The FPL Bonus Points – Moving the Goalposts?

While the Fantasy Premier League player list is taking up the bulk of our time, sapping our energies and thinking – some will no doubt have noticed that Wednesday’s launch also brought several rule changes. One such tweak involved the allocation of Bonus Points. The “man in the stand” from the Press Association is no longer the “judge and jury” behind these points – from this season the FPL have gone back to a method driven by an Index, fuelled by statistics that measure player actions and team performance.

The EA SPORTS Player Performance Index (EA SPORTS PPI) will now be the recipient of our post-match wrath – although given that cold hard statistics will be behind it, it’s going to be more difficult to justify the bile.

Such a change inevitably poses some questions but for us at Fantasy Football Scout, it also gives us the opportunity to offer a new feature to offer Members a helping hand.

What is the EA SPORTS Player Performance Index?

The Premier League site offers a full explanation of this right here so we won’t go into too much detail. Effectively the index uses an algorithm to provide a single value which offers an appraisal of a player’s performance in a Premier League match. That algorithm takes into account a variety of statistics gathered from a match reflecting player actions on the pitch such as – shots, clearances, saves etc. Goals scored, assists and clean sheets are perhaps the biggest factors in the calculation of the index score but crucially, the outcome of the match is also very significant. A player in the winning team is far more likely to register a high EA SPORTS PPI score than a player on the losing side.

What does this mean for the Fantasy Premier League Bonus Points?

It’s hard to say. While we are likely to have more visibility on the factors that affect the award of the Bonus Points, it’s still very difficult to predict which players will benefit next season. The fact that winning performances are crucial suggests that players amongst the top sides will be far more likely to earn big totals of Bonus Points than those turning out for struggling sides. To put this into perspective, Charlie Adam had the highest Bonus Point total in the Fantasy Premier League game last season. However, he ranked just 20th overall in the EA SPORTS PPI.

It’s also notable that, out of the top 25 EA SPORTS PPI ranked players last season, 10 of them were Man United or Chelsea players, 3 were at Man City, 2 at Liverpool and 1 at Arsenal. Charlie Adam was the only player from a relegated club in the top 30. Scott Parker – the player of the year last season – was not in the top 10 midfielders and was ranked 70th overall.

The jury is very much out on the effectiveness of the EA SPORTS PPI then but we can only really speculate on how it will distribute the FPL Bonus Points until the season is underway. One thing we’re pretty sure on – we noticed last season that goalscorers were big beneficiaries of Bonus Point awards – our guess is that this will continue with the implementation of the EA SPORTS PPI. Goalscorers on winning sides are set for regular gains then. Is that any different to the old PA Sports method? Only time will tell.

How can Fantasy Football Scout help?

At least now we know that the statistics available to our Members have a definite impact on a player’s likelihood of earning FPL Bonus Points. Our Members already have access to the statistics that contribute to the EA SPORTS PPI via our Opta data. By interrogating last season’s data now, you can already get a view on the top performers across the statistics that matter. We will be publishing members articles to aid this process too.

As you no doubt will have heard, Fantasy Football Scout are also contributing articles to the FPL this season. “The Scout” will examine the Bonus Point allocation each gameweek and attempt to breakdown the factors behind the awards using the EA SPORTS PPI data.

We’re going to provide something new however. Something a little extra…

The Scout ICT Index – Influence, Creativity and Threat

We have a new way for Members to read and analyse statistics this season. We’ve built our own Fantasy Football Index – the Scout “ICT” Index. This measures the performance of Premier League players in three key areas – Influence, Creativity and Threat. The first of those, a player’s Influence, will use similar performance indicators to the EA SPORTS PPI via our Opta data, although our algorithm will be different.

Our index score for Influence won’t take the results into consideration and will therefore offer a level playing field to those players who suffer defeat in a match. In this way our Index will hopefully be effective at finding influential players within struggling clubs, but should still offer our Members a view on which players are more likely to score highly in the EA SPORTS PPI and therefore be in line for Bonus Points. While the FPL Bonus Points arriving “the morning after matches” – our members can get access to our ICT index once we update our data – often just 10-20 minutes after the final whistle has blown.

In basic terms the ICT index will help to make our Opta data more digestible. It will offer one single index score for Influence, one for Creativity and one for Threat. These will help to measure a player’s importance to their team and to a match, a player’s likelihood to earn assists and to score goals, or at least get in goalscoring situations. Those three figures will then be combined to create a single ICT Index score to measure a player’s overall performance contribution from a Fantasy perspective.

Index scores will be generated on a gameweek basis and cumulatively over the season. The full Opta data will still be available of course, but Members will now have an easy route to identify how players are performing across the key statistics.

The index, like any football index, will be far from perfect. There will be tweaks along the way. Plenty of discussions as we go. Even so, the ICT Index is already providing us with plenty of talking points and insight behind the scenes and we think it’s going to be a valuable addition for our Members. It will also give us plenty of material to discuss in a series of new Members articles.

We currently have the ICT Index in test and will be creating new tables and new sidebar widgets that will give Members quick access to the top performers on our Index on a gameweek basis and over the season as a whole. These widgets will also form the basis of our new dashboard available to Members when they log into the Members area.

Keep ‘em peeled for more news on this in the next few weeks.