1/ @ffscout user ‘Wesmantooth’ made a post a few days ago about Kolasinac (Kola). Roughly, he stated that he’s being undervalued by the FPL community. I agree. The comments back to him were mixed, more negative than positive. Let’s look at that in more detail. 
2/ Once I’ve set up my GW1 team, (check my ‘moments’ for my post on how to I do this,) and the season has started, most of my player transfers are decided via stats that I find on the @UnderstatXG website. understat.com/league/EPL/2018
3/ On the EPL home page if you scroll down you find a list of all players in the league. It’s sorted by ‘goals’ before we touch it. Let’s change this to something more useful. If you click the cog icon you have the option to add stats. Let’s add ‘NPxG90 + xA90’. (Click the eye).
4/ Now scroll up to ‘Min’ and add a number of minutes to remove people with the fewest minutes. Let’s choose 600 for this example. Click apply. Now on the main page you will have your extra column and <600 min players will have been removed.
5/ Clicking sort by on NPxG90+xA90 will then list the players in order of underlying stat based performance. This *isn’t* perfect (goals are worth more than assists, FWDs get less points than MIDs for goals, etc.) But it’s a *much better* starting point for our picks.
6/ Now what I do is go through the first few tabs and take a list of all the players who are performing @ 0.5 or higher. Now *ideally* we would scrape & filter this data across a recent number of GWs (say 6-8) and I’m sure someone cleverer than me can. But I can’t.
7/ So over the full season this gives us a 35-player pool. This is my new, much more manageable list of players that can make my team based purely on attacking threat. I then go through the players one by one with a ‘common sense’ check to further narrow this down.
8/ So green is a ‘buy’ option. Red is ‘don’t buy’ (Jesus / Chicharito not guaranteed starters at their club). Yellow is ‘maybe’. In this case because of price (Hazard / Auba / Aguero) and minutes (Aguero) meaning their value is less of a slam dunk compared to the greens.
9/ Normally I choose my MIDs / FWDs based on this and then DEF on CS potential as DEFs don’t make this list. Or at least that’s what I thought until this guy appeared @ 0.50. Now, the reason this makes Kola such a big ‘green’ is that we can justify him *purely* on attack.
10/ His offensive output is in fact so great on this Arsenal team, that he is doing more for their attack than both Ramsey and Ozil. The CS potential is just *gravy* on top of this. And yes, Arsenal’s defence is *bad* but it’s ~= (approximately equal to) Everton’s.
11/ His 0.50 puts him way ahead of current FPL sweetheart (and 2nd placed stats wise) Digne (0.31). Kola is also *cheaper* at £4.9m v Digne’s £5.2m saving your team a precious £0.3m. This should be (and is to my mind) a non-contest if you can only have one of the two.
12/ I brought Kola into my team for GW16 based on the stats and fixtures at that time. Barring being dropped or his stats jumping off a cliff, I’ll be keeping him right until the end of the season very happy with my choice. I hope this thread convinces some of you to do the same.
@threadreaderapp unroll
6a/ Update to this post - understat have very recently added a date filter to this column too (you can actually see this in the table on the last post before I noticed it) You can enter the date you want to filter by to get this shorter range! A very useful change for us.
