The Telegraph Fantasy Football has recently just launched their fantasy football game for the 2019/2020 season. I played this for the first-time last season and it was really enjoyable and was looking forward to playing again this season and providing some tips for fantasy football hub users.
The game is slightly different from other games in that there are no captains, all players score the same for a goal and FA Cup games are included. I found including FA cup games an enjoyable twist as it meant planning differently to other games and there are no blank weeks at the turn of the year.
Another difference was they organised cash mini-tournaments which was limited to 16 teams. This was a real attraction to me but unfortunately, this is no longer available.
One other difference to other games is that there are no assists, but instead have key contributions (KC). This is slightly looser than an assist and it is possible that two key contributions are given for a goal (so an assist of the assister). Last season there was around 80% more KC than assists. This varies a lot by the player, and also by team. These are as follows by team:
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter wp-image-12785 size-full" src="https://cms.fantasyfootballhub.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/fig1-2.png" alt="Telegraph fantasy football 2019 2020 tips" width="255" height="442" srcset="https://cms.fantasyfootballhub.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/fig1-2.png 255w, https://cms.fantasyfootballhub.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/fig1-2-173x300.png 173w" sizes="(max-width: 255px) 100vw, 255px" />
There are some variations by team, but with limited data it is difficult to see if this is random or an actual difference. Due to the style of Man City, I would expect that their players will continue to have a higher ratio of KC to assists in the coming season.
By looking at the increase of KC to assists by position we have:
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter wp-image-12786 size-full" src="https://cms.fantasyfootballhub.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/fig2-2.png" alt="Who to pick for telegraph fantasy football teams 2019 2020" width="229" height="158" />
To account for this in the prediction model, I have increase assists for defenders and midfielders by 85% and strikers by 55%.
<h3>Data summary for Telegraph Fantasy Football</h3>
The first step for the new season is to gather information on players, positions and points scored from the previous season and use this to understand how I should be spending the budget.
The summary data for Telegraph is in the following link:
<a href="https://1drv.ms/x/s!AkYcP_eLvYMVqg_mFGzmZQ5ZT8rG?e=iTREuk">Telegraph summary spreadsheet</a>
The structure of the spreadsheet is:
Summary &#8211; contains all the players, their position, price and points scored.
Season top 20 – list the top 20 by position based on total points, points per £m and points per game per £m
Team – Select a team from cell C3 and it lists that players teams.
VFM – Shows a scatter plot for each position of points per game by cost of player. A line of best fit is shown, and the top eight players compared to the line are labelled.
<h3>Metrics and initial view</h3>
It is quite difficult to know the best metric to use to compare players, but my preference is the number of points per game per value of player.  The points per game, makes adjustments for players that have missed a game through injury or rested etc.  The chart below comes from the VFM page and is for midfielders that have played at least 10 games.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter wp-image-12787 size-full" src="https://cms.fantasyfootballhub.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/fig3-2.png" alt="Telegraph fantasy - what players to pick" width="863" height="465" srcset="https://cms.fantasyfootballhub.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/fig3-2.png 863w, https://cms.fantasyfootballhub.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/fig3-2-300x162.png 300w, https://cms.fantasyfootballhub.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/fig3-2-768x414.png 768w, https://cms.fantasyfootballhub.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/fig3-2-610x329.png 610w" sizes="(max-width: 863px) 100vw, 863px" />
The solid blue line is a linear regression line.  The r2 figure (bottom right hand side) indicates how much of the variation is explained by the line.  The closer to 1 means a good fit and 0 means there is no relationship.  Here the value is 0.7745 which is a very good fit.
Choosing Telegraph Fantasy Football Formation
Once we have a regression line for each position, we can plot them on the same graph as follows:
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter wp-image-12788 size-full" src="https://cms.fantasyfootballhub.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/fig4-2.png" alt="Telegraph fantasy football best formation and players 2019 2020" width="847" height="436" srcset="https://cms.fantasyfootballhub.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/fig4-2.png 847w, https://cms.fantasyfootballhub.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/fig4-2-300x154.png 300w, https://cms.fantasyfootballhub.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/fig4-2-768x395.png 768w, https://cms.fantasyfootballhub.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/fig4-2-610x314.png 610w" sizes="(max-width: 847px) 100vw, 847px" />
The first question is which formation to choose. For this assume you had to spend £3m on each player. From the above lines it would be a defender, followed by a goalie. As you want more outfield players to be defenders then this suggests a formation of 5-3-2
The next stage is where to spend your money once the formation has been decided. This is based on the gradient of the lines. The defender and striker are the steepest and run in parallel, which indicates that we should spend most of the budget in this area.
If there is an outlier, eg a player is obviously miss-priced then he should be selected before spending your main budget.
<h3>Other considerations</h3>
The above is a good starting place but doesn’t account for players scores from last season being above or below expectation. For example, if a player had ten shots and scored all ten, then this is unlikely to be repeated. He may only be expected to score four times so the data over-estimates his likely output.
We have new players joining the league and they aren’t included in the data and new managers will change formations and style of play.
With in the introduction of VAR we are likely to see more penalties (or goals is defenders no longer foul or handle the ball). I expect this to hurt the weaker teams the most.
<h3>My First Telegraph Fantasy Football Draft</h3>
To select my team, I use the algorithm. I set game weeks to be 1 to 10 (as want to minimise transfers before the turn of the year).  I select the best 11 players, which will naturally be over budget. The next step is to replace players with higher projected pts/£m. This resulted in:
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter wp-image-12789 size-full" src="https://cms.fantasyfootballhub.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/fig5-1.png" alt="First Draft - telegraph fantasy football tips" width="270" height="320" srcset="https://cms.fantasyfootballhub.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/fig5-1.png 270w, https://cms.fantasyfootballhub.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/fig5-1-253x300.png 253w" sizes="(max-width: 270px) 100vw, 270px" />
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter wp-image-12790 size-full" src="https://cms.fantasyfootballhub.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/fig6-1.png" alt="Telegraph fantasy football team Gameweek 1" width="575" height="524" srcset="https://cms.fantasyfootballhub.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/fig6-1.png 575w, https://cms.fantasyfootballhub.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/fig6-1-300x273.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 575px) 100vw, 575px" />
I hope you have enjoyed this article on telegraph fantasy football and look forward to the new season as much as me.
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