MLS Fantasy Boss A Fantasy MLS Community
If you’re reading the advice we give here on MLSFantasyBoss, you probably already know that it is good to pick players who take set pieces and PKs. The question is just how much does it account for? The below table looks at PP90 for specific positional roles. The equations I use are now able to pull out midfield set-piece takers as their own category so we can compare them to other attacking mids.
| Role | PP90 |
|---|---|
| Mid w/ set pieces | 6.66 |
| Complete forward | 6.10 |
| CAM | 5.92 |
| Winger | 5.25 |
| Poacher | 5.20 |
| Support forward | 5.01 |
| Box to box mid | 4.61 |
| Dmid | 4.45 |
| Center Back | 4.34 |
| Outside Back | 4.07 |
The three rows we’ll focus on today are “mid w/ set pieces”, “CAM”, and “Winger” as these are the three attacking mid categories. By comparing these we can come to the conclusion that regularly taking your team’s set pieces are worth somewhere between 0.73 and 1.41 PP90 (the difference between the mid with set pieces category and the other two categories). If we combine wingers and CAMs without set pieces into one “attacking mids” category, set pieces become worth about 1.2 PP90.
If a player plays 30 games (out of possible 34) and averages close to 90 minutes, they’ll earn you 36 more points if they’re on set pieces. Multiply that by 4 midfielders and you can score almost 150 more points simply by filling your midfield with guys who take set pieces.
If you want to look at just how each player landed in my role categories, you can find it here. Every column to the right of minutes shows how a player compares in that particular category to their team per 90 minutes. So Campbell gets 2.37 times more blocks per 90 than Chicago does as a whole. Any number greater than 1 means they are above average for their team and every number less than 1 means they’re below average for their team. I did it this way so playing for a team that plays really slow and doesn’t have a high count of possessions per game like Seattle doesn’t penalize a player for my categorization purposes compared to someone who plays for a fast team like NYRB.
Updates to previous analysis:
32% of DGW players rotated within the double game week
A player who plays in a DGW scores about 1.6 times the round points of a player who plays in a single game week
Average home score is ~1.23 times the average away game score 4.25 vs 3.45
