The most discussed topics on FPL’s return are clear: building wildcard drafts, tracking injuries from the international break, and evaluating their impact on their respective teams.
A sneaky interesting one is captaincy.
According to models such as Solio Analytics and FPL Copilot, Bruno Fernandes (£11.9m, 38.4% owned), who faces Spurs at home, is this week’s best option. He’ll also likely be among the most popular. Alternatives aren’t too enticing.
Going there is hardly a poor play, but it makes for a nice newsletter topic.
I already touched on this subject in this week’s Though Process series, but I’d like to expand on it.
After all, he’s the second most expensive player in the game and someone you should feel comfortable captaining from time to time if you own him. On the surface, nothing suggests you shouldn’t – he’s a 90-minute man who takes penalties and set pieces, and his expected numbers look fine.
If you’d told me before the season that he’d play all 5 opening games as number ten and average 3.80 shots, 0.36 non-penalty xG, and 0.26 xA per 90 minutes, I’d rip your hands off.
The problem is that, given this tiny sample size, you should also account for the distribution: if you remove that outlier Ipswich game in Gameweek 2, his final product looks much worse.
After adjusting, his expected assists fall to 0.09 xA/90. And while he’s still on 2.50 shots, his 0.19 npxG/90 suggests that shot quality has declined and is driven mainly by volume.
Let’s start with his goal threat.
If you remove the Ipswich game, he took 11 shots, but only 4 were inside the box, and just one was a truly big chance. He also had only 1.7 touches in the box, about the 40th percentile for his position and below his last season’s average, even though he played the second half of the season pretty deep.
Touches in the box is an extremely noisy metric and doesn’t mean much without context, but it has some predictive power: you can’t really expect Bruno to turn into a regular goal threat (like this season’s Bukayo Saka, if he keeps up what he did until now) when he doesn’t get touches in the most dangerous areas.
What’s more interesting is the drop in expected assists in those non-IPS games. Again, we’re describing a sample size of just 4 games, which is nothing.
But hey, people on FPL X are already splitting data by home and away games (never do this early in October, folks ❗), so why not look at it in more detail?
Bruno continues to provide significant value in the build-up, according to advanced non-shot-based models, and it’s not as if he’s doing less in the final third of the pitch – he still takes 60% of the team’s set pieces, plays plenty of creative open-play passes, and ranks in the elite percentiles for passes into the box and for passes leading directly to a shot.
It’s also not as if he’s not trying difficult passes, or that he suddenly stopped playing his usual wide range of creative solutions. If you dig deeper, he still delivers verticals from both half-spaces, and his open-play crosses are well executed.
However, there’s a lack of passes from deep, both crosses and through balls, and this isn’t offset by him arriving to create inside the box (which he doesn’t do too often in general, but it would help to drive high-xA chances).
If you look at the sample size from the last season after Michael Carrick’s appointment, there were so many diagonals towards the far post and deep crosses. Partly because of positioning, as his average height of touches with the ball was a few meters lower even when playing as #10, but that alone doesn’t explain the drop.
I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but it’s just 4 games, and it might be nothing. Still, it’s worth monitoring over the next 5 GWs until the next international break.
Also, one possible explanation is that his teammates don’t take shots from his other good passes, because, as I hinted, Bruno’s execution is still good from an analytical point of view (and the eye test).
Plus, those final passes often result in headers or blocked shots – which is a definition of low xG attempts. One heavy touch, one decision-making error, poor judgement of the pass's trajectory, and you’re suddenly in a much worse shooting position.
The problem with the current United team is that they take the most shots in the Premier League, but they are ranked 5th worst for xG per shot. If you remove that Ipswich game, they are worst in the league in that metric. So you can’t really wonder why their main creators’ numbers are down.
My guess is that Bruno’s production will improve.
He still tries to get a ball into the box with crosses and passes a lot, and although he also fails a lot, the other way to look at it is that we have enough historical evidence to say his creative numbers won’t decline year over year that drastically. But it’s hard to say by how much, because United has clear issues.
So far, the only truly reliable goal threat is Bryan Mbeumo (£7.9m), who has performed well in most of the games. And that isn’t enough.
It’s funny, because they have the best central progression of any Premier League team – they progress the ball through the middle most, get into the final third often, and generate a lot of shots from those build-ups, but there are simply too many poor shots and not enough good central attempts.
United also create very few dangerous shots from set pieces, another area Bruno is heavily involved in.
The upcoming game against Spurs might seem like a nice bounce-back opportunity, but I’m not so sure.
Because if we’re working with an outlier game when analysing Bruno, it’s fair to do the same with Spurs, right?
If we remove Spurs’ clash against Brentford in Gameweek 1, when the starting eleven was nothing like they were in the following weeks, they are actually ranked:
6th for xG conceded
6th for xG conceded from counters
7th for shots conceded
9th for xG per shot conceded
10th for goals conceded
Another example of how deceiving the table can be this early in the season:
It’s more of a wildcard issue than a captaincy problem, but it’s still useful to know Bruno and United's current situation.
Would I sell him before Spurs? No (in most cases). Reevaluate in GW7.
Would I have him on the wildcard? Probably not, but I’d keep the structure flexible enough.
Would I captain him? He’s obviously someone to consider this week, despite those doubts. It’s hardly a poor play. However, I’d also consider other alternatives.
Sources close to ESPN allegedly said that Bruno has been managing an injury since United’s win over Sabah FK and passed a late fitness test just before the Fulham game. He then played three full international games, so it’s difficult to draw any sensible conclusions from those reports.
This is both unsettling and promising, depending on how you read the situation.
Because we all know what happened with Cole Palmer’s (£9.7m) final product when he played through the pain…
Look, Bruno might get a penalty, an assist, and a full bonus against Spurs on Saturday, and this article will look pretty stupid. Still, I think it’s a nice case study and analytical story that gives you an overview of the Bruno & United situation.
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