Friday 14 December 2012

GW17 Captain Rankings

Your weekly captain pick in FPL is arguably the most important element of your team.  I know I am certainly reeling from captain scores in the last 4 weeks of 2, 1, 2, 2.  You can assemble the most optimised squad in the game, packed with potential and a bench brimming with value, but if your captain only adds 2 points every week end everyone's else gets 10 points out of theirs it's almost all for nothing.

For this reason I am putting extra work in to the captain rankings for this site.  Expect them to continue to be revised and tested through the season. 

For this week I have implemented a "two dimensional" element to the ranking.  The first is projected F.SCORE which you will be used to from previous weeks.  This is the modelled score based purely on the underlying statistical performance of the player, team and opponent.

The second element is how many actual points a player has this year per 90 minutes played (P90).  This breaks with the normal approach around here to ignore goals scored and points amassed to try and rule out any good or bad luck a player/team suffer through the season.  At this stage in the season though points scored correlate very well with a players underlying stats. The chart below shows the relation ship between every players cumulative statistical score (F.SCORE) and actual points scored.


 

Short term good or bad luck in finding the back of the net has levelled itself out.  This gives me confidence that actual points can be incorporated and therefore I have added FPL points to the ranking,  To do this, and inspired by work I have seen in the Soccer Analytics community  which in turn was inspired by early sabremetric work in baseball, I have used Pythagorean theorem to incorporate these two elements, F.SCORE and P90.

This gives me the following Captain Rankings for GW17.  The original F.SCORE metric is the dark blue bar on the chart up to the white line.  This will give you an idea of the statistical strength this weekend.  The lighter blue bar whilst not exactly their P90 is a representation of it.  The value in orange is the Captain Ranking - the lenght of the hypotenuse in the equation (c)


Notable "winners" of this revision of the capt ranking this week are Tevez, Long and Rooney, who would not have made this top 10 without their P90, particular Tevez.  You can see just from looking at his bar that most of it is made up of P90, as does Rooney's.  Notable losers include mostly Liverpool defenders, Glen Johnson, Agger and Skrtel, who would have made the ranking had I used my usual method but dropped out due to a lack of end result.

One final note -  please continue to ignore Lukaku unless Steve Clarke let's us know otherwise ;)




3 comments:

  1. Interesting idea. Like the potential.

    Quick question, is this full fantasy points or non-appearance points only?

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  2. Hi SG. They do include appearance points. Will not be a problem to remove these for next time though.

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  3. Hi Ste,

    You should note the players who are above the correlation line. i.e. Suarez below, Mata & Michu above. Indicating over achievement / under achievement?

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