Analysing The EA SPORTS Index

As we highlighted around the launch of the Fantasy Premier League (FPL) game, this season’s Bonus Points are being gathered from a very different source.

The days of Fantasy managers calling foul when a player sporting an extravagant haircut (see: Chris Eagles, David Luiz, etc for perfect examples) appeared to win favour simply by catching the eye of the “man in the stand” – the ever elusive Press Association representative – are now dead.

This season the FPL are dealing in cold hard statistics; numbers will be crunched and repurposed via the EA SPORTS Player Performance Index – a figure dealt to each player after every game based on six key factors (winning, performance, appearance time, goals, assists and clean sheets). That new Gameweek stat will now decide the destination of the much-maligned supplementary scoring; we’re no longer at the mercy of a shadowy figure with the dubious outlook – a good thing surely?

The truth is – the jury is still out on that. While we’re likely to have a decent insight on how things will work once the season is underway, right now we can only speculate on how this change will evolve matters.

There are some clues available; a few paths we can tentatively tread right now to help anticipate how the Bonus Points will be steered from next weekend onwards. We’ve done some digging through the data already publicly available to explore how matters may pan out and, in doing so, can present you with more than a few theories to ponder prior to Saturday’s deadline.

Looking at last season’s top 25 EA SPORTS PPI scorers, the first impression is extremely encouraging. Names like Vincent Kompany (7th), Joe Hart (11th), Petr Cech (12th) and Sylvain Distin (24th), are high in the rankings, suggesting that such players will benefit from a belated extra boost in their Gameweek earnings.

Dig a little deeper however and these early hopes seem a little forlorn.

Kompany and Hart, for example, started 75 out of 76 games between them, with an average EA SPORTS PPI of 14 and 13.2 respectively. Right now those scores mean very little. We know that, over the season, both players fared well – that they were obviously very consistent in their Index scoring. However, when push comes to shove, picking up Bonus Points is about being one of the top three scorers on the index in any given fixture – consistent scoring week to week will mean nothing – “explosive” performances in a single Gameweek is what we’re looking for. This is where attacking players appear to hold a firm advantage with their decisive interventions at the business end of the field.

Before we switch our attention to those particular players, let’s dwell on Kompany as an example a little longer.

Much is expected of the City centre-back this season; here is a player who rarely threatens goal and assists but is often the mainstay of a rock solid City backline. With an initial price of 6.0 in the FPL, Kompany looks good value but, in saying that, we’re still anticipating Bonus points will help him justify that valuation.

As already mentioned, Kompany earned a very respectable average score on the EA SPORTS PPI of 14 points per game last season- however, it’s his range of scoring that is key to his chances of earning a top three Index spot in any given match. If this range of scoring over the season is between 7 and 28 points in the Index, can we be sure that this will be enough to finish above the likes of David Silva, Carlos Tevez and Sergio Aguero on a regular basis?

To assess this further we analysed the first ten EA SPORTS PPI “Team of the Week’s” in an attempt to decipher some trends within the scoring. We start with the top scoring goalkeepers of weeks one through ten…

Looking at the table above you can see the best goalkeeper in each of the first ten weeks of action scored between 19 and 26 on the EA SPORTS PPI. Averaged out across the ten weeks this gives us a score of 22.1 points as an average return for a top rated stopper.

These numbers appear to show there is a definite ceiling to a keeper’s Index score. However, on initial inspection, given that we know that Kompany averaged a score of 14 points a week, this still look promising – the early impression is that keepers may well be in line for more Bonus next season. Once we start analysing the outfield positions however, the complexion changes.

When we examine twenty of the top forty defenders from the first ten weeks of the season you can immediately see an increase in the range of scoring. Nemanja Vidic earned 45 EA SPORTS PPI points in a single week, while the lowest in our sample is 19 from Wayne Bridge – the same as our tenth rated keeper Petr Cech.

The “top performing” defenders look like they pick up between 24 and 37 Index points in a given Gameweek. The average score the top of the level defenders (using the sample of all 40 from the first ten weeks, not just the 20 listed above) returns an EA SPORTS Index score of 28.1. Indication that defenders are at least more likely to get Bonus Points than a goalkeeper on your average Gameweek. Little change there then.

Significantly, from the Defenders table above, we can already see that goalscoring is a key factor behind a strong Index haul. The top scoring defenders over the first 10 Gameweeks all claimed goals and Alex and Jara were ranked amongst them even without earning a clean sheet.

There are, of course, and always will be, exceptions to the rule. Chris Samba earned 30 Index points in Gameweek 3, despite failing to register any of the key factors. From the data available, however, such occurrences appear to be a rarity.

Already we’re beginning to suspect that goals and assists, plus of course a winning team performance, will be the key contributors. When we switch our focus to the attacking players, this hypothesis appears to be cemented further.

Perhaps the most surprising factor of all, hidden amongst the minutiae of the EA SPORTS PPI definition, is the fact that clean sheets contribute towards a midfielder’s – and even a striker’s Index tally. The definition states that these are weighted according to position, but the fact that a striker has any benefit from a clean sheet whatsoever immediately diminishes the value of a defender in comparison to their attacking comrades.

To think Mario Balotelli could be more likely to pick up FPL bonus points now because of work predominantly done by the likes of Kompany, only strengthens the case for attacking players within winning teams.

As you can see on the table above – the range of returns here is the biggest we’ve seen. Midfielders and forwards are of course much more likely to score and assist and it appears to be those factors that see their Index scores rocket.

The bottom scorer in our table – Rafael Van der Vaart still picked up 24 points (this is 10 more than your average Kompany score) while the top earner over the first ten Gameweeks – Didier Drogba – romped home with an index mark of 68 points – a truly explosive return.

Finding the average EA SPORTS PPI score from the top midfielders and forwards (using the sample of all 60 from the first ten weeks) we can see evidence of a clear runaway winner – the Index figure comes in at a strong 39.6.

Looking back then, while the defenders made the goalkeepers look somewhat irrelevant, by and large the midfielders and strikers leave them both behind. The average score of 39.6 is higher than all but one of the very best defenders in the first 10 Gameweeks.

Given that there is an average of 2.8 goals scored in every Premier League game, that leaves the potential for a fair number of assists and goals to boost the attacking players’ Index scores each week. A clean sheet proved much harder to come by last season and, on the evidence of the data available, seems far less likely to earn a player the boost required to push them into the top three EA SPORTS PPI position in a given match ahead of a goalscorer. Winning, scoring and assisting all look like being the key indices.

All roads, perhaps unsurprisingly, lead to goals then. If a player scores a goal (or even just contributes to it) then their Index score seems likely to beat off other “top performers” across the less significant performance statistics.

We have to hold our hands up and be honest here – our data is limited – we’re working with a large number of blind spots and these theories are ultimately assumptions based on what’s available. The evidence found however, seems to defy some of the assumptions made since the rule change was announced. Defenders and industrious midfielders could earn extra recognition but ultimately, it looks as the attacking players, particularly those in sides that regularly earn three points, will dominate the Bonus awards.