It was a largely disappointing end to a damp squib of a season for the five managers  I’m tracking at the top of the 2016/17 season’s Career Hall of Fame.  Just one, the new HoF number one Jay Egersdorff, made it into the top 10,000.

This rather lacklustre finish to the campaign follows nine top 1,000 finishes in the previous three seasons and a massive 37 top 10,000 ranks over the course of their Fantasy Premier League (FPL)  careers.

So what went wrong?

To help answer that question I have deployed Fusen’s FPL Statistico tool to gain an extra insight into their seasons.

POINTS & RANK

The graph above shows the ranks of the top five managers over the course of the season. 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 299pts between rank 1 and rank 100k and 191pts between 100k and 1m. The graph gives an idea of how difficult it is to move up the ranks as you near the summit.

Matthew Jones (aka Numb) missed out on his eighth successive top 10,000 finish by only four points. Nonetheless his final rank of 11,009 was his highest of the season and constitutes a remarkable turnaround for the Welshman who was just shy of the 3 million mark in Gameweek 5.

Heading into the final gameweek, Matthew was the only Top Five manager who kept hold of Leicester City duo Riyad Mahrez and Jamie Vardy. His perseverance was rewarded with a combined 26 points against Spurs. Prior to the nine goal thriller at Wembley, the pair had been a let down since forming an integral part of the Gameweek 32 Wildcard template.

Matthew’s faith in Mahrez and Vardy mirrors the faith he showed in Liverpool frontman Roberto Firmino earlier in the season. Matthew brought in the Brazilian on his Gameweek 4 Wildcard after two 12 point hauls in the opening three gameweeks. However he was forced to wait until Gameweek 15 for Firmino to manage his next double digit return.

PATIENCE VS MAXIMISING BUDGET

Matthew made the fewest number of transfers amongst our elite quintet (38), and his patience with mid-priced/premium players, like Firmino and Mahrez, contrasts sharply with the managerial style of his fellow HoFs.

In Gameweek 4 Firmino was the only player to be universally owned by the Top Five. However by Gameweek 6, Jay and Graeme Sumner (aka Gregor) had already discarded him following back to back 2-point returns. Peter Kouwenberg (aka My Pretty Pony) and Mark Sutherns (aka Mark) followed suit in Gameweek 8 after further blanks.

Since starting his weekly preview videos, Jay has been very revealing about how he plays the game. One of his golden rules is ‘focus on your most expensive players and make your budget work for you’. This is why he was so quick to sell Firmino, and underpins his thinking behind ‘Kanexit’ and selling Salah in Gameweek 33.

In the first part of the season Jay’s approach was certainly more effective than Matthew’s, as can be seen from the graph below:

While it would be too simplistic to say patience only serves you better later in the season, Matthew’s decision to hold onto Firmino – an £8.5m forward who averaged 2.6 points per game from Gameweek 4 to Gameweek 14 – showed patience certainly didn’t help him at the start.

In hindsight Matthew should have made more effective use of his budget, just as Jay did in that early part of the season. The Blackburn Rovers fan used his Gameweek 6 Wildcard to rebalance his squad; he downgraded Firmino to a cheap third forward and upgraded both of his budget midfielders – Crystal Palace’s Ruben Loftus-Cheek and Swansea’s Tom Carroll. It was the right decision as the players he brought in – Everton’s Dominic Calvert-Lewin, Brighton’s Pascal Groß, and Newcastle’s Matt Ritchie – all out performed those he sold.

However, we didn’t have to wait long to discover that Jay’s strategy wasn’t foolproof. Jay had valid reasons for selling Tottenham’s Harry Kane in Gameweek 18 – the Spurs ace was averaging 4.1 points per game since returning from a hamstring injury in Gameweek 11, hardly great value for the most expensive player in the game. Of course we all know what happened next.

This is where judgement comes in.

Neither approach is necessarily right or wrong. There were times it paid to be patient, and times it didn’t. Sometimes focusing on your most expensive players and rebalancing your squad was the right thing to do, at other times it backfired. Each manager has to analyse the data present at the time and make a decision.

On Firmino, perhaps his strong performances in the Champions League coupled with his good underlying stats convinced Matthew that he would repay his faith at any moment. It didn’t happen. Jay, perhaps wary of Firmino’s reputation of being a troll – a player with a history of posting good stats without returning points – sold him early.

THE TIDE TURNED FOR JAY

Just because Jay had decided to sell Firmino didn’t mean that he wasn’t prepared to buy him back when he hit form. Following a 13 point return in Gameweek 15, the Brazilian returned to Jay’s side in Gameweek 17 just in time for his best run of the season – 36 points returned over the following three gameweeks. Across the season Firmino averaged 6.3 base points per game for Jay, and 4.9 base points per game for Matthew.

It all seemed to be going so well for Jay, so what went wrong?

It’s easy to say that ‘Kanexit’ caused Jay to lose momentum. I wonder if he ended up defending an idea, and it meant that what had been perfect judgement in the first half of the season turned into points chasing in the second half.

He bought Manchester United ‘keeper David de Gea just after his only double digit return of the season, the stopper averaged 3.8 points when Jay owned him compared to 5.3 points when he didn’t.

He bought Manchester City’s Kevin de Bruyne in time for a slight dip in form – returns of 3, 6, 3 were sandwiched between returns of 10, 10, 12. This is a player who Jay had previously been in sync with, and praised for holding onto in Gameweeks 4 and 5.

Chelsea’s Eden Hazard was held for too long, and then sold in Gameweek 21 just before his best run of the season – 4.1 average base points before being sold, then 8.4 points in the following seven gameweeks.

When he started his preview videos, instead of telling viewers which moves to make, Jay would try to educate by explaining his ideas and logic. Did the videos cause him to become more stubborn because of the added scrutiny he put himself under? Did they affect his ability to play instinctively as he became more concerned about defending an idea?

It must be very difficult when you call yourself the world’s #1 FPL player to admit you may have made a mistake and correct it. It seemed to have a ripple effect and compromised his judgement.

Crystal Palace’s Wilfried Zaha and West Ham’s Marko Arnautovic were largely ignored. Players like Chelsea’s Willian, Tottenham’s Son and Alli, Leicester’s Vardy and Mahrez, Manchester United’s Jesse Lingard, and Watford’s Richarlison, were all either owned just after they had stopped hauling or sold just before they did, or both.

MATTHEW’S SECOND HALF COMEBACK

Although Matthew fell into many of the same traps as Jay – selling Hazard just before his good run, buying Willian just after his – he also managed to use better judgement on a number of players. In addition to keeping Mahrez and Vardy for the final gameweek, he bought Son and Stoke’s Xherdan Shaqiri for their most productive periods.

He took only three hits in the second half of the season, and from Gameweek 19 onwards was the most successful manager out of the Top Five in terms of points gained from immediate transfers with 89. Jay managed 53 points over the same period.

Double Gameweek 37 saw him sell Salah instead of Mahrez, in a move that demonstrated both patience in Mahrez and maximising his budget – Chelsea’s Andreas Christensen was upgraded to Tottenham’s Jan Vertonghen as part of a 19 point gain. Jay would have been proud.

However, Jay had bought Salah for a hit the previous gameweek, perhaps the repercussions of Kanexit played on his mind.

Despite their relative successes and failures, Matthew and Jay still had excellent seasons by most standards, both comfortably beating the AI manager featured on the BBC. However in Jay’s case, perhaps not the exceptional season it at one point promised to be.