Fantasy Football Home

Fantasy Football for the English Premier league has grown signficantly in popularity in recent years. It still has a long way to go to rival the popularity of NFL fantasy football in the US, however as the popularity of the game grows, so does the sophistication of the players. The Fantasy Football Scout does a great job of pooling some key information fantasy football managers need to have an edge over other managers you're competing against, however it does tend to dumb things down to cater for the vast majority of people playing the game that don't really know anything about football, in spite of what they think.

The resources available on this site focus on the statistical information you should be considering when making your Fantasy football decisions. As well as providing you with useful stats based fixture tickers, such as average goals scored and average clean sheets for the upcoming fixtures, we also show you the stats for certain teams combined to help you select players within your team that complement each other in terms of fixture ease. And as our database grows, we will continue to add new analysis that will help your fantasy football decision making more informed.

As Fantasy Football managers, one thing you need to remind yourself is that even when using information to gain a statistical edge, you will still be a victim of the variance/volatility in points you receive in a given gameweek. In fact, the popularity of the game depends on this variance. Much like a casino game or poker, the only reason people even consider playing against the house is that the edge is marginal, so any given individual player can actually have a good day. The house on the other hand makes its return by knowing that it has a sufficient volume of bets to take advantage of its edge over time. In a premier league season, you'll have 380 fixtures to make your edge count. It might not be the volume that a casino is able to muster, but it's enough for your edge to count over the course of a season, and certainly over a few seasons if you're playing with the same people each year - which is particularly useful when you're playing for cash sidepots.

To illustrate this point, take a player like Robin Van Persie, playing for a team as prolific as Manchester United. Ignoring any point share issues with Wayne Rooney, if we assume Manchester United score on average 2.1 goals per game, and that RVP is involved in 40% of these goals, either through an assist, or through scoring the goal itself - this means that in any given game, there is still a c30% chance that RVP will NOT score or assist during a game. So next time you're cursing your bad captain choice luck, remember, it's a perfectly reasonable statistical variance. So long as you continuously make statistically the best decisions each week, your edge should be evident over the course of the season. Don't get drawn into admiring your game week scores. There are a lot of parallels with online poker here. You'll make a lot of calls that are the correct play but that don't win. Don't get hung up on it, and certainly don't tilt. You want to be a long term winner.