The Professor Reviews: Gameweek 15

After a whopping red arrow for yours truly, operation top 100k by January 1st is officially back on track.

Other than Foden, who did a fair bit of heavy lifting this week, the green arrow was provided by the same group of players who served up that hefty red arrow last gameweek.

Good picks don’t become bad picks overnight, reader.

It’s why I’m always, irritatingly for the most part, banging on about allowing your players time to breathe in your squad.

That includes potentially stupid ideas like a short-term punt on triple Manchester United midfield.

I think it’s fair to say that on another night, the triple-up gamble could have made for a legendary FPL evening.

Eight shots for Cunha, and if you watched the game, you will know how excruciatingly close he came to a monster haul.

First half of the season (so far) has felt like a lot of near misses for me. Maybe you’re in the same boat.

But I think I’m playing better than my current OR shows.

A bit of luck and I’m right in the mix.

Summary for the Lazy: 3rd in the league and beating Arsenal. It’s about time we had a look at Aston Villa.

Aston Villa are grossly overperforming so far this season. It’s a similar case to when Nottingham Forest were in contention for Champions League football last season, but anyone looking at the underlying data was saying this can’t continue.

And one way we broke down Forest and managed to avoid owning their players for their drop-off in the second half of the season last year was by analysing their expected points data.

Expected Points (xP) is a statistical model that estimates how many points a team deserved to earn in a match based on the quality of chances, rather than the final result. It is derived from Expected Goals (xG) data and simulates thousands of match outcomes based on the xG values of both teams.

Here’s the Premier League table ordered by expected points so far this season:

It reads pretty much as you would expect.

Arsenal are the best team in the league, City close behind, Liverpool have been a bit unlucky/throwing games in spectacular fashion after dominating, Palace are the standout team outside the top 4, United, Everton, Spurs are all mid-table hoping to sneak Europe, Burnley, West Ham, Sunderland, and Wolves are all near the bottom.

So while you may be thinking expected points is just another one of those new age football terms that doesn’t actually mean much, it does, more often than not, give you a better reflection of performance vs points.

And we can see that in Aston Villa’s numbers.

Aston Villa are currently overperforming their expected points by 13. That is about the same as Nottingham Forest’s overperformance last season (approx. 14 points).

And here’s the part where I tell you that can’t continue: Villa’s form will drop off. On current performance, they’re more likely to finish 12th than 3rd, etc.

And that is true to an extent. But this is not linear.

Two things usually happen when a team is overperforming.

Just so we’re on the same page, scenario 1 is far more likely than scenario 2 in most instances.

However, Aston Villa have Unai Emery.

And over the past two fixtures, they have outperformed Arsenal and Brighton in xG.

Performances are starting to improve, no doubt in part driven by positive results, fortunate or not.

Momentum is colossal in football, and when you have it on your side, extraordinary things can happen.

So how do we capitalise from an FPL perspective?

Roll out my favourite gif.

Only six players have played (cumulative) more than 12 matches worth of minutes in the Premier League for Aston Villa this season: Watkins, Rogers, McGinn, Cash, Konsa, and Martinez.

Emery has been quite happy to chop and change his 11 both for tactical purposes and because, especially earlier in the season, he simply didn’t seem to know what his best 11 was.

Villa didn’t have the best transfer window, and late moves for Elliot and Sancho to fill out the squad perhaps left more questions than answers.

So this all makes the pool of legitimate picks shallow.

Given there’s a bit of a dearth of striker options in FPL right now, Watkins would have been nice. But here are his recent minutes:

Rogers is the next real option if you’re looking at a Villa attacker, but his attacking numbers are through the floor.

Even as Villa’s performances are improving, Rogers has only managed 0.1xG across his last four starts.

It’s nowhere near the level of a £6.9m midfielder, and you can find better options across the game.

So, how about a defender?

Not sold on that, either.

From gameweek 16-23, Aston Villa have the third worst defensive fixture difficulty in the league.

That is not the time to begin investing in Aston Villa’s defence.

It would help if Buendia or Malen could become nailed in the starting eleven, but, despite having four goals each so far this season, Buendia has six starts, and Malen has four.

They’re not nailed.

So, in conclusion, we have a team littered with budget to mid-price picks that have just beaten Arsenal, are in top form, sitting in third, and I can’t find a single pick from their squad I’m interested in?

Unfortunately, that seems to be the case.

Summary for the Lazy: Out goes van Dijk, Cherki improves other City assets (Foden), and Spurs finally play well.

Manchester City (2.42xG) 3-0 (0.71xG) Sunderland

It really helps your chances of chasing down a league leader if you can field a player who can do this against low blocks:

Over recent weeks, Manchester City’s injured players have slowly begun to return to the squad, and the results have been, well, they’ve scored eleven goals in their past three Premier League games, reader.

And anecdotally, over the seasons Pep has often had 2-3 players who seem to be nailed above the rest of the squad, and Phil Foden currently fits that mould.

If you haven’t got him already, it may be wise to bring Foden in because with players like Cherki now rotating in around him, his potential to haul increases.

Leeds (1.51xG) 3-3 (1.91xG) Liverpool

Can I start by saying fair play to Liverpool?

If you’re going to crash out as a football club, at least do it in style.

And that’s what Liverpool have done.

Every game they are involved in is box office, scoring late goals, conceding late goals, throwing away massive leads, giving away penalties, your star player turning on the manager in public, van Dijk arguing with Wayne Rooney after a fixture, the list just goes on.

I want off van Dijk, and I’ll be using the five FTs to rectify that mistake later this week. Let’s just get those midweek European fixtures out the way first.

It’ll be interesting to see if Liverpool jump off Slot and onto Xabi Alonso if he’s sacked at Real Madrid.

I’m still of the opinion Liverpool aren’t completely terrible (I know, I know), and with a few tweaks, they’ll be fine. I don’t think they’ll be challenging for the title, although stranger things have happened, but I’ll certainly be interested in their assets from an FPL perspective when they start to turn things around.

Tottenham (2.18xG) 2-0 (0.19xG) Brentford

Sometimes, fans are right.

And Frank finally relenting and hopping off the Bentancur Palhinha double pivot has immediately improved Spurs.

Archie Gray, 30% of his passes going forward and Spurs’ best performance since gameweek 2.

It’s too early to start thinking about Spurs assets for FPL purposes, but this is a start.

Summary for the Lazy: I know you’re itching for some AFCON transfer content, and it’s coming.

In the upcoming Thursday edition of the newsletter, we will have the moves and thoughts of every LazyFPL pundit on their AFCON FT bank.

The reason why we don’t have that now? There’s a full set of European fixtures this week, and other than the odd move to catch price rises, it’s best to wait and see how they play out before making transfers.

Speaking of catching price movements, I’ve already made a transfer.

Matetea → Thiago (announced in the Broadcast Group)

Mateta has some difficult fixtures coming up (Manchester City in gameweek 16), I’m unhappy with his minutes (again subbed at 60), Palace have fixture congestion, and Thiago has a great immediate fixture run.

And I’m just going to get this in early.

Thiago is a £6.8m forward.

At that price, he doesn’t have to score every week, and I’m fine having him tick along in my squad. Even with his great fixtures, I’m not expecting anything outside of a return every three games.

And that’s fine.

The bumper AFCON transfer extravaganza will be with you on Thursday.

But for the time being, can I just cast your attention to the below fixture swing Everton hit in gameweek 18?

Everton propaganda incoming.

Summary for the Lazy: In my opinion, the best fixture tracker in the game.

At the start of the season, we added a Fixture Tracker to the LazyFPL Premium offering because we are always looking for ways to enhance your subscription.

As a Premium member, you can access it here: LazyFPL Fixture Tracker

But we also made it because we weren’t really happy with what was out there and thought we could do better.

And after building what I believe to be the best Fixture Tracker across all FPL, we went ahead and improved it.

Here’s how it looks now:

Expanded View

You can now switch from the "Condensed" gameweek grid to an ‘Expanded’ calendar-style view.

Perfect for identifying fixture congestion, especially over the December period.

Cup Fixtures

The ticker now integrates scheduled fixtures for all cups and provisional fixtures for teams still in the cup.

Blank and Double Gameweek Markers

Future gameweeks include indicators for potential blank gameweeks and likely double gameweeks with space for fixtures to be moved to.

And a reminder that the team strength ratings within the tracker are modelled from Spreadex odds data.

We believe the best team strength rankings come from the bookies (surprise, surprise), and it also allows the data to be continuously updated throughout the season in line with the latest odds.

Meaning if the bookies feel like a team is dropping off offensively or defensively, that will be reflected within the tracker.

Which is extremely cool.

As always, the tracker is best viewed on a desktop/laptop due to the amount of information being displayed.

But if you’re like me and you live on your phone (2026 New Year's resolution to stop that being the case, incoming), then rotate your phone sideways, and it’s almost as good as looking at the tracker on a laptop.

And that is us.

Again, don’t forget we have a full set of European fixtures this week.

Be wary if going early with transfers. But with 5 FTs, I understand entirely using some of them to jump on price rises (I’ve done the same myself).

Everything is less risky when you’re carrying a full bank of transfers.

See you in the next one.

Professor