Bored? You will be! Yes boys and girls we are slap bang in the middle of another break from the Premier League and at just over halfway through the season I thought I’d sit down and have a look at how everyone is getting on. Of course, I do sit down weekly and have a look at how everyone is getting on (Hello Mum!) but as the best football had to offer today was Wycombe v Villa and Man United v Sheffield Utd I have had plenty of time to look a little deeper.
I’ve focused on a few areas, Points, Transfers, Team Value and Chips.
As far as Points go, there is little I can tell you that you don’t already know. That is of course, if you bother to look beyond the page you are on in the league. Mark Turnbull (1st) leads the FFUK League with 1184 points, and an overall game ranking of 8341. Mark’s in the Top 10,000 in the world, or the top 0.3% of players, so respect to you Mr T. The lowest points scorer in the league with 782 points is my cousin David Fitzgerald (116th). Dave got married this year and it is also his first year playing FPL. Still, it’s unforgivable. I’m giving him until late July to finish honeymooning and then my rigorous training program for next season begins.
As far as averages go we are looking at an average of 1125 points in the Top 20, or 1089 for Top 50. Hmph. That 1089 points would put you in 24th place, right next to me, so I’m guessing I’m doing, average.
The number of Transfers made can give us an indication of how effective they can be. Assuming we get a single transfer a week then the total to date should be 20, right? The average number of transfers in the Top 50 is 22, and in the Top 20 that drops to 21. My personal assumption would be that transfers above the 20 would be points hits then, and I expected to see teams with excessive points hits lower down the league as they are spending all their points on hits all the time. By the same token I expected to see teams with low transfer totals lower down the league as these teams would not be making enough transfers and would not be competitive enough. Both aspects were correct but with interesting exceptions. Loz Kelly in 6th place has made 30 transfers, which means he’s taken a lot of hits, and it’s served him well. In fact the only player that’s made more transfers then Loz in the Top 50 is his brother Josh Kelly (43rd), but only by 1. So hits can work. The player with the highest number of transfers in the league is James Coffen in 76th place with 40 transfers. Lowest transfers in the league is 1 transfer, by a team who isn’t playing, which I’ll get back to. But Mark Tarbox in 13th place seemingly hasn’t made many transfers, just 12 in fact, the lowest in the Top 50 by far, a massive 18 less than Loz, and yet both approaches have worked. For Mark’s team his lack of transfers must partially relate to a few great choices in his original team namely Cech, Ozil and Lukaku (as well as Krul). That’s 4 players from his original team still in it. Luckily for Mark Arsenal are having a good season for once.
Finally on transfers, the stats also give an indication of how many ‘dead teams’ we have in the league. Pretty much, it looks competitive throughout the league. Only 3 teams have made less than 5 transfers, 10 teams have made less than 10 transfers. So that leaves 106 of 116 teams that are making transfers, or at least did make a decent number of transfers. I also had a look at how many of them had used their first Wildcard. Surprisingly, of 21 teams that didn’t use their first Wildcard, 6 were in the Top 50, including Toby Glicher (3rd). There were only 5 teams in the league that didn’t use their wildcard and have made less than 10 transfers in total. But I’ll stick with the above guess of about 10 dead teams in the league spread between Page 2 and Page 3. Certainly don’t take it for granted that the people on Page 3 aren’t playing.
Unfortunately I can’t get enough info yet on whether anyone has been hitting Wildcard 2 already, but I bet someone has…
I’ve had a quick look at Team Value and I can tell you the following stats:
Highest Team Value: Paul Baker (9th) – 109.3m
Lowest Team Value Top 20: Vivaek Venkat (16th) – 102.8m
Lowest Team Value Top 50: James Sheridan (48th) 100.7m
Lowest Team Value Overall: 96.3m (Not playing)
Average Team Value Top 20: 106.1m
Average Team Value Top 50: 105.3m
That’s as far as I went with Team Value, primarily because it is impossible to work out another team’s selling values and therefore I can’t really work out how much cash teams have got (or made, or lost). That said, as a rule, the difference between team value and selling value, ie. profit, is about 50%.
Team of 107m = 100m + 7m. 7m x 50% = 3.5m so selling value is approximately 103.5m. That works for me. My Team Value is 107.2m and my selling value is 103.3m. Anyway, at a guess it means that Paul Baker has about 1.5m more cash than most of the Top 20 which is an advantage.
For an in depth view of Team Value see Paul’s article here
Finally, we get to my favourite part, Chips! And what do Chips mean? Points! Chips mean points! Yummy yummy points! Well, that’s what I’m hoping anyway. I’ve been following the new Chips closely this season as you can see here and here
But you know all that already. What you really want to know is who has been using their Chips yeah? Get your gloves on.
As far as the Top 50 goes 55 total Chips have been played, of 150. That’s about a third of them. As far as the Top 20 goes that increases to about a half as 25 have been played, of 60. And we’re about halfway through the season so that’s fair enough, right? Wrong. Many teams have still used no chips at all, 17 in the Top 50 of which 6 are in the Top 20. In the Top 20 just 3 teams have used all their Chips but, if you are one of the 6 teams in the Top 20 trying to gain on those that have no Chips left, surely you have a good shout. Further, if you’re in the middle of the Top 50 somewhere and looking up, there are teams above you that have used more chips than you.
And what Chips are they?
Unsurprisingly the AOA Chip is the most used, 26 in the Top 50 or 11 in the Top 20. So over a third of the Top 20 have used that one. The least used is Triple Captain, 13/50 in the Top 50 or 7/20 Top 20. Triple Captain has been penned as the big one for double gameweeks, and allowing that you pick a captain earning say 20 points, then you’re going to gain as per the above numbers. That’s the equivalent of 10 league places for me (if no one else uses it on the same week). Fingers crossed. The same goes with Bench Boost, though I’m still not convinced that that Chip is more likely to earn more points on a double gameweek than a normal week. My highest bench score is about 30, which was pretty frustrating… Again 7/20 have been used in the Top 20 or 16/50 for the Top 50.
All in all that means there are an average of 1.90 chips still to be played in the Top 50. But those Chips won’t all work…
So what does all this tell us? Well it tells us that Mark Turnbull is in a pretty good position. He has the highest points total in the league, he’s made 23 transfers which is about average, he has a decent team value of 106.3m and he still has his AOA and Bench Boost chips to use. Hopefully they’ll work as well as his Triple Captain…
Good luck!
FFUK 