Pre-season 24-25 Blog

Hi and a very warm welcome to the NEW TransparaTech Fantasy Football blog !!!

Back by popular demand (well, at least two friends/family 😆) we’re blogging on the TFF forthcoming season. The Pre-Season Selector is now available via the TFF Player Stats Portal hope it helps with your team selections…

The Pre Season Selector has been ordered by default by Pts Per Game (from last season) NB – players not in the PL last year including those from promoted teams won’t have the points available although I noticed a slight curiosity on the Telegraph website where some points are showing, not sure what that is about, a link to the EFL game perhaps?

The current filter default is for 10 + Starting XI appearances to help with that particular quirk.

Usual names at the top, GKs and Defenders didn’t represent good value in last seasons game with only one defender, Ben White of Arsenal even appearing on the above screen grab !

With Haaland’s price increasing to a record £8.5 mil this season, most of the pre-season FF chit chat seems to be about whether to find room in the team for him… or take the risk of leaving him out enabling more of the other premium players.

It seems at time of writing half the players in the game ARE NOT willing to take the risk of leaving Haaland out as he is second in popularity only to Cole Palmer with 57% of players including him in their starting line ups.

Sorting by the Pts £m and also of course by the % picked by (accurate to the date shown in the Data Refresh Date) can also help in gaining some insights:-

This is particularly useful to identify those Team ‘enablers’ i.e. the cheaper players in the game – the likes of B. Guimaraes, J. Branthwaite, J. Pickford, M. Gibbs-White and A. Gordon jumping out a bit on the above.

Moving onto the second page on the portal – the Fixtures is clearly of major consideration for picking that first team:-

Liverpool have the easiest start on paper so its perhaps a bit surprising to see so few owners of Mohammed Salah (just 21%).

Liverpool defenders also don’t seem too popular, especially compared to say Arsenal :-

It seems gamers are being drawn to the good value to be had from cheaper teams like Everton, in particular J. Branthwaite (although perhaps a mooted transfer to Man Utd is affecting him) and Crystal Palace who have three defenders showing on the above (two more than Newcastle, Villa and Spurs).

Palace of course are also showing with an easy set of starting fixtures, aswell as being much improved under their new manager last season. D. Munoz at just 2.7m is the most popular Palace defender although this author is personally pumping for J. Anderson who’s just 0.3m more expensive but notched 116 points last year.