[FPL90cents] The Age of Defenders?

First things first, update on our team: another green arrow for us (145,000 rank overall), making it around 5 out of 7 green arrows so far. The other two times were when:

• Salah scored the injury-time penalty against Burnley; and when
• Haaland scored two injury-time penalties while we kept our triple captain chip.

We like the two red arrows in fact. Because they, together with the five green ones, reflect how FPL works: we can't control how each event plays out, but we can control how events play out on balance. FPL is very much a macro game in statistical control combined with good individual judgements.

It's been a good run for us because this season, unlike usual seasons, is about how fast and willing you are able to adapt to new situations when usual assumptions fail. E.g. Salah and Nottingham faltering (which we wrote about before the season started), or when we quickly switched out of Watkins after GW3. In contrast, veteran FPL players (including on paid sites) have been posting about toughing it out, etc - because that's the approach that usually works.

So here's an interesting "macro insight" that challenges usual mental models - Defenders are currently a much more superior class compared to Midfielders and Strikers.

You probably already suspected this, but here's the extent of it:

At the end of last season, all of the top five midfielders and top five forwards scored more points than the top five defenders:

In contrast right now, apart from Haaland/Semenyo/Caicedo, the rest of the top five strikers and top five midfielders all score lower than the top five defenders. It's a drastic inversion!

There're two keys reasons for this:

• Defensive Contribution pts is a major factor of course but we originally expected that to only narrow the gap for defenders to catch up.
• But in addition, we have coincided with a separate lack of strong attacking midfielders, either due to injury (Palmer, Saka), and/or poor form (Salah, Watkins), and/or diluted distributed returns (Liverpool players).

What does this mean for our strategy? We'll cover this in depth in future articles - especially the premium reads, so click here to subscribe! (Free trial available.)