How you can use fantasy football stats to predict the weekend’s results
Football is a sport that is becoming increasingly obsessed with numbers. Gone are the days when only one stat mattered: the final score. Today, it’s all about expected goals, shots on target per 90, progressive passes and all sorts of other weird and wonderful metrics.
It is important to acknowledge that this data can often be very insightful in predicting the outcome of future games, whether it is as part of your online betting in the UK or when setting (and possibly transferring players in or out) of your fantasy team.
The official FPL site is a treasure trove of stats and numbers these days, and these can be incredibly informative for both previewing games and forecasting the results you expect to unfold.
One of the best measures available to fantasy players revolves around three letters – ICT – and is an essential tool to consider before placing your bets and confirming your line-ups.
Influence, creativity, threat
Regular FPL players will know that the site pumps out some excellent stats, and their ICT metric – Influence, Creativity and Threat – is a great way of identifying players who are important to their team.
Influence is how many actions a player – typically a midfielder or attacker – performs per 90 minutes that would be considered to have a significant outcome on the final result of the game.
Creativity is, as the name suggests, a measure of how a player impacts on a game by creating goal-scoring opportunities for their teammates, whether it is through assists, key passes, crosses or other actions.
Threat is a calculation of how likely a player is to score. When these ICT metrics are combined, the FPL has come up with an index that measures the attacking output of a player. It should come as no surprise to learn that, at the time of writing, Mo Salah is leading the way.
How does this impact on your football predictions?
Even the best teams in the world are hampered by the loss of their finest players. Take Salah out of Liverpool’s starting 11 and they are clearly weakened, and the same goes for De Bruyne at Manchester City, Lewandowski at Bayern Munich, Karim Benzema at Real Madrid and so on. Even the biggest, richest clubs in the world have their kryptonite.
This means that waiting for team news before placing your bets and setting your final fantasy line-ups is crucial. Injuries, suspensions and players being rested completely change the shape of a game, and you only need to see how the betting odds move when players like Salah or De Bruyne are rested to see evidence of that.
It’s fair to say that this is a situation exclusive to attacking players, with defenders playing less of a decisive role in the outcome. If you take Virgil van Dijk out of Liverpool’s side, they are weakened; that goes without saying. But does it impact on the Reds’ chances of winning as much as the absence of Salah would? That is very debatable.
You should be using fantasy football stats to identify the best attacking players and the ones who make their team tick. Their absence can have a huge impact on the outcome of a game, so you should base your football bets and FPL line-ups on this key information.
