Week 28 – Time to Ditch Haaland….?

With relatively few goals, Week 28 was the lowest points scoring week of the season for the Team of the Week ! and poor R. Barkley (£3.2m) has the dubious ‘honour’ of being the lowest scoring Star Player of the Week this season with 9 points 😆

With not many points on offer there is little change to the Team of the Season, D. Rice (£4.8m) replaces the injured B. Guimaraes (£4.2m) but, to fit the best players into the £50 mil budget :-

we’ve instead included bargain ‘enablers’ R. Roefs (£2.6m) who has possibly recovered from his injury and H. Wilson (£2.9m).

Gamers continue to ditch mis-firing or rotated City stars, current Player of the Season E. Haaland (£8.3m) and R. Cherki (£3.5m) :-

Turning to the likes of I. Thiago (£3.6m), B. Fernandes (£6.4m) and D. Szoboszlai (£4.1m) – all of whom scored/assisted this weekend to reward the gamers who brought them in:-

This brings us onto the key question of the week and the title of the blog…. Is it time to ditch Star Player of the Season E. Haaland (£8.3m)….???!!!

Well, firstly a glance towards the fixtures shows City ranked highest in terms of forthcoming fixture difficulty:-

although it should be noted that their next four games are against League leaders Arsenal (twice) and last years Champs Liverpool (H) and Chelsea (A) !!

City’s run becomes more favourable from Week 33 onwards so, if there is a good time to take out the highest points scoring player in the game, it is arguably now…?

We can see from the below that Haaland doesn’t even make the Top 10 of recent form strikers – he’s scored less than half the points of J. Pedro (£4.5m) during the last 7 game weeks:-

Haaland is still the top Striker on the Six Week Segmentation matrix :-

BUT…. changing the slicer range to the latest half of the season so far and you can see Haaland’s fall from grace (even relegation threatened Leeds’ D. Calvert-Lewin (£3.7m) is outperforming him 😆) :-

Gamers have been selling him off over the last 6 game weeks – his % owned by has dropped 12% from him being in 69% of teams to now just 57% :-

and selling gamers have been proved right by Haaland’s non-appearance at all in the Top 8 Striker Weekly points matrix over that same period.

So…… IF you were to now ditch Haaland, who will you turn to replace him?! We’d suggest J. Bowen (£5.5m) is probably top of the list, West Ham have a favourable run of fixtures, Bowen tends not to be a minutes risk and the Hammers also have a home FA Cup tie against Leeds.

B. Fernandes (£6.6m) is another strong contender although United are out of the FA cup so play at least one game less. Another premium priced alternative could be C. Palmer (£6.2m) who has that extra FA Cup game at home to lower league Port Vale IF he plays in that game.

We’ll leave you to ponder and agonise….. 😆👍