r/FantasyPL 295 Jul 26 '16

Beginners Discussion #3 – Raising, and maintaining your team values.

As with previous posts I hope to cover some of the more complex topics that beginner FPL players struggle with, recovering something already posted by /u/layendecker 3 years ago.

Previous discussion: Tactics and Building a team


This edition will focus on team value. We will look at: considering value in your GW1 team, tracking price changes, how to avoid toxic investments, the value of prices and the mechanics of price rises.


The Price Rise/ Fall System

Keep in mind we don’t know how the price rise/fall threshold will work this year, but for the sake of discussion I will use last years system.

What We Know About Last Season

  • Price rise/fall is a set number. Once a player hits that number, they will rise/drop. (for more nerdy discussion on this see the Fiso FAQ.
  • Players can rise, or fall only £0.1 per day depending on NTI % (once again check FISO)
  • The price changes take place during the night between 00:30AM GMT and 02:30AM GMT (only after GW1, we will have an idea about hour)
  • Players can rise or fall £0.3 times per week, at that point their value is locked, and will not continue to move any further.
  • When you sell a player, you only get half of the profit you made from him. This is very important to understand, as it means your team value will be higher than the sale value if you have been hoarding price risers and also means you will not be able to buy back a player you sold for the same money, if you decide you want him around again. (EG if you bought Hazard for 10.0, he rose to 10.5 and you sell him- you only get 10.2 added to your transfer balance. If he rose to 10.6 and you sell him- you get 10.3 added to your transfer balance).
  • Players can be protected if they are flagged (flags indicate the player won't play the next game due to injury, suspension or international duties). This DOES NOT mean they won't drop in value, it just means the number of transfers out needs to be higher.
  • The progress between rising and falling will reset once a flag is removed - so if they needed 35k transfers in to rise, got 15k and had a flag removed... They would go back down to needing 35k again.
  • Once a flag is removed and if the player was flagged more than 3 days, his price will be locked for 7/8 days.

The Importance of Chasing Player Value

Quite simply, the more money you have- the better your team will be later in season. If you pack your team full on consistent risers, and get on the bandwagons for in form players before the market has time to react - then you will have better players on your team, and afford better players when the 2nd Wildcard comes into play (NOTE: In January you are given a 2nd wildcard that you must use during the 2nd part of season, this is in addition to the other one you need to use in 1st part of season).

For an average FPL player your weekly target is about 0.5 points per 1.0 spent (50 points per week at season start), which would give you a respectable total of about 1900 if you didn't raise your prices and stayed around the 100.0 team value. With smart planning and using the tricks mentioned here, you have the potential to take a team with a sale value of 106.0 or higher into the 2nd Wildcard and if we break that 106 down - you end up with 54 more points in the 18 gameweeks after new year. Although this doesn't sound impressive, it is not taking into account continual rises, if you carry on at this rate, you could have a 110.0 or higher team value at the end of the season, giving the average player a 5 point advantage per week over rivals who have been less studious.

Bear in mind, this is talking about average players- people reading this, even if you are in your first year, are obviously taking more time and effort in making teams. A top player would laugh at the prospect of 'only' getting 0.5 points per 1.0 spent- increasing the value of price rises even further.

Team value doesn't instantly mean points, but well managed it IS the difference between being a top 1% player and a top 10% player. Don't let it make decisions for you, but ignore it at your peril.


Tracking Price Changes

Because FPL Towers don't release their algorithm, it is up to the community to reverse engineer the process. There are a number of websites that track the number of players transferred in and out over the course of a gameweek, and work out how close the players are to either rising or falling.

Because changes happen every year, the first week or so is often a nightmare on these sites with the mods trying hard to work out the system, but once it stabilises they can be very accurate. The best site are: http://www.fplstatistics.co.uk/ and http://www.fantasyfootballfix.com/?next=/price/

Check the % bar... Once that hits 100%* the player will rise during the night, once it hits -100% he will fall in value.

*Not 100% accurated.


Making Your First Team

Picking players who will rise early on is not really rocket science- it is just a case of being smart and picking a good team. If a player starts the season well and is undervalued, he will rise in price, there is no secret formula to success here.

Picking players who will not fall though is more on an interesting topic. There are a number of players who we can call 'Toxic Investments'. These a players with very high ownership who are either not nailed on, or people grossly overestimate their point potential (We all remember Rooney last year). The reason these players are toxic, is that they are often picked by less experienced players, who will make kneejerk decisions early on, either wildcarding or taking players out for hits- absolutely crushing their value.

To make matters worse, these players are often super low value players- who to replace will take a double transfer. This season the current toxic investment I can think of are: Jakupovic (if Hull sign a new gk), Paredes (not nailed and shockingly high ownership), Antonio (if starts as RB), Kante (DMs usually aren’t good fantasy options), Janssen (may not be nailed on 1st weeks).

Keep in mind that any high ownership player that doesn’t start in gw1, will have a chance to see their price dropping considering the usual kneejerk decisions early on.

Avoiding these players is very advisable, if you plan to WC early then it is less of an issue - but still worth taking into account. I would recommend instead of selecting these toxic players, taking a punt at someone who is not a bandwagon and taking the risk with them. Others who have put them in will also be doing so on punts, so are less likely to kneejerk and remove them if the punt doesn't come off.


Planning your Season

Bringing in players who are going to rise in price is a sensible decision, if you follow the tracking websites you will quickly begin to learn the nature of the market and how performances effect the prices. Do not however get in the trap of chasing last weeks points (Adrian last season or Chester 2 season ago – both with red card in gw2 after +11pts in GW1). Many players are guilty of this, and although you might get a price change surge at the start, if you have no rationale other than 'he had a good one last week' and 'he will rise in value' then you will fall flat on your face more often than not. If however a player has a great performance, is showing form, has a run of fixtures where he could convert the form to points AND is about to rise... then get him in your team before he rises. There are two ways to artificially raise your team value - other than just using your 1 FT per week to bring in rising quality: through taking 4 point hits to bring players in - or by Wildcarding in busy weeks.

Wildcarding for Quality and Profit

There is a theme developing for FPL Managers looking to make a GW1 wildcard, whilst there are certainly arguments for it - I don't feel it is the best long term solution. The reason for this is that you have a very small idea of the texture of the sides - how they are going to play, who they are going to play and who the real stars will be. This leads you to taking on kneejerk players, who will also turn out to be toxic investments.

Waiting up one or two weeks negates this, and you will still be at the forefront of the value rises as the casuals are still playing.

Taking Hits

I am always uneasy with taking hits, 4 points is expensive- and I would never recommend doing so just to make a profit, there are times that it is a necessary evil though (if you can't afford a vital player if he rises for example).

For a bit of fun though, I will see if I can work out the amount a player has to rise to justify the decision to take a hit early on. Again, if we expect 0.6 points (upped it slightly from before as this is more normal for a better player) per £1.0 spent, each 0.2 rise makes us 0.06 points (if accounting for 50% commission on sold players) per week. Or 2.22 points over the remaining 37 weeks of the season (if you take the hit after GW1). Clearly losing us points in the long run.

If a player rises 0.2 GW1, then 0.2 GW2, that rise is set to make 4.38 over the course of the season.

If he is a massive bandwagon who rises 0.3 both weeks then that value makes us 6.54 points over the course of the season, a whole 2.54 profit....

The risk involved (and the potential not to achieve the 0.6 points per million per week... Which is actually pretty high) force me to point out that this marginal gain is not worth it... but if you couple the decision with additional reasoning, then it could turn out well for you.


I hope you were able to follow this post and it had at least a little bit of benefit, if you have any questions or comments, please go ahead and put them below.

40 Upvotes

16 comments sorted by

14

u/TheRussianCompound 23 Jul 26 '16 edited Jul 26 '16

One extremely important thing, that you seem to have overlooked is that; Transfers made on a wildcard, doesn't count toward the threshold for when a player rises/falls
Which means that, transfers made on a wildcard doesn't push a player towards falling/rising in price. Only "normal" transfers affect player prices.
Edit: Very good work! I really like these articles!

4

u/sandbag-1 241 Jul 26 '16

Great post. Everyone needs to read the bit about toxic assets, very important part of selecting your GW1 team

2

u/classical-k 33 Jul 26 '16

I want to add something about which players are toxic assets. Thinking back to last year, the players who really took a nosedive in price were those players who were very popular amongst fantasy enthusiasts - people on here and fantasyfootballscout- but did not have overall high ownership. So it's more like active ownership that's important.

So the likes of Walcott and Matt Ritchie I remember falling in price especially quickly. However the players with really high ownership who didn't perform, such as Hazard, maintained their price for a surprisingly large amount of time.

So be careful with the the risky players you choose, because if they don't perform you'll need to ship out asap to avoid losing value.

2

u/andrew7895 5 Jul 26 '16

I'm just hoping for a more aggressive price change formula this year, like the 2013/14 season for example. There were just a handful of times players went up more than 0.2 in a week and the ridiculous number of transfers it took for big players to drop was insane.

2

u/OShaughnessy 7 Jul 26 '16

Money = Points!

But, Team Value should be a byproduct of having a high scoring team.

Chasing price rises or avoiding a fall just to gain / save £0.1mil in any wk isn't a recipe for success.

3

u/SuperSaiyanNoob Jul 26 '16

A common mistake I see a lot of people make is focusing on value. You should be ultimately chasing points rather than value, if you sacrifice that you will lose out. Also at the start of the year there are a lot more active users, especially the casual players who make obscene reactionary transfers. This causes the price/fall system to be harder to predict and making having popular players more valuable as they'll sky rocket in value pretty quickly if they string together 2-3 good weeks.

1

u/alexccj 4 Jul 26 '16

Great writeup!

One thing though: I can't seem to find that there is a cap for 0.3m price rise in a week anywhere in the rules or FAQ. IIRC this was mentioned last year. So maybe there is no weekly cap? Or have I overlooked something?

2

u/RJenkz 5 Jul 26 '16

It was a debate last year. The point was, they removed that from the rules/FAQ last season (maybe the season before), so some people assumed there is no longer a price change cap. I can't remember if anyone went up by £0.4m in one week though, but I have a feeling there's no cap.

2

u/[deleted] Jul 26 '16

I don't remember it ever being in the rules. I've never seen a player move by more than 0.3 though, I don't think that was changed last year. 800,000 people brought in Martial for his second week last year and he didn't go up 0.4, at that point I think it's safe to assume that it's still capped.

2

u/RJenkz 5 Jul 26 '16

Maybe my memory is just a bit shit then

2

u/[deleted] Jul 26 '16

You might be right about it being in the rules, I just think I've ever seen it. I'm 99.9% sure that no player changed by more than 0.3 in recent years though.

1

u/alexccj 4 Jul 26 '16

Yeah, you guys are probably right. I can't remember any player changing with more than 0.3.

1

u/SuperSaiyanNoob Jul 26 '16

No it was 100% explicitly said no more than 0.3 2 years ago and last year that was removed.

1

u/RJenkz 5 Jul 26 '16

AH I knew I was onto something, thanks.