The second international break of the season gives Fantasy Premier League (FPL) managers an opportunity to take stock of the season so far.
Seven Gameweeks is a small sample size, but scrutiny of the underlying stats in the Members Area reveals some trends already starting to emerge that can help give us a good basis for FPL decision-making.
Promoted sides Burnley and Sunderland languish at the foot of the table for non-penalty expected goals (NPxG), while the Clarets and Manchester United are among the bottom three for non-penalty expected goals conceded (NPxGC).
Manchester City, meanwhile, lead the way for NPxG, which is hardly surprising given the exploits of Erling Haaland (£14.5m) this season.
However, when evaluating these factors, it is important to consider fixture difficulty.
Burnley are indeed nothing to shout about at present, but bear in mind that from Gameweeks 1-7, they have had the second-worst schedule of any team, according to the Fixture Ticker.
To this end, let’s take a look at how all 20 Premier League teams are doing on the NPxG front when compared to how easy or difficult their opening set of fixtures were.
ESTABLISHING FIXTURE DIFFICULTY
What constitutes an easy or difficult fixture schedule is subjective, but Fantasy Football Scout’s Season Ticker helps give an objective view.
It gives different ratings for attack and defence on a colour-coded ticker and can be filtered accordingly.
EXPECTED GOALS (XG) V FIXTURE DIFFICULTY
The top scorers in the Premier League at present are Man City, with 15 goals, then Arsenal have 14, followed by Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspur and Chelsea (all 13), while the top five teams for NPxG are Man City (12.21), Crystal Palace (12.15), Man Utd (11.69), Arsenal (10.64) and Chelsea (10.40).
City, Arsenal and Chelsea have all overperformed their NPxG, while Palace and Man Utd should have scored more according to the chances they have created. But if we scrutinise the opponents faced, of the above-mentioned teams, only Pep Guardiola’s side have had a relatively benign start to the season.
Arsenal have had the third-most demanding schedule for the opening seven Gameweeks, Liverpool (who lie sixth in the NPxG table) the fourth-worst, Palace the fifth-most demanding and United the sixth-toughest. Even Chelsea’s matches rank in the toughest half of the difficulty table.
So what does this tell us? Well, in theory, apart from City, the above teams should actually start scoring at an even more rapid rate as their schedules ease up.
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