Top 5 Career Hall of Fame – Gameweek 30 Review

The Fantasy Premier League Gods were very cruel in Gameweek 30, as current Live Hall of Fame leader Jay Egersdorff, remarked on twitter. There were red arrows all round for our Elite Hall of Fame managers as their recent struggles continued.

Jay slipped to 2,778 overall with a score of 39. His team was undone by an injury to his captain Tottenham’s Harry Kane, and a dose of Gameweek 31-itis; Everton’s Theo Walcott, much maligned in recent weeks, arrived at the expense of Manchester City’s Raheem Sterling. Jay will be thankful that Sterling managed only an assist after he was restored to the City starting line-up following a recent hamstring injury. Walcott continued to frustrate – outpaced by the own goal scoring Brighton left back Gaeten Bong before departing early with cramp. Will he finally redeem himself in Gameweek 31?

Fellow suffering Walcott owner Mark Sutherns (aka Mark), was the highest scoring manager out of the Top Five with a bang on average 41 points. Clean sheets from Huddersfield’s Zanka (aka Mathias Jorgensen) and Everton’s Jordan Pickford, the main contributions to his paltry total. Mark’s score moves him onto 1,747 points for the season, level with career Hall of Fame number four Matthew Jones (aka Numb). 

Matthew managed only 38 points this week despite owning Tottenham’s Heung-Min Son. The South Korean scored a brace for the second week running, and against Bournemouth was shifted up front following Kane’s injury. Son could lead the line with the England international set for a spell on the sidelines, although some recent reports suggest Kane could be back for Spurs’s Gameweek 33’s trip to Stoke.

The battle for the Top Five wooden spoon is neck and neck. In Gameweek 30 career Hall of Fame number one Peter Kouwenberg (aka My Pretty Pony) drew level on points with career HoF number two Graeme Sumner (aka Gregor). Peter had Sterling, Tottenham’s Christian Eriksen, and Leicester’s Ben Chilwell to thank for providing assists in an otherwise poor week.

Heading into Gameweek 31 Peter is the least well prepared of our Top Five managers with six players and one free transfer available. Although knowing Peter’s propensity for a transfer, I think we can expect the odd hit.

Graeme, like Jay, lost points on his transfer this week. A second penalty save of the season from Brighton’s Mathew Ryan, meant the Seagulls ‘keeper scored a point more than Graeme’s new signing Huddersfield’s Jonas Lössl, despite the Dane keeping a clean sheet.

So far this season our Top Five have an average of only 28 immediate transfer points after hits, compared to 186 points in Gameweek 30 for last season’s Top Five. It’s proving a difficult season to predict in terms of transfers. For instance Graeme no doubt regrets selling Son for Walcott back in Gameweek 27, however, it seemed a perfectly sensible transfer at the time given the rotation threat to Son from teammates Erik Lamela and Lucas Moura, coupled with Walcott’s brace against Leicester in Gameweek 25. Sadly for Graeme it hasn’t worked out.

This article focuses on the moves and strategies employed by the five elite managers who grace the upper echelons of this site’s Career Hall of Fame. Between them these managers have achieved nine top 1,000 finishes in the past three seasons and have ended up in the top 10,000 a whopping 37 times over the course of their FPL careers.

To help out I have also deployed Fusen’s FPL Statistico tool to gain an extra insight into their thinking.

POINTS & RANK

If you are curious to know why, despite having the same number of points, Graeme is ranked higher than Peter, and Matthew higher than Mark, the reason is the number of transfers made:

In the event of a tie between teams, the team who has made the least amount of transfers will be positioned higher. Any transfers made using a wildcard or free hit will not count towards total transfers made

Graeme has made 35 transfers to Peter’s 46, and Matthew 30 to Mark’s 37.

The graph below shows the ranks of the top five managers over the season so far. The vertical scale is from rank 1 to 3m. The distance between the ranks corresponds to the number of points separating them. For instance there are 265pts between rank 1 and rank 100k but only 133pts between 100k and 1m. The graph gives an idea of how difficult it is to move up the ranks as you near the summit.

The pattern observed in recent gameweeks continues – that the biggest gains were made from Gameweeks 6 to 16. Logic would normally tell us that the more information you have the better decisions you make, therefore you might expect Gameweeks 17 to 30 to have seen the biggest improvements. That ranks have either decreased or slowed their rate of improvement over the latter period, perhaps tells us something about how tricky this season has been.

CAPTAIN

So far this season ten different players have been handed the armband by our Top Five.

Kane is the most popular having been chosen 47% of the time followed by Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah on 17%. However it is the Egyptian who has proven a more reliable captain choice than the erratic Englishman – his 18.3 point return compares favourably to Kane’s 11.1 points.

In the graphic below I’ve displayed this information for the five most popular captain picks.

Manchester United’s Romelu Lukaku, Manchester City’s Raheem Sterling and Chelsea’s Eden Hazard complete the most popular captain picks. Lukaku has been chosen 15% of the time and averages 14.2 points as captain, Sterling and Hazard have both been chosen 5% of the time. Hazard averages 14.5 points, while Sterling averages an impressive 24.9 points.

TRANSFERS

TRANSFER SUCCESS – GAMEWEEK 30

TRANSFER SUCCESS – SEASON SO FAR

Caveats to this table:

• It doesn’t reflect that Transfers aren’t made with only one fixture in mind
• It doesn’t reflect when Patience in an underperforming player finally pays off
• Points from newly transferred in players left on the bench are included.
• Players transferred in and captained have their points counted double.

Matthew remains in negative transfer points for the season on -9. This is despite holding onto players such Son, or Liverpool’s Roberto Firmino early in the season. This table does not reflect when patience is rewarded.

Does this prove that immediate transfer points aren’t that important? It’s not as if Matthew or Jay (14 immediate transfer points after hits) are having especially poor seasons. Why are managers so bad at timing their transfers this year?

COMPARING LAST SEASON TO THIS SEASON – THE YEAR OF THE CASUAL?

Comparing last season’s Top Five to this season’s Top Five reveals some interesting trends.

The average total points for this season is 36 points up. Yet the higher points total has not translated into better ranks, in fact the average rank is more than four times worse than it was at the same stage last year (174,846 vs 35,840). With points comparatively easy to come by, is this the year of the casual?

Bearing in mind the ranking graph earlier in the article, which showed that the ranks for our Top Five have been fairly stagnant since Gameweek 17, and it really is quite an odd season.

As mentioned, the average points gained from immediate transfers after hits is massively lower this season – 28 compared to 186! Why is this?

Are a lot of players are scoring well this year – including those just sold – meaning that the transfer points gain is lower as a result? Are the players we bring in not performing in the fixtures we expect them to?

Ultimately FPL is a prediction game, although, for our Top Five at least, making predictions is proving remarkably difficult this season.

However all is not lost; conventional wisdom dictates that the best managers save their chips for the double and blank gameweeks toward the end of the season. Just as our Top Five have done. Yet 1,896 managers in the top 5,000 (38%) have played their second Wildcard already, and another 38% (1,897) have played their Free Hit chip. Does this mean that there are opportunities for managers still holding their chips? Or we expecting too much from the chips?

Conversely perhaps the real lesson this season, a high points scoring season so far, is that we shouldn’t get distracted by planning ahead for chip use and double/blank gameweeks. Instead we should focus more short term, and use chips when we feel the opportunity presents itself.

It promises to be a fascinating end to a tricky season, who will prevail – conventional wisdom or the casuals?

FPL & LIVE HALL OF FAME BATTLES

As it stands Jay’s form since his season high of 48th overall in Gameweek 16 means he is unlikely to make up the 158 point gap to first place. Ten red arrows in the twelve gameweeks is not the form of champions.

One manager who remains in with a realistic chance of claiming the title is Matt Kearney (aka Bøwstring the Carp). In Gameweek 30 Matt went against the grain by choosing Manchester City’s Sergio Aguero as his captain – a move that, on the whole, has proven successful for him this season. However with the Argentine disappointingly missing the game through injury, Matt defaulted to his vice-captain Harry Kane. So despite gaining 14 immediate transfer points with Lössl, Zanka, and Leicester’s Riyad Mahrez coming into his team, Matt dropped from 10th to 14th place overall. The gap to overall leader Bharat Dhody increased to 44 points.

For those interested to hear about Matt’s stellar season so far, last week he joined Andy (aka andy85wsm) on a livestream, and there’s also an interview I conducted with Matt you can read on FFS.

David Isaac had a decent gameweek; he again had Son to thank for a brace, plus 9 points from his goalkeeper Swansea’s Lukasz Fabianski, saw him move up ten places to 83rd overall with a score of 48 points.

Current Live Hall of Fame number two Grant Barclay (aka Jake Donahue), another manager to own Son, is up to 753 overall with an impressive score of 58. Pickford, Huddersfield’s Christopher Schindler, and Manchester City’s Nicolas Otamendi contributing clean sheet points.

Meanwhile former Hall of Fame number one Ville Ronka dropped to 3,491 with a score of 39.  Ville, who does not own Son, wasn’t helped by Swansea’s Jordan Ayew getting a red card. Ville remains only 6 points behind Jay in FPL.

TEMPLATE – Gameweek 30

Players in Bold are in three teams or more

Speroni, Lössl

Alonso, Ogbonna, Van Dijk, Daniels, Zanka

Salah, Walcott, Sterling, Shaqiri, Mané

Kane, Firmino, Wilson

PLAYERS – Gameweek 30

AVERAGE COST PER PLAYER

*based on GW1 prices

Goalkeeper – £4.4m

Defender – £5.2m

Midfielder – £7.7m

Forward – £9.1m

In The Bank (ITB) – £0.4

FORMATION

There were no automatic substitutions this week as none of the Top Five owned the stricken Aguero, who missed Monday’s game against Stoke after he revealed he was injured in training last weekend.

Over the season 3-4-3 is the most frequently used FPL set-up and has been chosen 47% of the time, with 3-5-2 second on 28%.

GAMEWEEK 31 PLAYERS

Ahead of Gameweek 31 Mark revealed on this week’s scoutcast that his two free moves this week are likely to be Chelsea’s Eden Hazard to Bournemouth’s in-form Junior Stanislas, and Kane to Firmino.

Jay looks unlikely to take any hits, according to his Gameweek 31 preview video.

Despite his two point return against Manchester United, I would be very surprised if any of the Top Five did not choose to captain Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah in Gameweek 31. Jay and Mark have both publicly stated they will be handing the Egyptian the armband.