Mohamed Salah and Benjamin Mendy have become less fashionable options to own according to the current top 10,000 Fantasy Premier League managers.
Both players have seen their popularity in that bracket fall going into Gameweek 7, as the Liverpool man blanked again and Mendy did not play once again.
We continue to look at how the top managers are lined up for the latest round of matches Gameweek 7 and how that compares to the overall trends.
Most Selected Players
The most popular line-up for the top 10k managers sees the departure of two main stars for the first time this season. Salah and Benjamin Mendy both made way this week for more popular options such as Richarlison (47.8%), Ryan Fraser (49.6%) and James Maddison (47.5%) in midfield. Meanwhile, Kieran Trippier (41.1%) and Ryan Bennett (32.7%) increased in popularity in defense. Suddenly Salah has become as a huge differential in the top 10k.
However, his overall ownership (in the sample) still makes him the second most-owned midfielder with 41.65%. His team-mate Sadio Mane features in the most selected team for both samples, as well as Aaron Wan-Bissaka, Marcos Alonso, Andrew Robertson, Eden Hazard, Sergio Aguero and Aleksandar Mitrovic; all in-form players.
The overall teams have a greater concentration of Harry Kane ownership, as many managers started the season with him already, which is the same story with David de Gea.
The stats suggest that we might be about to witness a large swin in player ownerships, with Salah and Mendy especially shaking things up.
Selling them has allowed more managers to contemplate investment in the likes of Hazard, Kane and Trippier as well as cheaper options from Wolves, Bournemouth and Leicester.
This, in addition to European competitions taking more of an effect, may cause the very successful early season “template” to be broken up and create more interesting different alternatives.
As expected, the Wildcard chip is the only one that has significant usage this week with 4.6% of the top 10k managers activating it. This raises the percentage of Wildcards used to 55.3%.
If we compare the chip usage of the top 10k and a sample of 50,000 managers outside of that bracket, we see that the top players of FPL are much more lenient in using their Wildcards early. This is perhaps what helped them reach that high rank early on.
Only 29.7% of the overall sample had activated their wildcards so far, as compared to the 55.3% of the top 10k.
Chip Usage
However, the overall usage of the Triple Captain and Free Hit chips are actually higher than the top 10k percentages. This might be an indication on how little an advantage those chips give earlier in the season.
As a result of those Wildcard deployments, it has now come to pass that the majority of the top 10k have used one chip. 47.3% of managers in that bracket have used that many so far, while 37.1% are yet to deploy any chip.
Meanwhile, the majority of overall teams have not used chips yet. 55.3% of these managers still have their chips intact.
Captains
When it comes to captaincy for Gameweek 7, both samples opted for Aguero as the top choice. However, the top 10k had much more faith in him with a captaincy record so far this season of 83.35%, while the percentage for the overall sample was less than half of that: 40.35%.
Overall players still saw Salah (13.22%) and Kane (12.82%) as important captaincy choices this week.
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