It’s been over a week since the last market update! I’ve been hard at work on other stuff with the New Trader Guide series continuing (part 3 now available), potential performance scoring changes to analyse, and pre-season games getting underway to run through.
I spent all of yesterday running through stats tables for an in depth members article on performance changes which had some interesting results, particularly for aerial duels actually.
Depending on how this is scored (number of points per successful duel and whether you lose any points for losing the duel) this could have a significant impact. To share a quick snippet from yesterday’s members article:
Some teams just set up to play long ball and in those matches you can have huge spikes in a players aerial duel stats. A good aerial duelist may get 8-10 successful aerial duels in such a game. That could be a whopping 40-50 points at 5 points per duel!
That’s potentially massive so I hope FI have clocked this given they compared it to tackles in the survey. Whether football fans value one more than the other is important but the reality is there are more successful aerial duels on average in most games than there are tackles.
A big score award for them could therefore have a big impact and it will be fascinating to see how many points they get given. I think 3 is the right number, tell me on Twitter if you agree/disagree! 🙂
And, much has been made of midfielders and forwards who may profit from aerial duels as well. It seems a good fit for a target man on the surface and this is not completely without reason. Although as I discuss in the article not all may be as it seems.
Will we see a spike after any announcement as traders try to reshuffle portfolios to reflect the new scoring system? Possibly. But regular readers will know I rarely suggest the wait and see approach or even worse complain that we “already had our portfolios set up”.
Don’t be a victim!
Good data and information is out there and we should proactively use it, find the players likely to benefit based on educated guesses about what changes might be made, and plan accordingly. Change often brings good opportunities.
So, what’s happening in the market lately? The quiet July beyond pumps for young players getting run outs in friendlies has continued.
I do expect things to pick up a bit as we head towards the end of July and early August though.
It’s been a fairly slow month so far and I think chiefly there just hasn’t been much new information to react to. You can take punts on kids on the back of a pre-season game if you want but these early games don’t tell us too much about them we didn’t know already.
In my opinion, if we wanted them we should have bought them before they almost definitely started a pre-season match with many senior squads away!
Things should change as more pre-season data and early results start coming in though and I think traders will get more reasons to trade and hype for the new season will start to build again.
And lastly, the excellent Football Index Guide has made a video review of the members area of my site, so if anyone wants a guided tour of it from FIG with his opinion on the service check it out here!
This is brand new this morning and I’m excited to get it out there. FIG has a good reputation for straight shootin’ so he was the ideal person to do the review.
p.s I’ve just seen the IPO news, I’ll run through the stats on them this afternoon and assess them in Scouting for members.
Risers
Bukayo Saka
17 year old Saka was given a substitute debut last season and has impressed in the Arsenal youth setup.
The hype for him has been building since March and he has flown from £1.10 up to £2 now.
There really is not much top level data on him to go on. But from what we can see, he has broadly the right playing position. He possibly hugs the wing in a deep position too much and needs to get further forward.
He has shown streaks of goal scoring (under 19 Euro Championship this year) and this is what kicked off his price rise back in March. But outside of that goal threat is fairly tame and the rest of his stats decent but unspectacular.
So overall, I’d say he has a chance but at 17 he is a long way from a finished product. Not too much to seperate him from a few dozen other similar good prospects and it is more the trend rather than the quality driving this as per many young players.
Paul Pogba
Another Pogba entry and whilst I do not want to mention him every week, he is a hard man to ignore!
This week has seen a resurgence in trader confidence that he will stay. Do we really know much more than a week ago? Not really.
It’s still up in the air with lots of moving parts and it depends heavily on other transfers to happen. The bookies are still 50/50 on it and I can’t do much better than that. I am not sure anyone can.
My stance overall on this has not changed for months. Out of the EPL his prospects take a genuine and significant hit and his price will crash hard. If he does stay and has another year of being a sulky gossip magnet there is a huge upside there.
I tend not to take 50/50 gambles (see my latest New Trader Guide as to why). But if you were going to bet on this the time to do so was closer to £7 a week ago.
We don’t really have any reliable new information since then so the prospects of winning the bet have not improved but the price has gone up.
I’d therefore be wary of chasing it now.
If I wanted to make the bet, I would come to a trade like this when the market was feeling down on it rather than when sentiment and prices are rising.
Fallers
Antoine Griezmann
With the transfer out of the way Griezmann has been slipping backwards in price.
That’s to be expected and most transfers will end in a damp squib, unless they are into the EPL and people have huge optimism for them.
At Barcelona though I quite like his chances. He’s got performance suitability and is more than just a goalscorer.
Atletico’s style is not good for performance scoring although Griezmann managed to have his moments even so and put up some decent scores there.
Barcelona will be a much more performance friendly environment for him and if he starts well I would expect to see him making a dent in some early season performance scores.
Leading for France in a Euros year too, he’s got a lot of good background factors that could lead to a good season and I think he looks a nice semi-premium season hold.
The only worry would be is if he pulls a Coutinho and flops at Barcelona so that’s something we will have to watch pre and early season performances for carefully.