In our latest Members article, we take a look at four Premier League players who have recently been deployed in more advanced roles.
We have drawn from the Opta player data available to subscribers in our Members Area to see how these positional changes have affected their games.
What do we mean by ‘out of position’?
In Fantasy terms, ‘out of position’ (or ‘OOP’) doesn’t necessarily denote square pegs in round holes.
It doesn’t mean centre-halves deputising at full-back, players occupying a different flank from normal or a Jeff Hendrick-type (£5.4m) conversion from a central midfielder into a jobbing wide-man.
All those things are relevant when assessing a player’s worth in Fantasy Premier League, of course, as a change in roles can enhance or lessen a player’s appeal.
But by ‘out of position’, we in this context mean a Fantasy asset whose classification in FPL no longer fits.
As a rule of thumb, FPL players are grouped by the following criteria at the start of every season, with the decision heavily influenced by where they spent the bulk of their time in the previous campaign:
- Defenders: Centre-halves, full-backs, wing-backs.
- Midfielders: Central midfielders, ‘number tens’, wingers (either in a 4-4-2, 4-5-1 or 4-3-3).
- Forwards: Those who spearhead a three-man frontline, are paired in a strike duo or plough a lone furrow in attack.
Occasionally there is a misstep, with John Lundstram‘s (£4.8m) classification as an FPL defender a particularly glaring error, but most players fit neatly into the categories above and are accurately bracketed.
What FPL can’t vouch for at the start of every season is changes of system during the upcoming campaign, which occasionally throws up an ‘out of position’ asset for us to consider.
The cases of Lundstram and Anthony Martial (£7.9m) are already well-documented, with those two assets playing as a midfielder and forward respectively for the entirety of 2019/20, so we instead switch our focus to four players whose ‘out of position’ statuses are more recent developments.
4 years, 1 month ago
Roll on Thursday.