Index Outperformance & Fantasy Football

Another season of Premier League is about to begin. Since the inception of the blog, I post an article at the beginning of the  Premier league season related to Fantasy Premier League. I try and pick different themes/topics that I find unique about the upcoming season. You can find my blog from last year here where I talked about 2 major factors that I believed were going to have an impact in the last season. 

This year I have decided to talk about a feature that isn't widely used but can be impactful if used in the right situations. It's the "% Teams Selected By" or TSB sorting feature on the FPL website. Using that is very similar to a common approach of investing in stock markets. Hence, I decided to mix the 2 in this post. 

I'm going to talk about the following things

1. What is the Index Outperformance approach?
2. How can you leverage that in FPL using the TSB sorting feature? 
3. Potential situations when this approach can come in handy. 

What is the Index Outperformance?

The index Outperformance approach is a method of investing in stocks in Finance. I'll break it down in 3 parts - Aim, Methodology, and the Result

Aim: It is used when the aim of the investment strategy is to outperform a given basket of Stocks, for example, S&P 500. 

Methodology: The approach is to analyze the members and decide which ones are likely to outperform the index and which ones are likely to underperform. Criteria used for this decision making depends on the investor. Once the outperforming and underperforming stocks are determined, one shall to overweight the outperforming stocks and underweight the underperforming stocks i.e. put higher proportion of money than the weight in the index in outperformed and lesser than the weight in the index for underperformers. 

Result: If the index goes up by 10%, you can end up with a partially higher return (say of about 12%) and if it goes down by 10%, your portfolio is likely to go down lesser as well (say 8%). This, of course, is assuming that the analysis you made is indeed fundamentally sound. 

Applying it to Fantasy Football

Using the TSB feature, you can see the percentage of teams that have selected a particular player. For example, as of this writing, 51.9% of teams have Haaland in their squad, and 57.9% of teams have Salah in their squad. Consequently, you know that these are the players that will have a big impact on the average Gameweek Score of the weekend. 

For example, for every goal Salah scores, the average score of all the teams playing FPL will go up by at least 2.5 points. In practice, it'll probably be more because a lot of teams will even make him Captain/Triple Captain and hence, earning double/triple the points he gets. Similarly, if he doesn't perform well on a Gameweek, the average score of the gameweek is probably going to plummet massively. 

Knowing this, if your analysis tells you that Salah is going to do well, you should have him in the squad. At the same time, if your view is opposing, you may want to bench him or buy some other player. 

When to use it? 

There are typically 4 scenarios (that I know of) when this approach can come in very handy:

1. Start of the season - This is the time when most people are making squads on hunches and based on pre-season matches. This is probably a time when you aren't exactly sure where the quality lies and which players are worth they money that they're costing. It's best to try and get at least average Gameweek returns in the beginning if not beat the average. 
2. Choosing high value players - This goes back to the example of Salah and Haaland. Every season will go through a period when there's a concentration of team ownership around certain names and often, these will come with a hefty price tag. It helps to closely watch such names and decide separately if they need to fit in your squad and if yes, when and how. At the moment, this choice is between Kane, Son, Haaland, Salah, and Kevin De Bruyne. Additionally, Sterling, Ronaldo and Fernandes aren't too far behind. 
3. Choosing budget players - This is a bit similar to the previous point. Every FPL manager has to have a few low budget options from lesser known squads. If you are someone that doesn't want to invest too much time going through these squads, you can just put a budget cap and filter by TSB to see which ones are the value players that a lot of other squads are going for. This will probably give you a starting pool of players to choose from. 
4. When you're ahead of the rest in your mini league - Personally, I don't endorse this approach. However, a friend of mine told me that this approach can be useful if you're in a mini-league and there's money on the table. I never play in leagues with money so I didn't even know about it. If you're leading, with a gameweeks to go (let's 5-10 GWs). This can be a useful approach to preserve the lead. Buying up names with high concentration will force others to transfer in riskier dark horse type players which may have volatile returns. On the contrary, you can get average Gameweek returns every week and maintain your lead more or less in a risk-free manner. 

As usual, I'm also going to put my Start of the Season Squad below. This might change a bit going into the season but as of this writing, this is my squad: