Pre-season Shots on Target ticker

Although I said in my last post that I wouldn’t be launching the season ticker until we had enough new data to work off, I was intrigued to see what the opening fixtures would look like using last year’s data.

This wasn’t without its problems of course, the biggest of which is that I have no data from Burnley, Middlesbrough or Hull City to work off. The ticker mechanics are such that there is no simple way to model for that. Therefore, I took the easy way out and just gave each of the promoted teams the values of the teams they replaced – so Newcastle United became Burnley, Norwich City became Middlesbrough and Aston Villa became Hull City. This is far from ideal so I’ve displayed the numbers generated from games involving those teams in grey.

With so many other changes in the league over the summer, I would recommend FPL managers not view the pre-season ticker as a decision making tool. Nevertheless, the exercise did serve as a useful reminder to me that some teams will record good numbers regardless of fixtures – we just don’t know yet which teams will be the best at achieving that this season. We can hazard some guesses though…