It seems to be one of those generally accepted rules of thumb of the game that when it comes to picking your captain, you should go for a ‘heavy hitter’, a player that comes with a hefty price tag attached.

A quick look at the Fantasy Football Scout captain poll in recent weeks seems to back this up. Since Gameweek 12, only once has a player costing less than 9.0 picked up 10% or more of the votes in the captain’s poll (Charlie Austin in Gameweek 17, and even then he was a distant third behind Yaya Toure and Robin van Persie in the voting).

There is an implicit assumption that there is a strong correlation between a player’s price tag and their point-scoring potential, which may be leading us to overlook contenders for the captaincy at lower prices,  such as Stewart Downing and Austin.

In the FFS captain polls since Gameweek 12, Downing has averaged just 1% of the votes and Austin 6%. Neither of them were even listed as regular options in the captain polls until Gameweek 13.

Cheap v Heavy Hitter

With nearly half the season gone, I thought it would be instructive to see how strong the correlation actually is between a player’s price tag and their point scoring potential.

This is what we get when we plot player prices against Fantasy Premier League (FPL) points scored:

And this is what we get when we plot player prices against points per game (ppg)

Whilst there clearly is a correlation between points and player price (for those who care about such things, the r-squared is 0.3 for total points and 0.35 for PPG), it is not as strong as one might think, and there is a pool of players at the mid-price range who are outscoring several of the higher-priced players.

Downing, Austin, and even Christian Eriksen and Graziano Pelle have more than held their own against higher cost rivals such as Yaya Toure , Robin van Persie, Diego Costa and Wayne Rooney, and are not far short of the players at the top of the pile – Sergio Aguero, Alexis Sanchez and Eden Hazard.

What about a player’s explosiveness? Surely we look to captain the heavy hitters because they have more potential for racking up the explosive scores?

Double-Digit Scores

Let’s take a look at the number of times a player has scored 10 points or more this season:

Once again, Downing and Austin in the mid-price range compare well against their higher priced rivals. With three double-digit scores, each them match Van Persie, Aguero, Angel Di Maria and Cesc Fabregas and have done better than Costa and Rooney. They are also only one short of the players at the top of the pile who have four double-digit scores apiece (Toure, Sanchez, Hazard). The mid-priced duo of Leighton Baines and Christian Eriksen, it should be noted, are also at the top of the pile with four double-digit scores.

Blanks

What about reliability, then? Don’t the heavy hitters have a lower risk of blanking? Let’s take a look at the number of times players have blanked (I’ve defined this as scoring two points or fewer):

If avoiding blanks is a primary concern, it would seem we should avoid captaining van Persie, who has racked up 10 blanks in his 16 appearances this season. The rest of the heavy hitters do appear to suffer from fewer blanks than their lower priced rivals, but with five blanks this season, Downing can match Aguero, Sanchez and Hazard, while Austin is only one behind on six blanks, which is equal with Rooney and one better than Toure.

Conclusion

Ignore Austin and Downing as captain contenders at your peril!

Notes

–          Stats include all matches up to and including Gameweek 17

–          Screenshots taken from http://tinyurl.com/2014-15FPLstats-value