Introducing our ‘Captometer’ ratings to assist with those captaincy dilemmas

Bonus points, clean sheets and more precise scoring actions can all play their part when assessing captaincy options, especially when double points are up for grabs from any of the Fantasy Premier League contests on offer.

However, it is invariably a combination of a player’s ‘goals and assists’ expectation that will determine whether he is afforded the honour of wearing the captain’s armband in your fantasy line-up.

If you are familiar with our game difficulty features, you will know that we use the latest English Premier League betting odds to predict the number of goals each team is expected to score in any given gameweek.

We then take this one step further by including the proportion of team goals a player is expected to contribute to, in terms of goals and assists, and applying the Poisson distribution to produce a guide for each round of Premier League games.

If a team is scheduled to play twice in a ‘double gameweek’, this is also factored into the calculations. The table presents readers with the likelihood of each week’s leading captaincy contenders contributing to 0, 1, 2 or 3 or more of their team’s projected goals.

GW21 ‘Captometer’ Ratings

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in January 2017 and introduced Fantasy Sports Portal’s Captometer methodology for ranking Fantasy Premier League captaincy candidates. The original GW21 Captometer table is no longer available following a later website migration. The methodology and accompanying analysis have been retained as part of the Fantasy Sports Portal archive.

Alexis Sánchez tops the ratings for GW21 but he does come with something of a red flag. The Chilean international started the season playing in the number 9 role and his overall contribution has since ‘rocketed’ when compared with previous seasons, dating back to his debut in August 2014.

However, Olivier Giroud’s recent resurgence has seen Sánchez switched to a left-sided attacking role.

The early indications suggest that Sánchez will not be able to retain the goals contribution rate he recorded in the first half of the season, especially with the Frenchman in such prolific form. Lucas Pérez is also pushing for a starting spot, while Danny Welbeck is also back from injury, adding even more competition for those coveted places in the Arsenal attack.

Only time will tell but, bearing all this in mind, Diego Costa might be the better captaincy option in GW21.