The Offside Fantasy League: You Can Prove Anything With Facts

By: Daryl | September 13th, 2007

Einstein and Ashley Cole Vic Reeves once said that “88.2% of statistics are made up on the spot.” But the numbers collected by dedicated boffins for use in The Offside Fantasy League are all for real. The good people at SquadGod have slowly been expanding the level of information available to us so that we can now click on any current Premier League player and find out things like his passing success rate, his average assists per game and his favourite member of Girls Aloud. Though that last one only works with Ashley Cole.

Why is all this information important you ask? Because that’s how you score points. Goals, assists and clean sheets may be where the big money’s at, but players can consistently rack up plenty of points in other ways. It’s not enough to put you top of the league on its own, but if you can have a team of players who consistently score points, as well as your big point scorers, then you have a recipe for success.

Check out Ashley Cole as an example.

He has no goals and no assists for Chelsea, but he consistently scores a few points for his passing frequency and accuracy. In gameweek 4 he attempted 43 passes and completed 38, for 3 points. That’s 1 point for every set of 20 attempted passes and 1 point for every set of 20 successful passes. Cole may be blinged out beyond belief but his passing accuracy is impressive. According to SquadGod, Cole’s passing accuracy rate is 91%, compared to the position (defender) average of 75.38%. He also attempts more passes per game (40) than the average defender (29.76.)

His tackling is not so good, with a success rate (attempted tackles to successful tackles) of 64.29% compared to the positional average of 77.43%. But Cole’s replacement at Arsenal is doing much better.

Gael Clichy not only makes 4.5 tackles a game (positional average 2.41) but he also has a 100% success rate so far. I’m no mathematics genius but I’m pretty sure that means Clichy makes more tackles than most defenders and wins every single one of them.

Last gameweek Clichy attempted 10 tackles and won all 10. At 1 point for every 2 attempted tackles and 1 point for every 2 successful tackles, Clichy scored 10 points just for tackling. Add in the 6 interceptions he made at 2 points per interception and that’s a further 12 points for his defensive work.

In fact nearly half of Clichy’s 65 total points come from interceptions. He’s currently tied for the lead with Nyron Nosworthy, as both have 15 interceptions so far.

So it’s worth having a good look at all the numbers SquadGod are making available. Once your realize the numbers are based on simple concepts (passing, tackling etc) then we should all be able to use them to improve our fantasy teams. You don’t have to be a genius to put a successful team together. How many fantasy football leagues did Einstein ever win? None, exactly.