Who to captain? ©️
Quick thoughts on Gameweek 22
Hello everyone and welcome to the latest edition of Fantasy Gameweek. The deadline for transfers and changes to your team is 18.30 UK time this evening. A reminder - it is a double gameweek for Manchester United (Crystal Palace at home, Leeds at home) and Leeds United (Forest away, Man United away).
With the deadline only a few hours away I want to focus on a few quick thoughts. In case you missed it, Tom wrote an excellent piece on Thursday about the players who are rising and falling. Since we published that piece there has been an important injury update - Rodrigo (MID, £6.4m) is injured…
Some other news to make you aware of. The Carabao Cup final on February 26 between Manchester United and Newcastle United means four teams will not have fixtures in Gameweek 25 (three weeks away). They are Man United, Newcastle, Brentford and Brighton…
Given the popularity of players from those teams right now, Gameweek 25 is going to be tricky for a lot of Fantasy Premier League managers - it could be a moment to play your free hit. Planning ahead and picking the optimum moment to use your chips was one of the FPL tips we looked at in our guide about how to play and win this game last week. If you haven’t already read that piece or want to take another look you can click here. One other fixture issue to note - Man City and Arsenal have a double gameweek next week.
One of the key questions for Gameweek 22 is who to captain. As we mentioned in that piece on general FPL tips, double gameweeks can really matter. But they especially matter when players like Marcus Rashford (MID, £7.2m) and Bruno Fernandes (MID, £9.9m), two of the best performers in FPL since the Premier League restarted on December 26, have two matches. Rashford and Fernandes are great captaincy options this week - yes, even ahead of Erling Haaland (FOR, £12.2m), who travels to Tottenham. As midfielders Rashford and Fernandes get an extra point for a goal compared to Haaland and can also get a clean sheet point. This means that even if their performance over two matches is only the same as Haaland over one match this week, they will still get more points. Backing one of them is a sensible bet.
Fernandes, Luke Shaw (DEF, £5.3m) and Rashford are the most popular transfers-in so far this week in FPL. Joao Cancelo (DEF, £7.1m) is the most popular transfer-out following his surprise move to Bayern Munich, followed by Miguel Almiron (MID, £5.8m) and Gabriel Martinelli (MID, £6.7m)). Rashford is now in 51% of FPL teams, making him the third most popular player behind Haaland - 85% - and Kieran Trippier (DEF, £6.1m) - 69%.
Rashford will be a popular captain option this week and is a potential triple-captain option if you have that chip available. As Tom mentioned in his piece, Rashford’s output since December 26 has been remarkable and Man United’s fixtures this week are attractive. However, Fernandes is an interesting alternative as captain, particularly if you are looking to catch-up in your mini-league. He is in fewer FPL teams - 12% - but since the World Cup has 39 points. That is fewer than Rashford - who has 46 - but still impressive. As you will see from the data below, Fernandes is playing well and has been effective.
Let’s get into that data now by looking at some of the top metrics provided by Impect, our data partner. These are the leaders in four key categories since the Premier League restarted on December 26. We have set a minimum of 180 minutes played since the restart and the data is equalised so that it doesn’t matter that some players have had extra matches.
Firstly, here are the leaders in the overall Offensive Impect metric, which looks at the overall attacking effectiveness of a player for their team, measured as a percentage relative to other players.
Evan Ferguson - 99 (warning - is doubtful for Gameweek 22 with injury)
Erling Haaland - 98
Harry Kane - 98
Marcus Rashford - 97
Solly March - 97
Jack Grealish - 96
Martin Odegaard - 96
Eddie Nketiah - 96
Daniel Podence - 95
Bukayo Saka - 95
And here are your leaders in post-shot XG since December 26, which shows expected goals after a shot has been taken, so looks at the quality of a shot as well as the quality of the chance…
Eddie Nketiah - 4.7
Erling Haaland - 4.3.
Marcus Rashford - 3.6
James Ward-Prowse - 3.5
Harry Kane - 3.4
Aleksandar Mitrovic - 3
Brennan Johnson - 2.8
Kaoru Mitoma - 2.7
Solly March - 2.1
Jarrod Bowen - 2.1
These are the leaders for bypassed defenders, which shows how many defensive players a player takes out of the game with their play, ie pass or dribble
Trent Alexander-Arnold - 12.3
Hakim Ziyech - 12
Naby Keita - 10.5
Kevin De Bruyne - 10.3
Kieran Trippier - 10.1
Youri Tielemans - 10
Christian Norgaard - 9.7
Bruno Fernandes - 9.6
Alexis Mac Allister - 9.5
Jack Harrison - 9.1
Martin Odegaard - 9
Finally, here are the leaders for bypassed defenders receiving, which shows how many defensive players are taken out of the game when this player gets the ball and therefore looks at the quality of the positions they are getting into infront of goal
Darwin Nunez - 20.9
Eddie Nketiah - 19.9
Callum Wilson - 19.5
Kai Havertz - 18.6
Rodrigo - 18.3
Anthony Martial - 18.2
Ollie Watkins - 16.4
Harry Kane - 16.1
Michail Antonio - 16.1
Kieffer Moore - 15.2
Before we go, here is the latest FGPE 100 index. This is our guide to the value of players in FPL and should be used alongside our writing and the Impect data to help you make decisions and compare players. Our FPGE index uses an algorithm to calculate a score for each player based on their FPL points, price and points relative to the top points-scorer each week. This means that the rankings reflect a player’s value but also their upside…
That’s all for this edition. Good luck for Gameweek 22
Graham