Source

There have been plenty of articles written already about the Premier League fixtures with a focus on which teams have the best / worst start and we'd like to add to them with an additional layer of information building upon our recent over/underperforming teams articles from Attacking (G - xG) and Defensive (GA - xGA) perspectives.

Before previewing the fixtures though, we'd like to introduce our methodology which future articles will build upon.

Methodology

We use 3 pieces of information which encapsulate so much more:

1. Expected Goals Against (xGA)

Later in the season, we'll use this as an indicator of "Form" but for now, it's an indicator of their overall performance last season (a 5 game average) from the point at which their current manager took over (the only exception being Manchester United).

This value is "normalised" to produce a value between 1 and 20.

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2. Fixture Strength

We use Fantasy Football Scout's Season Ticker to give us a relative (defensive) fixture difficulty compared to the other teams.

The easiest fixture will have a value of 20 going all the way down to 1 for the hardest.

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3. Home / Away Fixture Location

Whilst we acknowledge that this is wrapped up within a team's Fixture Strength, we wanted to measure this independently too.

A Value of 20 is a Home match and 0 indicates an Away match.

Correlation

With these 3 pieces of information, we've correlated their values over the course of 2 seasons with the resulting number of players from that team who have appeared on the 1st page of FPL's "Round Score". This is split by defensive assets (Goalkeepers and Defenders) and attacking assets (Midfielders and Forwards). So we're not highlighting individual players but the likelihood of each team having a Top Points Scorer for the Gameweek. In our case, we're looking at the forthcoming 5 Gameweeks.

The player selection from this point is more subjective (although we have additional tools / spreadsheets to assist with this part) and many would consider the likes of Trent Alexander-Arnold or Joao Cancelo as attacking assets as much as they are defensive.

Results

The output is a relative fixture difficulty which can help with player selection and choosing which teams rotate well from a defensive / attacking perspective - especially once player prices are revealed and you're searching for 2 x £4.5m defenders who rotate well.

As a preview for our next article, these are the 5 teams whose defensive assets you might want to avoid at the start of next season.

It's also worthwhile layering over the information about teams that consistently underperform their xGA which makes Southampton an even less appealing option and perhaps increases Manchester United's appeal.

We'll have more on this in our next article.

Closing thoughts

Whilst this post may feel somewhat vague, much of the analysis which we'll share with you uses it as a foundation so it made sense to us to share it separately, which we can then reference later.

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As with our previous article, I'm sure that there's plenty more that can be gleaned from this data so please share some thoughts with us in the comments below.

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