Rankings for FPL Gameweek 8
New and improved FGPE 100
Hello everyone and welcome to the Fantasy Gameweek rankings for Gameweek 8, which include a new and improved FGPE, our Fantasy Gameweek Player Evaluator.
This is a week that does not feature Manchester United, Leeds, Chelsea, Liverpool, Brighton or Crystal Palace, so none of their players are included in the rankings.
I am delighted to stay that we have now updated the FGPE index to include a forward-looking metric, as promised. What you see below is a ranking that looks at performance so far and opportunity this week. The performance so far is measured using Fantasy Premier League points, price, points-per-million and how the player has performed against everyone in their position each week. Before this week that is just what the FGPE showed. It gave a score that measured which players were offering the most points per million and upside in their position, vital factors for building your FPL teams. Remember, the winner in FPL is the team who turns their £100 million into the most points. Value is vital.
With the updated FGPE we are taking that measure of past performance and putting it with opportunity in this Gameweek. To do this we are taking the score assigned to each team’s attack and defence by Nate Silver’s brilliant FiveThirtyEight. FiveThirtyEight has assigned attack and defence scores and built a prediction for how the entire Premier League will play out based on the results so far and underlying performances. It takes into account who each team has played, the results, and stats such as xG or whether goals were scored after a player was sent off. You can read more about it here.
What we are doing for the FGPE index is taking the scores attributed to a player’s attack or defence and the quality of the attack or defence they are playing against to get an opportunity score for this Gameweek. So, for a forward we are looking at his team’s attack score and the defence score for the team he is playing against. For goalkeepers it is their defence score and opposition’s attack score. For defenders we have taken their team’s attack and defence score as obviously defenders can get attacking points as well as clean sheet points. That opportunity score then gets matched with the performance so far score to get the total FGPE score. So what we are saying is - ok, if this is how the player has done so far, this is how we should score them given this is their opportunity this weekend.
The next step for the FGPE is to build in over-and-underperformance too. That will come eventually. This would take into account a player’s FPL points relative to their actual performance. We get a bit of this by using FiveThirtyEight’s scores, as that measures underlying data such as xG and chances created, but this would focus on the individuals themselves. So, for instance, it would mean that a player who has had plenty of opportunities to score but has performed lower than the league average for chance-conversion might get a little bump in the FGPE as the underlying data suggests better days may be coming. The same would be true in reverse for players who have over-performed the data. For now, I would recommend using your own judgement on this. For instance, I think that Trippier is likely to overtake Schar on the FGPE index shortly. Schar’s ranking reflects his goal in Gameweek 1, but Trippier’s underlying attacking stats are consistently better - he is likely to get more attacking points over the season.
Anyway, with that, here are your rankings. Goalkeepers are grey, defenders blue, midfielders yellow and forwards red. Please get in touch with any questions, queries or ideas by simply replying to this newsletter….
