Fantasy Football - Top 10 Analysis

Top 10 Teams Analysis

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Top 10 Teams, 'Red Herrings'' 'Goal Keeper Rotation Policy Questioned.' & General Analysis.
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Hello Football fans, This week I decided to do some detective work, I went undercover and sneaked a peek at the top 10 teams within the FPL. I downloaded their Game Week 12 teams & set about analysing how these fantasy guru's have accumulated their points so far. With 812 Points the maximum collected so far, the pace has been set at an average of 67.7 points per week.

Tenth position totals 785 points, an average points total per week of 65.41, not far behind top spot, I will be using these posts going forward to monitor if certain teams are finishing in the Top 10 consistently, there will be volatility but perhaps there maybe some player consistency or points to note.

Managers that stuck with Tevez after 3 weeks of not scoring were rewarded with a massive 19 points, not sure if lady luck played her part here for those that didn't twist, squad rotation was more than on the card for Game week 12. The large player points above obviously effect the Top 10 team, so even before looking at players in the teams, I will be expecting to see a few of these names in the line up and definitely a fair few Tevez / Silva Captaincy.

Well straight away we can see that there is least consistency with picking defenders, with 31 different names and although Baines was in the most selected defender, comparing this to other positioning this is also the least maximum compared to other positions. On comparison to strikers there are only 6 players selected across all ten teams, Suarez also ends up most selected out of all positions. 

Red Herring's

Tevez - Due to Tevez's large points hall this week I was expecting a large number of selection for Golf Pro. Further weeks will reveal if this high selection value is just.

Goal Keeper Rotation Policy - Looking through the Top 10 sides I couldn't quite believe that nearly all of the teams do not seem to using a Goal Keeper Rotation Policy, Most had Begovic and another goal keeper who doesn't even get any playing time i.e Green, Stockdale etc. This just seemed crazy, to round things off Cerny who's QPR's third choice behind, Paddy Kenny and Cesar hasn't even picked up a single point this season but was selected by more than one team. Least my previous suggestion of Begovic seem like more than a good shout. 

Comparing the Top 10 Selection to the Overall FPL TSB (Teams selected by.) There is a clear player difference. There is no mention of the following players, which gives food for thought, will be good to see if Guru manager know something the rest of us simple do not.

GK's 

• Ruddy - Perhaps Norwich are just too unpredictable.
• Cech - You can't tell me they saw the Chelsea turmoil happening at the start of the week, perhaps just too expensive.

Def's

• Kompany - Way to expensive in my view, Trend Analysis of Points vs. Price shows this.
• Jenkinson - With Sanga and Gibbs on the way back from injury will Jenko play much more.
• Ivanovic / Cole - For the same reason as Torres, hard fixtures and GW15 missing a game, Ivanovic is also facing competition in Azpilicueta. 

Mid's

• Michu - Seems like a bargain, he's now a midfield playing as a striker who like to score, cheap option, I'm really surprised he was not more selected.
• Yaya Toure - If only Mancini, would play this boy further forward, now they are out of the Champions league perhaps they will dump the 532 formation and push Yaya forward. After all he is the 9th highest Mid point wise.
• Routledge - Many season's in the premiership without good points, I too have my reservations.

Fwd's

• Ba - Although next few fixtures are good, Newcastle & Ba are simply out of form, could this explain the non selection.
• Torres - I would have thought Torres would have made the list as he the only out and out striker in the Chelsea squad, with hard fixtures up and coming and Chelsea missing GW15, perhaps the guru managers are well prepared.

Captain Corner GW 12- As we all know, you can't afford a run of bad captain selections, None of the Guru's selected a bad skipper. A large Van Persie Score might see a big a change in the top teams next week.

Captains	TSB	Points
Suarez	7	22
Tevez	2	38
Silva	1	32

The BIG 3 - Goal Forecast.

The BIG 3 - Goal Forecast.

Hello Football Fans, I started this article with the intention of trying to work out if there are any stats out there to help me to select players from the Top 3 teams. Personally I no longer think there is a Top 4, Arsenal, Everton, Newcastle & Spurs will fight it out for that 4th Champions league spot this year. So with this in mind for this article I have decided to try predict how many goals the Top 3 will score (and let in,) to help with decision around who to pick from which team. The idea here being to fill in the data in the red section (Cells P2:R5.)

So yes another set of colorful charts, but what do we have here? If only Utd, City or Chelsea have a chance of winning the league, I decided to compare them with past league winners at the same stage of season, 11 games gone. The Top Table is this year so far, and the second table is all of the the past champions, 11 games into there respective seasons (Bar last season where I have included both Utd and City, as they were only split by goal difference.) Note that only 3 out of 12 past winners were actually outside the top 3 (Column C.)

In Mancini's interview this week he said his Strikers are '5 goal short of where they should be,' even with their multi-million pound strike force the stats show they are 4.62 goals (=24.62-20, Cells I4 - I22) behind a past champions mean average 'Goals For' at this point in the season. Mancini had obviously been checking the stats!!

Looking back at the Tables above, the Blue Columns (B:L) are Standard League Table Data, the following 3 White columns (M:O) are Linear Average Forecasts for end of season 'Goals For & Against.' As we are only 11 games into the season it is simple to linearly calculate how many how many goal would occur (at either end) by a simple extrapolation I.e. Lets take the 2010-11 season for example, 11 games gone  means 11 games / 38 total = 29% of the season gone so far. In that season there were 24 goals for the Champions Man Utd (Cell I10.) If we extrapolate 24 goals for 29% of the season to 100% this would mean that there is 83 goals (=24*100%/29%, Cell M10.) Now we know no this can't be correct, but this gives us linear calculation that we can use to compare to what actually did happened at the end of the season (Cells P7:R20.) The percentage difference can then be seen in cells (S7:T20.) So for Goals For Cell M10 Forecasts 83 Goals, there was actuall 78 Goals Cell P10, this is percentage difference of -6% Cell S10.

Now further to this, to calculate this seasons Forecast end goals (P2:R5) this is a two step process. The first step is to compare the data tables to select similar data to infer comparable percentage differences (Estimates, Cells S3:T5.) The Second step is then to use percentage differences to calculate the forecast end goal. Let me take you through an example.

In the above table I have highlighted values in columns J & T and ended up with a value for Q3, the Forecast End Goals Against. This all starts from the goals that Man Utd have let in this season (Cell J3) if we look at cell J23 we notice that the total of 16 goal's let in this year, is three more than the maximum of any team that has won the title after 11 games. 16 goals conceded is also in the second standard deviation when comparing sigma from the mean (11.51=8.38+3.13, Cells J22 +J25), hence taking into consideration all the GA's which fall into the second standard deviation i.e. GA's >11.51, I have highlighted J9, J10 & J19. These values correspond to the 'GA percentage Difference,' cells T9,T10 & T19, we can see that these values are roughly the same, implying that the 'GA percentage Difference' would be similar. Hence by taking the mean average of T9,T10 & T19, we gain the value in cell T3, the 'Estimated GA percentage difference.' 

This then allows us to work backwards to calculate the Forecast End Goals Against, simply by taking the 'Forecast Average End Goals Against' & using this as a base to add the 'Estimated GA percentage difference' too. I.e. 45 = 55+(55*-19%), Cells (N3+N3*T3).

This methodology can then be applied to the rest of the cells, colour matching in the below table (columns I,J,S & T) through the same methodology shows how the forecasts were calculated.

The red section (P2:R5) is the Forecast. I think Man City are a little undervalued and will most probably do much better come May, the stats show that Mancini's new formation is effecting the forwards, at least he has identified this already.

From the Big 3, last year's Champions are a rotation nightmare for Fantasy Football Managers. With more than one star player for every outfield position, it becomes difficult to select players without the fear of a revolving door looming. Tevez, Kun Aguero & Yaya Toure are naturally the players who have been least rotated (when fit.) However Tevez hasn't scored in his last 3 games and Dzeko, Ballotelli are knocking at the door for his place. I transferred Tevez out this week just for the fear of rotation & with City lacking goals so far. The model was the last straw, I cross my fingers he gets rested. I think this model could actually help city identify that they need to revert back to the things they were doing right last season.

Further to this, the model made my decision on whether it was worth while getting another Manchester United player for my Fantasy side quite easy. I already have RVP & Rafeal, United have far too many Midfielders to avoid rotation & can't afford to blow money on Rooney as well. The Model makes it clear that I should not pick another defender, United look set to smash the record for goal conceded and with potential to still win the title, thanks to the amount of goals they are going to score. Perhaps Sir Alex will buy some defenders in Jan. After all they can't be sure they will beat Champions League teams in the latter rounds 4-3 or 3-2.

Chelsea's stats are nicely placed, they could do with scoring a few more goals, rumors of Falco in the window might be the catalyst for a successful season. Due to missing a game in gameweek 15 and hard fixtures I have moved away from Chelsea players at the moment but will be coming back to them, after all the model indicates that as long the scoring rate improves a little, then they look good for a title challenge.

World Soccer - November 2012

Hello Football Fans, after reading November 2012's 'World Soccer' magazine I was left with nasty taste in my mouth. Not only does it cost a ridiculous £4.10 but there is a clear air of disgust for English Football throughout. Petulant comments can be quite funny, sarcastic even more so, but their magazine was a full on attack on English Football this month. I usually only buy the magazine when traveling on long journeys, after a recent long weekend away, I read this little beauty front to back.  

Right so where should I start with the summary, the first readable pages open on Page 8 & 9, with a section dedicated to Hero's and Villains, a minor point but who's bottom of the villains? Yes of course that bad boy MOTD's Gary Linker, apparently he had to apologise for a remark made about players "eating grass" on Al Jazeera TV, after a goal scored by a Muslin Player for Montpelier against Schalke. Whilst I didn't notice this when I read it first time round, I'm sure 'no yellow cards' Gary didn't realise what he was saying, the subtle link to a cow is far too intellectual. Anyway the point here is that Gary is bottom, the only link to English Football. Italian Bari Defender, Andrea Masiello's Match Fixing scandal is even above & No mention of the Serbia England U21 game. Maybe that was just a gaff oversight.   

Page 10,'Goals we'd like to see again,' Take a look at the absolute brilliant tekker's in World Soccers ratings this goal came second, surprisingly no mention of any British Goals, Contenders could have been Ben Arfa Newcastle vs. Villa, Simon Cox Forest vs.Wigan. Perhaps I'm just reading to much into this....?

Right, realising this might be beginning to sound like a good old moan, I'll just highlight two further articles without trying to add any emotion, if its possible. Page 15 of football's high brow magazine,was dedicated to a grumpy old man's view on Stoke FC. Titled "Intimidation, Tony Pulis-Style, is the symptom a very English disease." (by Paul Gardner,) Surely this article was going to be a cracker.  If 'Clueless Pulis' needed to motivate his players, I have no doubt that if he had read the column, he would have blown the article up on to A3 & stuck it in the changing room to motivate his players. To quote the Article it start's with...

"It's difficult to take Stoke City manager Tony Pulis too seriously as he battles with his sport identity crisis wearing his baseball cap as he encourages his footballers to perform like rugby players." 

The article seems no less than full of hate for Stoke...

"..It is no longer possible to sustain the idea that Pulis is simply a bad joke. Shawcross, for a start has a formidable record of sending opponents to hospital..."

Adjectives such as Medieval, Primitive and Dreadful are littered throughout. 

It's definitely worth a read just if you want to chuckle. Lastly & I won't go into detail here, I'll just leave you with the theme's which are in bold between the written text, pages 18 & 19, from the self acclaimed 'Voice of Football' Brian Granville's article. I think I'll skip the next edition of World Soccer hopefully they'll turn on some other country. I fancy reading 442 next month, I'll let you know how it goes...

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"Terry: A horrid, complex and contradictory affair"

"If John Terry is, at the least, a non-racists liar, as the commission suggests, why did the magistrate' court acquit him?"

"English Clubs Embarrass themselves in Europe."

"Things have gone so wrong for City in the Champions League they seem doomed not even to qualify for the knockout stage."
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Player Vault - Wilfried Zaha

Wilfried Zaha

Probably the Championships best players at the moment.

The Crystal Palace Academy Graduate, come England Under 21 Prospect (or Ivory Coast, expect a battle.) Personally I've seen this boy play live 6 times and several more times on the TV (& I don't support Palace. No, no.) I probably don't need to tell you that a big transfer is on the cards and probably coming his way soon. With the BBC Gossip's Column & The Daily Mail linking the Championship Star to Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United, and not to mention the Crystal Palace Co-Chairman Steve Parish on Sky's 'The footballer's football show' last week, much air time was dedicate to the topic of Zaha's potential transfer in 2013 window. 

The boy undoubtedly has talent, he can play as a skillful winger, slinking past defenders, time after time with an assortment of tricks. He can also play up top, when I first saw Zaha (around 2 or 3 years ago,) he played as a striker either being the second or the furthest player forward, as he was only young, he was pushed off the ball by big marauding championship defenders. How times have changed, whilst Wilfred can play up top & do this role well, Palace have 'professional boxers' in Jermaine Easter & Glenn Murray who can play the classic 442 big bloke up top role. Palace have managed to use Zaha's skills to good effect on the wing of a 433/451 (although Palace do use 5 at the back against bigger opposition in recent times.) Dropping that little deeper, Zaha is able to collect and turn on the ball in more space, the absolute last thing players will want to see is Zaha in full flight running at them. The boys finishing is also up there with some really great goals to his name. Looking at Zaha's track record he will be well aware he needs to score more goals to step up to the next level. (Click here to see a corker.)

Season	Total
	Apps	Goals
2009–10	1	0
2010–11	44	1
2011–12	48	9
2012–13	17	4
Total	110	14

Overall I don't think it will be long before Zaha gets a transfer, I just hope the move isn't to top premiership teams bench, i.e. Marvin Sordell move from Watford to Bolton last year. Although I am sure it is comfy, moving to a big club and just warming the bench is the last thing Zaha needs, every time I've seen this boy play he's been noticeable better. If you watch lower league football you'll also have spotted this lad, some of the goals he has scored have indeed been 'Worldies,' although I do not doubt he will want to be known as a great goal scorer rather than a scorer of great goals. 

Realistically money talks, the boy will be off, Palace will be hoping for a loan back, but that isn't likely due to valuation Palace have put on their best player (£7 to £20 million on the rumor mill.) Zaha will see the £$£$ signs and the talk of double or triple your money is unsettling. It's easy to say he should develop himself at a lower level, but the lure of the premiership, money, and the time old excuse of the 'short life of a footballer.' Inevitably this means a move in the new year is likely. 

Ian Holloway is the only manager to mind, that has managed to hold on to a star player this being Charlie Adam at Blackpool, whom he must have promised to let him go after a year or big club bid. With Palace at the top of the Championship, there won't be a better time for Holloway to work his Bristolian magic. Zaha also has 4 years left on his contract so the Cheese Rolls (Eagles) will be hoping that their good form continues and they can try to convince him to stay a while longer. If we are to believe the papers Arsenal, look the most likely to put in a bid at the moment. Another expensive kid to the gunners, I'm sure the fans will be pleased. To finish this article, I would love Zaha to think about all the players that haven't quiet come off at 'The Emirates.' (Vela, Bendtner, Walcott, Denilson, Reyes, Manninger, Sendros to name a few.) Limited playing time, perhaps a mid-table premiership could fit the bill.

Analytics - Correlation (Article 1)

Correlation (Article 1 of an anticipated few...)

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Correlation for Positions & Bonus Points.
by Matt
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Hello Football Fans, This is the First Article for the Football^3 website (other than links to articles I have written for other websites.)  So without further ado, let's jump in at the deep end. 

A few weeks ago I came across a cool Footy-Stats website called 'Shots on Target' and noticed an article on correlation. From this article I spent a good few hours creating my own correlation tables, basically the 'Shots on Target' website inspired me to take their correlation work on a step further. Rather than looking at overall correlation, I have split the correlation out into positions and towards the end of this article I look at how correlation relates to Bonus Points. So let's get on with it, here are the tables I spoke about....

Right questions...
i) Where was the data sourced from?
- Assist to MoM were sourced from  www.whoscored.com
- Bonus Points & Total Points were sourced from www.fantasy.premierleague.com
 (Gameweek 9 - 2012)

ii) What are the abbreviations for the columns? 
SpG - Shot's per Game.
PS% -Passing Success
AW - Ariel Battles Won.
MoM - Man of the Match. 
(I asked WhoScored.com how the Mom's were calculated and received the following reply. Make of it what you will.)
"Hi Matt,

All of our ratings and man of the match awards are statistically calculated using our own unique calculations, with over 200 raw statistics (positively and negatively) affecting them. We do not use any other sites for our ratings, which are highly respected in our field.

Regards,

WhoScored.com"

iii) What does the correlation show?
Well where do we start... I'm hoping that people read this article and point out more ideas that I may have missed, but lets start with a few snippets I have picked out.

The most positive correlation is Goals/Total Points for Strikers, with a massive 0.92 for the correlation coefficient. This shows that without doubt, Goal's and Total Points are very related (well done,) even more so than Shots per Game. Admittedly I do not have data such as Shots on Target here, that may require actually buying data. However 0.92 is more than any other correlation on Shots on Target .co.uk. This means that there is value in splitting the data out into positions, and then the correlation should be even higher for Shots on Target per position, (Kudos to them!).

There seems to be little or no correlation between Passing Success and Total Points so players like Arsenals Arteta  (92% successful pass rate, at the moment highest in Europe) and Liverpool's Allen are truely in the brown stuff when it comes to picks for Fantasy football, but we knew that already, right? Perhaps I should include team win ratios to see if passing success or other metrics are related to result out comes, anyway I digress; point noted. 

iv) Bonus Points.

For me this is the most interesting, Bonus Points are mostly correlated to Total Points, it would indicate that the guys at FPL are awarding bonus points to the players that score the most points in the Gameweek, rather than a player that plays well. This almost makes player like John Obi Mikel  redundant for fantasy football purposes, but we already knew that right? (Please note unlike other websites, I did not remove appearance points, as I thought that not removing them would give players like John Obi Mikel's more chance of finding a good correlation, I could separate this out but has been done else where numerous times.)

v) Random Correlations i.e. between GK Assists and Bonus Points 
I believe this is for two main reasons and two indirect reasons:


Direct reasons.
1) The only keeper to have an assist when I did the modelling was Cesar (QPR), that week Cesar got bonus points too.
2) Most of the keepers don't have bonus points, I didn't have the saves data (&couldn't be bothered to collate the data as that takes the longest manual part, Vlookups etc.) but if I did have the saves data I should imagine this will be around 0.5, as most keepers don't get bonus points & don't get assists, so they are pretty correlated. Where as Goal keepers generally don't get bonus points but do get points for saves so not so correlated... Nice hey, showing each number needs to be interpreted!

Indirect Reasons
3) Think this ones is a biggy, keepers generally won't get in the top three players out of 22, for a game pointswise, hence the total amount of Gameweek points aren't as large. As the correlation shows significantly you have to collect points to get the bonus points.
4) I don't think the data is right for keepers or, well, more data is needed. This is due to too many zero's, I need more keepers to actually get BPs this season, hence I cannot draw strong conclusions that this data set is correct for keepers, more analysis with larger data sets are needed.


Splitting the data out in to position, & trying to understand which correlation is significant, is a time old problem. Reason being is that 'significants'' is wholly subjective, as I have well learnt modelling. Just because things are highly correlated doesn't mean they are related, this could just be coincidental correlation moreover a small correlation could actually be highly significant, long term analysis is needed and hence why I titled this... Article 1 of an anticipated few.


As for further analysis of Correlation I've been really mulling over what to do with it. I think I'm going to have to wait until I have more data.... & more decent metrics, it just takes too long to collate all the metrics at the moment aswell as they are from different places. Outside of the model it didn't throw up anything I didn't know already. Other than the few points which were mentioned above.


I'll leave you with the over all Correlation of all Positions and who the Max Correlation & Least Correlation matters for i.e. each individual position against one another. Please comment or get in touch if you think this was cool or have anything to add. 

@Mattistician

Fantasy Footy - Game day Trends & Champions League

Fantasy Premier League Related

Game Day Trends & Champions League.

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Please find the below link to Game Day Trends & Champions League.  this particular article covers the idea of predicting / analysis result dependent on days played & the effect of selection for players at Champions League clubs.

fpl-dugout.co.uk no-football-like-saturday-at-3pm-a-matt-istician-update

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Fantasy Football - Positional Analysis, GKs.

Position Analysis, Goalkeepers.

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Goalkeepers. - 'Value for Money' , 'MinsPlayed vs Points.', 'Fantasy Premier League.'

by Matt
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Hello Football Fans, Please find the below link to Positional Analysis for Goalkeepers, this particular article covers the idea of Value for Money (V4M) & Minutes Played vs Points which can be extended to other positions. This article is ideal for helping you select goalkeepers.

fpl-dugout.co.uk, Jumpers-for-goal-posts-a-matt-istician-update