Pillars of Success
Get wiser by understanding the significance of goal expectancies
As a teaser to our main article where we look at the 7 key fundamentals that will help you achieve daily fantasy football success we take a brief look at how to gauge the ‘softness’ of a fixture. Since almost all fantasy football scoring systems award points for offensive and defensive actions there is a clear correlation between the number of points a player is expected to earn for any upcoming fixture relative to his team’s average tendencies. Each player will usually contribute a percentage of a team’s assists and goals so the more goals a team is predicted to score the higher a player’s points expectancy will be.
Teams will tend to score more goals in home games as well so identifying a team that has an attractive home fixture is a good place to start. This can be done by calculating the number of goals a team is expected to score based on bookmakers odds and the following 2 tables show these projections for the opening round of premier league games and last season’s home and away averages.
Those teams marked in green look to have potentially the most attractive fixtures in Week 1 and players from these sides will be worth careful consideration if the other influencers are favourable.
Pigeonholing promoted teams is much trickier so a watching brief might be advised. Bournemouth for instance averaged 2.09 home goals per game and conceded 1.09 goals per game in the Championship.
Sites such as WhoScored provide detailed analysis of a team’s characteristics so you may be able to compare them with the likes of Hull and factor in any pre-season transfer activity to predict a rough idea of where you think they might sit in the table and use this as a base for assessing their future fixtures.
Nail down those goal expectancies to put yourself one step ahead of the opposing managers!
