The Offside Fantasy League: Hurray for International Weekend!

By: Daryl | October 11th, 2007

Hurray for international weekend International weekend beckons, which means a week off from worrying about assists, interceptions and passing percentages in The Offside Fantasy League. For myself it’s an extra week to lick the wounds sustained after falling seven places last week. Ouchy. But even a week off from the addictive evil that is fantasy football isn’t really a week off. Just like Sam Allardyce, all serious fantasy managers will be hoping their star striker doesn’t get broken while representing his country.

Luckily the good people at SquadBlog have given us something to take our mind off of Owen’s potential double hernia.

Recently they explained exactly what constitutes an assist. I thought I had an assist coming my way when Stevie Gerrard hit a shot which Paul Robinson fumbled, allowing Andriy Voronin (the finest Ukrainian in the Premier League by some distance) to score the rebound. Alas, here’s SquadGod’s definition, via OPTA (the fine football statistics service they use):

“An assist is a final pass to a team-mate, who goes on to score a goal.”

So it has to be a straightforward pass, from which the teammate scores. This rules out winning penalties, winning free-kicks from which someone scores, forcing own goals etc. While this robs me of some points I thought I was due, at least it clears up any future confusion. Either your guy passes to a teammate who scores, or you get nothing.

The second thing SquadBlog posted this week was a Value for Money index. Basically they’ve taken a player’s average points per game and divided it by how much he costs, giving a handy VFM figure.

The clear leader is Villa’s Danish defensive stalwart Martin Laursen. He averages 18.8 points per game, due to clean sheets and goals scored (including those two against Spurs) but costs just £5.5 million, which gives him a VFM of 3.4, the highest of any player. In second place is Mwaruwari Benjani, whose averages 22.54 points per game at a cost of £7.5 million, giving him a VFM of 3.0, which isn’t too shabby either. I wasn’t smart enough to sign up either of these guys to my team, so my highest VFM is 3rd placed Emmaneul Adebayor, who has a VFM of 2.8 (28.04 points per game divided by £10 million.)

Finally, let’s look in on our own title race. Here’s The Offside Fantasy League Top 10:

1. Obi 1 Kenobi 0 1207 points
2. fruit 1124
3. Zara United 1086
4. Dinamo Cambridge 1066
5. Norwood Park Red Devils 1048
6. The Latent Menace 1045
7. Shamrock Fc 1045
8. the good team 1040
9. Tukis gunners 1020
10. ITC11 1007