EPL FANTASY BLOG

If this is the first time you land on one of my Fantasy EPL Blogs, you might want to check out some of my original EPL blogs in my Medium archives written at the beginning of the season (GW1 – GW9) to get familiar with our overall approach and the improvements we’ve made over time. My partner in crime for this project has been Andrew Sproul, who just like me has lots of passion for Data Science, ML / AI and the Fantasy Sports.
Top 100 Players in the World GW24 Stats

This is the strongest week we’ve ever seen for the top 100 player in the world, since we started tracking this stat – 87pts average! Seems like this was the week of — you either choose Salah as captain or triple captain or you are left in the dust…As you can see those few players in Top100, who didn’t go with Salah for captain ended up lagging quite behind the pack with total scores in the 40–50s.
Top100 EPL players optimal blended team
While we’re on the topic of the Top 100 players in the world let’s look at who the most selected players on their teams by position and the most preferred team formations for GW24 were.
Most Selected Goalkeepers by Top100

Most Selected Defenders by Top100

Most Selected Midfielders by Top100

Most Selected Strikers by Top100

We used this data and the current player prices to create the team below which is a blend of the most selected players by Top100:

Pretty good looking team, and lots of wiggle room to try some different picks on key positions, while still keeping a solid core of players.
Most selected Team Formation by Top 100 Fantasy Users

This stat is looking back to normal, where most of the top players opt to go with 3 defensive players and tried to capitalize on offensive midfielders and strikers with 3–4–3 or 3–5–2 formations.
GW24 Team Performance Recap and Overall Stats
We have mixed feelings about this week as we scored 67 points, way above the average of 53, so at first sight we should be happy. But then when you looked at our team below you’d see that if it wasn’t for choosing Salah as captain, which saved us, we blanked on a lot of other key players, including both of our goalkeepers not playing giving us zero points. We got green arrows in all of our leagues, though, so I guess overall we should be happy.

GW24 Overall Stats to Inform our GW25 Picks
Let’s start with the Adjusted Opponent Difficulty Rating (FDR) for the next three game-weeks below:

Looks like West Ham, Leicester, Norwich, Spurs and Chelsea have a relatively difficult program, so our Algo will not be making any picks from these teams. Teams with relatively easy schedules are Bournemouth, Aston Villa, Arsenal, Sheffield Utd, Newcastle, Liverpool, Burnley and Brighton.
Latest Injury Updates Jan 31st, 11pm EST
The data below comes from an independent site that updates the latest injuries much more frequently than the Fantasy Website:

Top Players by ROI and 90_mins_played Stats
As per a reader’s request last week I will now be posting the top and bottom 50 players in terms of ROI, so our readers can have a look at a broader pool of high-ROI players to pick from and overpriced and under-performing players to stay away from.

Bottom 50 Players by ROI

Goalkeepers Top 10 by ROI

Goalkeepers Top 10 by pts_per_90min

Defenders Top 10 by ROI

Defenders Top 10 by pts_per_90min

Midfielders Top 10 by ROI

Midfielders Top 10 by pts_per_90min

Strikers Top 10 by ROI

Strikers Top 10 by pts_per_90min

GW25 Algorithmic Picks
Our algorithm takes in adjusted budget per team formation and tries to maximize spend per position for the main 11 players, and then get you subs which are good ROI value to fill the rest of the team. Based on current ROI scores, filtering out any team with AVG opponent difficulty (FDR ≥ 75th %) over next three games and removing injured players from the list of available picks, our algorithm picked the team below as optimal for spending the full $100MM budget:

As far as our own team is concerned, we decided to play our Wildcard, because Hugo Lorris is now back, so we were left with zero active GKs, and with Mane’s injury and Leicester’s upcoming difficult schedule we wanted to make quite a few rotations, so we decided – why not play our wildcard!? We really wanted to go with a team that has Auba, Firmino and Aguero, but that got too expensive, so we had to sacrifice one of them and decided to go with Aguero and Firmino since they have been in really great shape and they are facing weaker opponents (historically Aguero always punishes Spurs big time). We were almost tempted to make him captain, but we’re afraid of Mourino’s ultra defensive style, so we went with Firmino, given that Liverpool play at home and Southampton’s defense is weak.

Team Stats
Looking at Best / Worst defense and offense can be used in a few different ways – for example, if a best offense team is playing a worst defense team, you might want to captain your attacking mid or striker. Also, you might want to give preference to DF and GK from the best defensive teams when looking at the algorithmic recommendations for these positions.
Best 7 Defenses

Worst 7 Defenses

Best 7 Offenses

Worst 7 Offenses

Cumulative Team ROI Stats
Below you can see the teams, sorted by cumulative player ROI. Note that an active player is any player that has played at least 33.33% of the total possible game time. So, we are counting any player that has played a total of at least 650 minutes as active on that team.

Stats are starting to converge nicely as the more solid performers with reasonably priced players are now occupying the top 5–8 spots. Some of the teams with expensive players that are struggling to catch up and improve their overall ROI are Arsenal, West Ham, and Everton.
Final Thoughts:
Over the last few seasons, playing our wildcard didn’t work out too well for us, so we’re hoping that this time things are a bit different, especially because we were kind of forced to play it out of necessity. The main thing we hope for this week is that we picked the right captain by going with Firmino over the obvious choices – Salah or Aguero. It’s a bit risky and extravagant, like choosing to marry a redhead, for example, but sometimes such wild risks can pay off handsomely in the long run, so let’s see what tomorrow brings 🙂
Good luck to all of you this week and as always – thank you for reading!