Firstly, I just want to wish all our readers a very happy Diwali and a prosperous New Year! I hope most of your arrows are big greens that rocket you up the ranks and our endeavour is to help you along the way.

With us completing 10 Gameweeks this season, I thought it would be good to take a wander into the Premium Members Area to look at some of the numbers so far this season.

Aaron Ramsdale (£4.7m) has a very high 85.7% save percentage this season. Only Edouard Mendy (£6.2m) and he are above the 80% save mark. He showed in the last game against Leicester City that he is very much capable of pulling in double-digit hauls this season. His saves combined with distribution ability and Arsenal’s low propensity for goals has me convinced that he is one of the best goalkeeper options in the budget bracket. He almost had an assist this week, too, where he put Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang (£10.0m) through on goal if it wasn’t for a last-ditch tackle from Jonny Evans (£5.4m). After a horror start to the season, Arsenal are finding their feet in the league, especially defensively. In the last six Gameweeks, Arsenal are the sixth-best team in the league when it comes to expected goals conceded (xGC) and only four more teams have conceded more big chances than them in this period.

West Ham United are a different proposition this season. Only Liverpool and Manchester City have a higher expected goals (xG) tally than David Moyes’ team at the moment, while just Mohamed Salah (£12.9m) has a higher xGI than Michail Antonio (£8.2m) in 2021/22. A lot of people are asking the Antonio question in terms of whether we should sell him. I won’t be surprised to see Antonio or West Ham score against any team this season so my position on this matter would be to sell only if you don’t have other fires in your team or if you’re funding an upgrade and chasing the new manager bounce with Harry Kane (£12.1m). I don’t mind a switch to Ivan Toney (£6.6m) either as a pure fixture play. I don’t think I would shift him out for any other strikers at the moment. While Antonio has only one return in the last four Gameweeks, he has a healthy expected goal involvement (xGI) figure of 2.23 in this period, suggesting that his owners have been a little bit unlucky.  

These are Salah’s ranks amongst all players this season so far:

Add to that the fact that he has double-digit hauls against Manchester City and Chelsea, and it just tells me that you need a very strong reason to bet against the Egyptian for captaincy. Simply put, he’s unparalleled. He’s always had the volume of shots but now with the added creativity and ‘form of his life’ conversion rate, I would just say think very, very hard before putting the armband on anyone else. It is a different kind of season and you need to adapt to it. At least, for now.

That’s it from me this week. I got a very healthy green arrow last weekend as I jumped from 240k to 80k on the back of hauls for Ramsdale and James. This helped me make up for not captaining Salah in the previous week.

On this week’s episode of The FPL Wire, we deep dive into the new Spurs manager, Antonio Conte, and discuss Chelsea, Antonio and Crystal Palace in depth. I highly recommend at least watching the first 30 minutes for the stupendous job that my co-host and fellow Pro Pundit Zophar did with the Conte and Spurs analysis.

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