COUNTDOWN TO KICK OFF – PP90 RE RE-VISITED

Now then FFUKers, as the start of the season approaches I thought I’d revisit a pair of articles I wrote a few years back so see if last year’s data can throw up any cheeky gems for our GW1 team.

For a reminder of the previous article click here

The theme is “PP90”, which is a simple stat I’ve devised – it’s basically ‘total points’ divided by ‘minutes played’, multiplied by 90.  It kind of sounds like ‘points per match’, but does spit out slightly different results.

To be totally honest, most of the time I think you might as well just look at the PPM figures and save the effort of calculating PP90.  But sometimes PP90 can expose a potential diamond – for example someone that performed well off the bench last season so might be in line for more regular starts this year. Obviously if you can spot that cheeky differential before he explodes and everyone else jumps on the bandwagon you’ll gain a vital advantage.

First, a quick reminder of the ten highest scoring players last season:

Plenty of these guys will be on our radars for GW1. However, when you look at points per match (PPM) the list looks a little different:

Lingard had a fantastic loan spell at West Ham and was in most of our teams during the second half of the season. If he can get regular minutes again this season then he’s obviously one to watch. Personally I think he massively over-achieved last year and won’t return the same sort of numbers whether he goes back to West Ham or stays at United.

Stones is another interesting one – 5.8 PPM was far superior to both Dias (4.4) and Cancelo (4.9), but he’s £0.5 cheaper. Could be good value if he can avoid rotation at City – although that’s a big if!!

Let’s now look at PP90 to see if it throws up anything interesting…

(Note that I’ve excluded anyone that played less than 500 minutes this season to avoid oddities like Jaden Philogene-Bidace, who scored one point from one minute off the bench at Villa and thus has a PP90 of 90.00)

I imagine lots of FPL managers will pick a few big guns and then go hunting for some value by filtering by PPM. But Iheanacho and Jota aren’t even on the first page for PPM so could potentially be overlooked. Iheanacho is probably more nailed on than Jota for starts, but either could provide excellent value if they’re given regular opportunities, which I think is pretty likely.

It doesn’t look like Bale will be coming back to Spurs, but if he does he’s definitely worth another punt. He’s down in a relatively lowly 50^th place in the PPM rankings as a result of several one-point sub appearances early in his loan spell. But he tops the PP90 rankings, illustrating that when he got pitch time he delivered some awesome results. His PP90 of 11.15 was WAY ahead of second placed Foden (7.56).

Taking the PP90 principle a step further, we can divide it by this year’s price to add a ‘value’ angle to the numbers. Here are the results for what I’m calling PP90£…

Bale still tops the list thanks to his huge PP90. But other than Stones, not many of these guys are going to get many starts at all.

However, looking a little further down the list there are some more interesting options…

Not that many of these guys are particularly near the top of the PPM list. But these are essentially the guys that performed very well when they were on the pitch last season and appear to be excellent value.

If you think any of them are gonna be nailed on this year, perhaps as a result of a loan move, then maybe these are the players you want in your starting XI to supplement those big guns…??

JDS