Fantrax: Why your league needs to give points for Fouls Suffered
Or... the curious case of Jack Grealish
This short hit is going to be all about one thing, and one thing only. It’s a door to door polling push in favour of a change to your league’s Fantrax rules. I know, I know… The last time you proposed a scoring change in your league, three managers threatened to leave, you spent two whole days responding to Whatsapps about how “if things aren’t broken, you don’t need to fix them” and the democratic process left you outvoted 11-1 but I’m here to try to give you hope and a tool to help you to make the case for change.
(^ An actual image of the moment my home league commissioner made the call to go with Fouls Suffered).
Before I get into why it’s important to make this change, I want to be very clear that the change I am arguing for is not a small one. If you are going to make this change, you’re going to meaningfully adjust your league’s scoring and as a result player values. If your draft is tomorrow and you’ve prepared without it, you might find it’s a next year vote, to avoid some real draft errors.
But now lets get to the good stuff: why it matters. For context, in standard scoring Fantrax leagues, you will receive 1 point per successful dribble by a player. Last season we had a clear top 3 in terms of successful dribbles (and an interesting name at 10), with some predictable names in the list:
1. Adama Traore - 182 CoS
2. Wilf Zaha - 157 CoS
3. Allan Saint-Maximin - 116 CoS
10. Jack Grealish - 72 CoS
The top three probably make a tonne of sense to you. They’re players that run at defenders and progress the ball for their teams. It’s totally right that they should be rewarded for their efforts in moving the ball. Especially as beating a man is a great way to create overloads or to progress the ball into a position to do something dangerous (a shot on target or a pass). These players also lose the ball quite a lot (64, 145 and 48 dispossessions respectively) and your scoring system probably hits them for this pretty significantly. So what’s the problem? Surely this accounts for their dribble attempts and gives points for positive outcomes and docks points for negative ones?
Except… This isn’t all the possessions of the ball that the player has. What about the times when a player is dribbling the ball and an opponent defender decides to foul them? In most Fantrax leagues, it’s a neutral play. The defender takes no hit, unless they’re booked. The attacker doesn’t get a successful take-on, but also doesn’t lose a point for a dispossession. The best that a player can hope for is that the foul that they’ve suffered results in a free kick or penalty that leads directly to a goal, which might grant them a fantasy assist.
There’s a better way. By rewarding players equally for a dribble completed or a foul suffered, you’re giving a much more complete picture of their contribution. I mentioned Jack Grealish sitting at number 10 overall there on successful take ons. Why is he relevant? Well alongside his 72 successful take ons and his 63 dispossessions, Jack was fouled 167 times. To put this into some perspective, only two other players broke 100 and no other player had over 120 fouls suffered. Opposition teams knew facing Aston Villa that the best thing to do when Jack got the ball was to bring him down, ideally a good distance away from the goal.
In standard Fantrax leagues, owners of Jack were getting short changed. He wasn’t losing the ball, he was trying to progress it and was being brought down time and again. There’s a very real footballing argument that sometimes Jack held the ball too long, that his style of holding the ball didn’t actually always help Villa, or that he looked for the foul as a way to relieve pressure rather than it being part of him looking to progress the ball but nonetheless he was fouled.
In my home league, which awards points for Fouls Suffered, Jack Grealish was the second most valuable player in the entire league in total points scored, just ahead of Trent Alexander-Arnold and a fair distance behind KDB. And, much as that might sound odd, ask yourself and your league this question: why would you not have Fouls Suffered as a scoring category?
Sidenote: The top 5 players in Fouls Suffered last year look like this for anyone wondering:
Jack Grealish - 167
Wilfried Zaha - 119
Jordan Ayew - 105
James Maddison - 88
Adama Traore - 77