FPLZ 2012/13 Season Preview: Introduction

Fantasy Premier League: A game of statistics.

My utmost gratitude to all my fellow readers for continuing to stay with Fantasy Premier League Zone over the last three years. To repay your loyalty, FPLZ will go a little bit further this season by giving you a more in-depth season preview, which will deal a little bit with statistics. But before we start, let me just introduce some of the terms and glossaries that I will be using throughout the upcoming season previews.

Key Glossaries

1. Total Points - Self-explanatory. Simply the total fantasy points a player scored for last season.
2. Total Bonus - Self-explanatory as well. The sum of bonus points of a player over the course of last season.
3. Total Minutes - The total playing time of a player in minutes for last season. Has a limit of 3420 minutes or less, depending on how many gameweeks the player was listed in FPL.
4. Average Price - The average value of the player over the course of last season. It is calculated by averaging the price of each gameweek.
5. Points per 90 Minutes (P90) - Projection of player score per 90 minutes. It is computed by dividing total points by total minutes, and then multiplied by 90.
6. Productivity Index (PI) - A measure of player's fantasy efficiency based on his price. It is calculated by dividing P90 by average price.
7. Captaincy Index (CI) - A measure of player's captaincy potential relative to his price. The formula for this is quite complicated, and I will explain this in a subsection below.
8. Playtime Index (TI) - A measure of player's scoring limitations based on his playing minutes. The formula for this is again quite complicated, and I will explain this in another subsection below.
9. FPLZ Index (FI) - An overall measure which will take all PI, CI and TI into account. It is equal to the average of PI and CI multiplied by square root of TI.

Captaincy Index

This is a measure of explosiveness of a player, in which a high score indicates that he is a good captain candidate. The calculations are as follows:

• For each gameweek's score in excess of 5 but no more than 10, each point is awarded with captaincy score of 1; for each gameweek's score in excess of 10, each point is awarded with captaincy score of 2. For example, a gameweek score of 7 will be awarded with a captaincy score of 2 (7-5=2); a gameweek score of 14 will be awarded with a captaincy score of 13 (5+2*(14-10)=13).
• The captaincy scores of each gameweek where the player has played (non-zero playing minutes) is summed up, and divided by the product of the square root of the player's average price and the number of gameweeks where the player has featured (non-zero playing minutes) last season.
• As you can see, this index is affected by the player's price. The justification is that you don't expect a £5.0m player to have as much captaincy potential as a £10.0m player.

Playtime Index

This index is position based, due to the fact that goalkeepers and defenders incur much heavier penalties for not playing for sufficient minutes (clean sheets are only awarded if they occur when keepers/ defenders have played for more than 60 minutes in the game). Midfielders do lose clean sheet points too if they have not played for enough minutes, though the effects on them are much lesser. The formulas are as follows:

• For forwards, TI is equal to the sum of gameweeks' playing minutes divided by the product of classified gameweeks (the number of gameweeks the player is in the Premier League) and 90. In simple terms, it is actual playing minutes over maximum possible playing minutes.
• For midfielders, TI is almost identical to TI for forwards, except that for gameweeks where playing minutes were less than 60, penalties of 0.875 were applied before summing them up. The reason for this is explained in the heading of this subsection.
• For defenders and goalkeepers, TI is almost identical to TI for midfielders, except that the penalty factor is changed to 0.5 for gameweek playing minutes of below 60 as defenders and goalkeepers rely a lot on clean sheet points, and such points will not be awarded when playing minutes are below 60.

Accuracy of Indices

As you can see, these indices only take few factors into the account and have omitted quite a few other parameters which may be crucial in determining players' fantasy value. Due to that there may exist players who are overrated or underrated by these indices. Therefore, it is not advisable to rely blindly on these indices. But don't worry, I will give you some of my interpretations as I go through with the indices of players in my upcoming season previews. Hopefully this introduction will help you to understand more on my upcoming  preview series! Stay tuned!

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