The power of Jamie Vardy (£9.9m) continues to rise as he dominates the Gameweek 15 captaincy statistics – especially among the top 10,000 Fantasy Premier League managers.
Ahead of the first midweek Gameweek of the season, a whopping 82.1% of managers at the highest level handed the Leicester City centre-forward the captaincy.
That’s the largest amount of support for a skipper among the top 10k all season while just under 2% of the top 10k have Triple Captained Vardy.
Vardy also won the Fantasy Football Scout captain poll this week and was selected as the best option for the armband both by the Captain Sensible article and our Scout Picks.
After scoring eight goals in six matches, Vardy now faces a Watford side without a manager and short of several key defensive personnel, while many of the other options do not come with such fortuitous circumstances in Gameweek 15.
That is best shown in the backing for Sadio Mané (£12.2m) among the top 10k.
The Liverpool man, preparing to face Everton on Wednesday night, was the second most-captained among the top 10k for Gameweek 15 but was still only backed by 6.6% of them.
That made for a massive gap between him and Vardy, one of 75.5 percentage points.
Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang (£10.9m) completes the top three with a measly 2.4% backing for the Gameweek 15 captaincy at the highest level of FPL.
It will be interesting to see if Vardy can continue to make the armband his own for the foreseeable future with matches against Aston Villa (away) and Norwich (home) coming up in Gameweeks 16 and 17.
It is probably worth pointing out just how much impact a Vardy captaincy could have at lower reaches of the worldwide rankings.
Despite overwhelming support from the top 10k for Gameweek 15, only 31.9% of Fantasy managers overall have handed him the armband for the meeting with Watford.
Vardy continues to show almost complete control over the top 10k in terms of base ownership too.
In Gameweek 14, the Leicester man was in 97.4% of teams at this level, which has now risen to 97.8% for Gameweek 15.
By contrast, a chunk of managers have decided to cash in on Tammy Abraham (£7.9m) amid his injury developments.
Going into Gameweek 14, 52.9% of top 10k managers owned the Chelsea man, making him the second most-popular forward at this level.
However, this figure has dropped to just 40.4% for Gameweek 14.
Meanwhile, Raúl Jiménez (£7.7m) has gone in the opposite direction, rising from third to second in terms of most fashionable top 10k forwards.
Interestingly, Christian Pulisic (£7.5m) has not yet shown up in the top 10k template just yet, his colleague Mason Mount (£6.6m) still inside the top-five (28.8%).
That just goes to show how much of a differential Pulisic could be as Chelsea host Aston Villa on Friday night.
That said, Mount does continue to fall from grace among the top 10k.
In Gameweek 14, he sat in 39.1% of teams at this level but has dropped to just 28.8%.
Travelling in the opposite direction is Son Heung-min (£9.8m), who is benefitting from the Jose Mourinho resurgence.
No Spurs attacker has scored more points than him across the former Manchester United manager’s, which is why his stock continues to rise among the top 10k.
Son sat in 30.9% of squads at that level in Gameweek 14 but is now owned by 38.2% of them.
Meanwhile, the goalkeepers and defenders preferred by the top 10k have stayed the same for Gameweek 15, including their popularity rankings.
As expected, chip usage was generally quite sparing for Gameweek 15 but there were still some interesting lines.
We’ve already mentioned that 1.6% of top 10k managers opted to Triple Captain Vardy.
However, despite fears over midweek rotation, the Bench Boost was actually the most deployed chip.
2.2% of managers in the top 10k have opted to add their substitutes’ scores into their total points tally for Gameweek 15.
That could be considered a brave decision considering that we have just embarked on the first midweek Gameweek of the campaign, of which many were concerned about rotation.
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