Which Players and Teams flourished during Project Restart

Introduction

“It’s football, Jim, but not as we know it.”

Premier League football was very different during Project Restart. Empty stadiums with fans on a Zoom wall. 5 substitutions and drink breaks. Sanitised footballs and corner flags. 3 games a week with very little time for the players to get match fit. In this strange new world of football, which players and which teams adapted the best and plundered the FPL points? With lockdown football likely to continue well into the 2020/2021 season, answering this question could be very useful for our FPL teams in the fast-approaching new season.

The Best (And Worst) Players Post Lockdown

In the table below, we looked at how many goals and assists high profile players scored during Gameweeks 1 to 29 (pre-lockdown) and, after calculating their ‘minute per attacking return’, compared this to Gameweeks 30+ to 38+ (post-lockdown). The difference in the number of minutes it took to register a goal or an assist (including FPL assists) highlights which players quickened up their rate of scoring in this very different footballing environment.

For example, in Gameweeks 1 to 29, Kevin De Bruyne scored a goal or got an assist every 83 minutes. In Gameweeks 30+ to 38+, this fell to every 64 minutes, which works out 18 minutes quicker than pre-lockdown.

Generally speaking, the higher the minus figure in the ‘Pre/Post Lockdown Difference’ column, the more the player’s performance improved during project restart. Wan-Bissaka recorded the biggest difference with the time it took him to get an assist falling by 795 minutes. While this is a huge drop and the player had worked on improving his attacking game, two assists in either of the two time periods compared is not overly statistically significant.

Perhaps more telling is a comparison of key Liverpool assets, namely Salah and Mane along with their attacking full-backs, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Robertson. Salah quickened up his rate of scoring slightly by 11 minutes post-lockdown, whereas it slowed down for Mane with his owners having to wait 44 minutes longer for an attacking return. More starkly, Robertson sped up his rate of scoring FPL points by a huge 194 minutes, while for Trent it took 49 minutes longer. If Trent is far more expensive than Robertson when FPL re-launches, could going for Robertson and pocketing the extra cash be the shrewd move given that the Scot appears to have adapted better to lockdown football?

Along with Antonio, who scored an attacking return 124 minutes faster once the season restarted, perhaps the biggest turnaround witnessed during project restart was from Raheem Sterling. He seemed to flourish in empty stadiums with his rate of goals and assists improving by 107 minutes.

Delving a little deeper into this pre and post lockdown stats, and we can perhaps see why. On average, his take-ons improved from 2.1 to 7.0 per appearance, dispossessions fell from 2.2 to 0.9 and the number of times he was tackled fell from 4.0 to 1.7. While his minutes per attempt stayed roughly the same (28.5 versus 22.7), his shot accuracy improved from 32.4% to 53.8%, his goal conversion improved from 15.5% to 32.1% and the number of blocked shots fell from 1.1 to 0.4.

These are big swings in what you might call ‘confidence stats.’ In other words, Sterling was flying past players more, getting tackled less and getting more of his shots on target and in the back of the net. Could the fact that there are no supporters in the stadium to groan when he loses the ball or misses a big chance benefit Sterling more than most? Does he play better with no supporters to get on his back or could it be a fitness issue? With Pep having previously praised Sterling’s “powers of regeneration”, was he in much better physical condition than his footballing counterparts and more able to cope with the demands of 3 games a week? Or, as a Match of the Day pundit would say, was it both?

Having looked at who did well post-lockdown, which players went the other way? In the table below, we have highlighted a few big names who significantly regressed when the season resumed.

Jack Grealish really regressed. His goals and assists took 733 minutes longer to arrive during project restart (did Aston villa sacrifice attacking play to focus on improving their defence in the final gameweeks or was this down to their strikers not putting away the chances Grealish was creating?), while Calvert-Lewin registered a big fat ‘N/A’ as he failed to score from gameweek 30+ onwards much to his owner’s frustration.

The Best (And Worst) Teams Post Lockdown

In the table below, we have looked at which teams improved their rate of clean sheets and goals scored pre and post lockdown and made some notable observations.

• Aston Villa and Spurs recorded the biggest improvement in clean sheets with each one arriving 351 and 480 minutes quicker respectively. This shows that Villa’s defence did indeed improve when the league resumed while Mourinho finally began to live up to his stereotype of his team’s being defensively sound.

• In terms of how much longer a clean sheet took to arrive, Crystal Palace clocked in at 557 minutes with a solitary clean sheet during project restart. This suggests they were more ‘on the beach’ than Chris Rea. Norwich somehow did even worse and the now-relegated team failed to register any clean sheets and scored just one goal post-lockdown (stats which were so exceptionally bad it threw off Excel’s conditional formatting colour scale for all the other teams).

• For goals scored, Leicester City showed why they are so reliant on talisman Jamie Vardy. With Vardy taking 73 minutes longer to score post-lockdown, the whole team suffered with goals taking 49 minutes longer for the Champions League aspiring side. In contrast, Manchester United’s kind run of fixtures from Gameweek 30+ to 38+ and their settled, all-out attack formation (with Greenwood, Rashford, Martial, Fernandes and Pogba all regularly starting) paid dividends, as goals arrived 23 minutes faster than they did pre-lockdown.