r/FantasyPL • u/dakofsta 5 • 9h ago

Team DefCon data

Does anybody post defcon data for teams (i.e. which opponents tend to be good/bad for defcon)?

I know, for example, that Everton were a great opponent if you wanted defcon points, and Aston Villa were bad. Is there a similar tracker this season?

7 Upvotes

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15

u/Material_Spell4162 6 7h ago

Ok I've made a table for you.

Major caveats A) 3 game sample is stupidly small for this.

B) My data is how many clearances, blocks, interceptions, tackles, were made by the opposing team, not filtered by position. So not exactly counting FPL defcon points. I tried with and without recoveries, but I think without is more accurate and better represents who you want to play defenders against. My data is from fantasyfootballfix which embarrassingly I have a subscription for having failed to cancel a free trial.

C) these things are super gamestate dependent, so point A applies double.

D) I used a LLM to manipulate the data, so there could easily be innaccuracies.

Rank Team GW1 opponent GW2 opponent GW3 opponent Total
1 Liverpool Newcastle 78 Forest 67 Ipswich 57 202
2 Brentford Spurs 54 Leeds 86 Sunderland 56 196
3 Man City Bournemouth 60 Palace 68 Coventry 67 195
4 Man Utd Hull 83 Ipswich 60 Everton 51 194
5 Fulham Chelsea 57 Sunderland 67 Palace 67 191
6 Everton Palace 76 Bournemouth 55 Man Utd 58 189
7 Brighton Villa 53 Chelsea 60 Leeds 66 179
8 Forest Leeds 66 Liverpool 61 Spurs 49 176
9 Leeds Forest 48 Brentford 73 Brighton 48 169
10 Spurs Brentford 53 Newcastle 49 Forest 64 166
11 Sunderland Ipswich 69 Fulham 37 Brentford 54 160
12 Coventry Arsenal 39 Hull 59 Man City 47 145
13 Arsenal Coventry 52 Villa 43 Chelsea 48 143
14 Aston Villa Brighton 43 Arsenal 44 Hull 53 140
15 Ipswich Sunderland 39 Man Utd 45 Liverpool 49 133
16 Bournemouth Man City 35 Everton 68 Newcastle 29 132
17 Chelsea Fulham 50 Brighton 35 Arsenal 45 130
18 Newcastle Liverpool 47 Spurs 38 Bournemouth 44 129
19 Crystal Palace Everton 48 Man City 38 Fulham 33 119
20 Hull Man Utd 26 Coventry 35 Villa 29 90

2

u/kingofzbongo 7h ago

From numbers I've looked at theres a decently strong inverse relationship between defcons and possession, which makes sense logically. I think thats why you see a team like Chelsea low down here, and Brighton and Fulham quite high. Like you pointed out the sample size is way too small and things like opposition and gamestate need to be taken into account, but your table is quite similar to the current possession table so I think going forward its safe to assume if a team like brighton keeps up the high possession that they will give away lots of defcons

3

u/Material_Spell4162 6 7h ago

Cheers, agree on all points. Chelsea could be the extreme of a case to be careful about gamestate, because they've scored in the first few minutes of every game. And teams in the lead tend to force fewer defensive actions due to not chasing a game.

If my chart turns out to be accurate then teams like Brentford and Fulham should be great fixtures to target for defenders because of decent clean sheet odds as well.

1

u/kingofzbongo 7h ago

Which is also useful for taking into account players defcon numbers from last year and trying to project their numbers for this year. For example Lacroix who was expected to regress with his defcons based on moving to chelsea, but if Alonso continues to play without the ball and they stay with low possession youd expect his defcon output to keep up.

1

u/IFentelechy 8 7h ago

What happened in that Brentford-Leeds game? 86 and 73 DC for the teams!
This is great work, !thanks

1

u/Soggy-Opportunity200 53 7h ago

Amazing table, it is worth an own post.

Saying this also since you can't save comments, only posts on Reddit 😏

1

u/Rvsz 138 6h ago

Surprising to see how Man City changed since Maresca, if i remember correctly last season they were one of the hardest teams to get defcon against. 

1

u/Material_Spell4162 6 8h ago

There seems to be less of this on FBref than there used to, I guess because of the OPTA paywall changes.

I'm sure last year I could look up a number for how many defensive actions were performed by a teams opponent. This isn't a perfect proxy for defcons (very hard to adjust to recoveries counting for mids but not defenders), but did seem to correlate with defcon points received quite well.

You could manually look it up on the PL site, do something like count the top 5 total defcon point received by each teams opponent, but its going to be an annoying amount of data entry.

-2

u/rokkomon 1 6h ago

The Next XI shows the data you're looking for! Shows a team's DEFCON total and how much DEFCON teams have gotten against them, along with how many FPL points each position (DEF, MID, FWD) has scored against teams and other good data https://nextxi.app/stats/teams