Thread by @FPL_Swe

Captaincy and effective ownership (Thread)

Time to delve into some statistics from this season and look at different correlations between captaincy points and effective ownership... 📊

Should you go for the safe pick or take more risks? 🤔

(This thread will use top 10k ownership provided by the great website @LiveFPLnet as a measurement of how popular a captaincy choice was that gameweek)

Starting off, let's say you decided to captain the most popular captain in every single gameweek this season. How many points would you have gotten?

The answer: 228 pts

Let's compare that to the average of the current top 10 players in the world which is 236.5 captaincy points.

To give a bit more context and compare to a bit more normal FPL season, I'm currently at a rank of around 100k and has 201 captaincy points.

Here is a list of who the best captains out of all the captaincy options every gameweek turned out to be:

And because I need to draw some sort of line regarding what is considered a captaincy option and what isn't, I will only consider players that were captained by 1% or more in that GW by top 10k managers.

Trossard in GW29 being captained by 1.07% just makes the cut as an example

GW29: Trossard 1% - 14 pts (9th)
GW28: Vardy 1% - 13 pts (6th)
GW27: Kane 6% - 19 pts (3rd)
GW26: Son 6% - 14 pts (5th)
GW25: Fernandes 6% - 12 pts (2nd)
GW24: Gundogan 50% - 19 pts (1st)
GW23: Son 24% - 10 pts (2nd)
GW22: Fernandes 7% - 17 pts (3rd)

GW21: Salah 17% - 15 pts (3rd)
GW20: Sterling 5% - 11 pts (2nd)
GW19: Kane 1% - 9 pts (5th)
GW18: Kane 30% - 8 pts (2nd)
GW17: Son 26% - 13 pts (1st)
GW16: Fernandes 8% - 6 pts (4th)
GW15: Fernandes 2% - 12 pts (4th)
GW14: Fernandes 23% - 17 pts (3rd)
GW13: Son 2% - 9 pts (7th)

GW12: Vardy 7% - 13 pts (4th)
GW11: De Bruyne 25% - 14 pts (1st)
GW10: Fernandes 15% - 10 pts (4th)
GW9: Calvert-Lewin 12% - 13 pts (3rd)
GW8: Kane 66% - 9 pts (1st)
GW7: Salah 16% - 8 pts (3rd)
GW6: Son 7% - 11 pts (3rd)
GW5: Kane 48% - 16 pts (1st)
GW4: Kane 5% - 16 pts (5th)

GW3: Calvert-Lewin 2% - 6 pts (8th)
GW2: Kane 1% - 21 pts (10th)
GW1: Salah 42% - 20 pts (2nd)

Total: 375 pts

So what are the main talking points from all of this?

- First of all it's interesting to see that there has only been 5 gameweeks out of the 29 that the most captained player has scored the most amount of points out of the captaincy options 👀

- But even though that stat sounds bad, if you had captained the obvious captain pick every single time you would only be behind the top 10 overall players by very few amount of points which is interesting since nailing your captaincy is said to be key to finishing very high up

- This means that captaincy points really hasn't made that big of a difference this season like we might think. I would expect the difference in captaincy points between me and the number 1 in the world to be a lot more than 35 points considering I am a total of 251 points behind

Final thoughts: 💭

Looking at all of this, I will probably change my approach to captaincy for the remainder of this season and going forward into future seasons. Why?

Because while captaining the obvious picks every single time will get you steady and guaranteed points

which will be close if you compare to the top managers, you will have an incredibly tough time to match them when it comes to making transfers, benching the right players etc.

This captaincy strategy probably won't get you consecutive top 10k finishes if that's what you want

but I think it increases your chances of one day winning FPL if you manage to hit big on a lot of differential captains.

It gives you room to not have to get every transfer and decision right, like you pretty much have to do otherwise if you want to win it.

Thanks for reading this thread, hopefully you enjoyed it and you are very welcome to share it if you found it helpful or useful in one way or another ❤️

Have a great international break everyone 🙌