The Player Raters Team of the (Half) Season

The end is nigh for player rater model, I'm hoping to replace it with a more refined model soon so there won't be any more updates to the current model. As a send off for the model, I thought I'd have a looked at what it thinks the best team so far would have been, it might serve as help for those on wildcards as well. Remember that the model only looks at points from goals and assist, it ignores clean sheets, appearance points, most bonus points and yellow/red cards. This is most noticeable with defenders, the choices are the most attacking defenders, not the ones I'd expect to get most points.

To select the team I modified the superb spreadsheet produced over at insideFPL, go check it out because it's a great tool to play around with. I pulled the ratings from the PR model and run the solver to find the best attacking 10. I decided to find two teams, the first was the perfect team found with an unlimited budget, the second a cheaper option which includes some differential options. Remember the players are selected for best attacking potential on a per appearance basis!

The Player Raters Perfect Team

Here's how the team breaks down:

Player	Current Price	Expected Points from Goals and Assists (Per Appearance)
Coleman	£6.7m	1.5
Debuchy	£5.2m	1.3
Kolarov	£5.3m	1.1
Walcott	£9.6m	3.1
Ozil	£10.0	3
Ramsey	£7.2m	3
Eriksen	£7.2m	3
Suarez	£13.3m	6.2
Aguero	£11.9m	4.3
Sturridge	£9.1m	3.1
Sum	£85.5m	29.6

Not a bad looking team, and all for a very modest £85.5m. It's not quite affordable, but downgrade one of the heavy hitters and your left with a realistic team. (Thanks to @SoccerSaber for pointing this out). This team has an expected points total of 29.6 each gameweek, so that's roughly 5 goals and 2 assists. Not bad from 10 players.

First thing to note is three Arsenal midfielders, which shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. What might is that Ramsey is one of them, his points are no fluke at all (unlike a certain Ivorian), they are fully backed up by his stats. The second thing to note is that Sturridge is the 3rd striker, with a return this past gameweek many will be debating whether to double up on Liverpool strikers. The stats certainly back that idea up, but Sturridge's injury record has always blighted his fantasy prospects. Third, the inclusion of Eriksen will almost certainly come as a surprise, unless of course you've been following this blog, since I tipped Eriksen to be a big name 2 months ago. His stats really put him among the elite midfielders and at £7.3m, he's about £2m under his real value, making him a tremendous pick up on your wildcard.

I also want to highlight the defence. The three chosen are the three with the best attacking potential (subject to budget) but all are viable picks. Coleman is obviously a great pick and leading all defenders for points, Debuchy's value is harmed by his propensity to a yellow card, while Kolarov could be a steal for the second half of the season. Incredibly attacking and now seemingly first choice LB for one of the best defences in the league, all for £5.4m.

The 'almost made it' list of players who just missed out on being included in this team:
Defence: Walker, Ivanovic
Midfield: Hazard, Silva, Coutinho
Forwards: Rooney, Lukaku

The Player Raters Budget Team

Here's how the team breaks down:

Player	Current Price	Expected Points from Goals and Assists (Per Appearance)
Bardsley	£4.5m	1.0
Shaw	£4.8m	0.9
Delaney	£4.4m	0.6
Shelvey	£5.4m	1.9
Redmond	£4.6m	1.7
Dyer	£5.2m	1.7
Puncheon	£4.9m	1.7
Rodriguez	£6.3m	1.9
Berbatov	£7.0m	2.4
Crouch	£5.5m	1.8
Sum	£52.6m	15.6

First, let me state that when I was running the solver to find a budget team, Suarez, Ramsey and Eriksen were included in almost every team. Not only are they big point getters, but they also offer tremendous value. I've manually excluded them from consideration for this team.

Now, I'm expecting to catch some flack here because it includes some odd names, and excludes some obvious ones like Januzaj, Barkley and Ravel Morrison. Neither of these are rated poorly by the model, but the players chosen just edged them for expected points. While these names are high profile, they're not much better than their unknown rivals. Barkley has grabbed roughly 3.5PPG so far, while Redmond has 3.1PPG, and the model has Barkley as over-performing his underlying stats.

Bardsley and Shaw are clearly worth considering, both are playing in good defences (though Southampton's is much better than Sunderland's) and offer some attacking potential for a kind price. I'd be less keen on Delaney when there are £4.0m alternatives in Palace's backline.

Upfront is where there could be some real value, especially in Berbatov who almost made it into the main team! As the front man for a much improved Fulham attack, Berbatov's fantasy pedigree can't be questioned but there's an element of risk in putting him in your team. More secure but much less glamorous is Crouch, who would be my ultra-budget forward of choice if you wanted funds to invest elsewhere in your team.

The 'almost made it' list of players who just missed out on being included in this team:
Defence: Celustuka, Rangel
Midfield: Mutch, Kasami, Amalfitano
Forwards: Hooper, Berahino, Deulofeu, Long

Wrap-Up

So there you have it, two teams that have been selected to gain most attacking points (goals and assists). They're by no means the 'perfect' teams, but my wildcard team will probably end up with 7 or 8 of the same names as the main team.

*Edit* The latest stats for GW21 haven't been included, so the inclusion of Eriksen and Sturridge comes before their big games the weekend just gone!

Which European Team Creates and Limits the Most Shots?

Following on from my first article looking at shot data from the Top 5 European leagues using data from WhoScored, I decided to take a lot at the defensive and attacking sides of shots. Much inspired by the graphics of the Ben Mayhew which most of you have probably seen, I also thank Ben for his courtesy in allowing me to post this graphics.

Learn About Tableau

Again, I want to allow you, the reader, draw your own conclusion but I thought I'd pick out a couple of teams worthy of note.

Fulham are very, very poor at both creating shots and stopping the opposition from shooting, but were even worse 2 games ago. The sacking of Martin Jol was probably justified by Fulham's performances, which led them to be one of the worst teams in Europe according to this model. The appointment of Rene Meulensteen also seems a good one, especially on the offensive end, with Fulham averaging an astonishing 18.5 shots per game since he has been in charge. That's double their average of all games so far and puts them on par with the likes of Bayern and Dortmund. These have been 2 home games, but they've been against a great defence in Spurs and a good one in Aston Villa. The quality in the squad that saw them finish 12th last year suggests they have the potential to turn things around, but there is a lot to be worked on.

Unsurprisingly few teams are elite in one area but poor in another. Hamburg are the only team who seem to be gung-ho all out attack and have scored as many as Schalke despite being 7 places below them in the table. This is likely in part due to the shooting of Pierre-Michel Lasogga who is averaging 3 shots per game, 3rd most in the Bundesliga.

Nantes are alone in the ' Top Defence, Poor Attack' section, but it is Lille that seem the most defensive team in Europe. Currently sitting 3rd in Ligue 1, Lille have only managed to score 18 goals (which places them 12th in Ligue 1), but have an impressive defensive record, conceding just 5 in 17 games. I don't watch Ligue 1 so can't give an explanation for this, but WhoScored's player ratings suggest Idrissa Gueye should receive much credit as a holding defensive midfielder. His stats suggests he plays the Makelele role superbly, and he might be one to look at for in future transfer windows (hint hint David Moyes). If anyone reading this does know more about Gueye I'd love to hear about it.

In the premier league and there's a small group of Man City, Chelsea and Tottenham who lead the league in taking shots and limiting to opposition in shooting. A more detailed piece of analysis might show Tottenham's shots are largely from long range, leaving Man City and Chelsea as the Top 2. Like many others these are the two teams I expect to ultimately fight it out for the title. Arsenal much more middling and I'll be bold and suggest they'll finish outside the Top 3.

With 5 straight wins you don't need a graphic to tell you Juventus are quite good and there's no reason to bet against them in Serie A. What will be interesting is whether they can translate their league dominance into top European performances. They are yet to qualify from Group B, needing a point in their final away game against Juventus, and their absence from the knockout stage would be a loss to the competition.

In La Liga we see Real Madrid stand far above anyone else in Europe for shots per game, not at all surprising given the shooting abilities of Ronaldo and Bale. They are only average across Europe for stopping the opponent having shots, but who needs clean sheets when you average nearly 3 goals per game.

Which European League Has The Most Shots on Target?

With so little fantasy debates to be had at the moment, with most decisions revolving around getting an XI who will start and some good bench options if needed, I decided to have a quick look at something a little different. To be honest, I mainly just wanted to test out the new box and whisker plots that are available in the new version of tableau 8.1.

I decided to use data from WhoScored and look at attacking stats from the top 5 leagues in Europe (Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A and Ligue 1) and since we all know the importance of shots on target as an indicator of attacking performance I choose to look at this.

Learn About Tableau

A quick explanation for the uninitiated (or those who have erased their memories of high school maths), each column is a league, and each data point is a team from within that league, along the y-axis we have Shots on Target per Game. The box and whisker plot itself is made up of 5 points, the minimum which marks the lowest of the group (in this case each league) and the maximum marking the highest. The median is also marked, which is the midpoint of the data, and the 'box' is constructed from the lower quartile to the upper quartile, such that 50% of the data is within the box. This is very useful for seeing the distribution of teams within a league and for comparing leagues. Graphically, the different points marked are:

Comments on the Box Plot

I don't want to indulge in a huge piece of analysis, and would rather you make up your own mind about what can be taken from the graphic, but here's a few comments:

• The Bundesliga has the highest median shots on target with 4.9. So an average game would see 9.8 shots on target, with an expected number of goals of over 3 per game. Does this make the Bundesliga the best league? Well, we cannot answer that, but it may be the most exciting league if you believe more goals leads to a more exciting game.
• Real Madrid are likely to score the most goals across the top 5 leagues, while Dortmund, Juventus, Manchester City and PSG top the charts in their respective leagues. No surprises here, apart from the fact that Bayern don't top the Bundesliga, their impressive record can be attributed to their defensive strength however.
• Sunderland are the worst attacking team, and by some way. According to my model they might be lucky to score 30 this season in the league, on current form at least. Cardiff, Fulham, Crystal Palace and Hull don't fare much better with only 2.8 shots on target per game. These 5 teams are worse than any team across the 5 leagues with the exception of Ajaccio. The belief that the English league has strength in depth certainly doesn't hold on the offensive side of the game.
• La Liga is positively skewed more than any other league, which we'd expect with 3 brilliant teams in Barcelona, Real Madrid and Atletico Madrid. This is at least in part to the way TV revenue is distributed in the Spanish league. Serie A is similarly skewed, but if we remove Juventus' supreme attack we actually see a cluster of good but not great attacking teams.
• The Bundesliga is also positively skewed by the presence of 3 stand out teams. It's certainly true that there is greater parity in the Bundesliga once you remove these teams though, at least from an attacking standpoint.
• The Premier League seems to be the most evenly distributed league, there are no run away teams and no teams falling far behind. There is also no cluster in the middle like we see with the Bundesliga, or towards the bottom as La Liga shows. Again, TV revenues likely play a part here, with the distribution of them being much more even across all teams than in other leagues. Does this mean the Premier League is more competitive? I'll leave that one open to debate.

If this post proves popular there's a few stats that throw up interesting box and whisker plots. There's some interesting stuff on the defensive end as well.

Update to the Player Rater Model

Also, there's a slight change to the expected points table. In selecting teams you now make your selections and click 'Apply' to apply that filter. This should be a lot quicker when you want to select or deselect a group of teams as you no longer have to wait for the viz to update with every single selection made.