Tuesday Tactical Takeaway Gameweek 9
Welcome to the Tuesday Tactical Takeaway, where we take a weekly look across the Fantrax EPL Draft landscape and ask the important questions: what went wrong, what went right, who is quietly cooking, and who should probably be taking a long, hard look at their squad. We’ll dig into the moves, performances, trends and general nonsense that shaped the week and, most importantly, figure out what actually matters going forward. Sometimes a development changes the entire draft landscape; sometimes it changes absolutely nothing; Our job is to try to work out which is which.
Happy Halloween! I hope you had an excellent weekend of costumes and doomscrolling, and spooky movies and all your lineups were filled with ample nuggets of ghosts! Mine mostly weren't, but I did get a few spooky films in, including a fun rewatch of Nosferatu/. I'm guessing you didn't expect to read about that in here today, but you're welcome!
This was one of those rare weekends where we had EIGHT matches on Saturday, probably the most matches on a single day outside of final day - no one fact check that. Also, there was a new metric built for Tarik Muharemovic? Successful Launches, which is defined as a long high ball into space or an area for players to chase or challenge. I'm just as confused as you are with that one. Either way, it all made for a rather chaotic weekend of Draft EPL, with plenty of opportunities for points, pain, and the occasional hauntingly bad performance.
A minor preamble before we get into things: I'm going to reference quite a few statistics and metrics throughout this piece, most notably XXPts. If you need a refresher on what that is and how it works, I've linked @Draftlad's in-depth explanatory article, as well as the actual scouting tool.
One particularly useful comparison is XXPts (xxPts = xPts + (xGPts − GPts)) against PPS (Points Per Start), which helps us identify players who are underperforming or overperforming relative to the underlying opportunities they're getting in a match. A positive difference between XXPts and PPS suggests a player is leaving fantasy points on the table relative to those opportunities. That could mean missed key passes, shots on target, tackles, goals, assists, interceptions, aerials, successful dribbles, accurate crosses and plenty more. In some cases, that's indicative of a skill issue; in others, it could point to a buy-low market opportunity on a player who's enduring a poor run of form and might reasonably be expected to turn things around.
Conversely, a negative difference suggests a player is outperforming their underlying opportunities, converting more of those opportunities into fantasy points than the expected output would suggest. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's worth considering whether that level of production is sustainable or whether some regression might be on the horizon.
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