns in disappointing results this week elevating him to nearly essential status.
Why is this happening?
Some might point to an allegedly overheated Fantasy Premier League marketplace, though evidence therein is still a bit lacking in my opinion. I chose instead to focus on the gaps.
Mind the Gap
For the forwards, the range between Jermaine Defoe at 7.8m and Romelu Lukaku at 9.4m is an absolute wasteland: Islam Slimani, Wayne Rooney, and Olivier Giroud are the highest scorers in that range at 47, 40, and 33 points respectively.
That combined output of 120 points is surpassed quite comfortably by uber bench midfielders Darren Fletcher, Adam Forshaw, and Dean Marney (46, 44, 41 respectively). And yes, I had to look up Forshaw’s first name.
Further up the ranks in midfield, the 6.0-7.0m range has been underwhelming when compared to last season, with only Michail Antonio and James Milner producing decently, though both are outside the top 10 (ranked 13th and 21st for Overall Score, respectively).
The Difficult Search for Value in 2016/17
But I have to return to the overall price differences for each position’s Dream Teamers once again to underscore just how different the two seasons have been:
2015:
Mahrez 6.9 Ozil 9.7 Barkley 7.4 Wijnaldum 6.9 (Ayew 7.1) = 38
Vardy 7.6 Lukaku 9.1 Ighalo 5.9 = 22.6
60.6m total spend
2016:
Sánchez 11.8 Hazard 10.4 Mané 9.4 Walcott 7.8 Eriksen 8.6 48
Costa 10.9 Ibrahimovic 11.3 Defoe 7.8 30
78m total spend
That 17.4m is roughly the difference between Fletcher, Forshaw, Marney and Sanchez, Hazard, Mané, or a full three extra premiums.
Final Thought
It is clear that while 2015/16 was the year of great value, the performances of premium options this year have made it a completely different competition that will need different strategies.
Last year you could have them all. This year that is simply impossible.
