Fantasy Premier League - Fixture Difficulty Ranking (Gameweek 19)

On the Fantasy Premier League website you can see the fixture difficulty ranking by clicking on one of your players and then clicking on "Fixtures". If you'd follow this ranking blindly it would lead you to believe that a lot of fixtures are the same difficulty, when in reality they aren't. To fix this I decided to create a program that would calculate the amount of points a team lets players in the other team score in general, and per position. In my opinion this gives a much better overview of the actual difficulty of a fixture in FPL terms.

So, how should you read this? If for example you own Otamendi like me, then you know his next fixture is Bournemouth (H), so you'd look at Bournemouth's row and navigate to the Home column. This gives a FDR of 2.10, which is pretty close to FPL's own FDR. This is Bournemouth's general FDR when facing them at home, but what about their PDR (Positional Difficulty Ranking). In Otamendi's case we would once again look at Bournemouth's row, but instead navigate to DEF (H), which shows that it has a PDR of 1.97. This means it's slightly easier for defenders to score points in this fixture, than midfielders for example.

So, how should I use this information? Above is an image of my own team with each player's own FDR and PDR. Using this I can make it easier on myself to select a starting 11 for gameweek 19. Blindly following this would give me the team shown below. Obviously it's not a good idea to do this, but you should use it more as a guideline when picking your team, because players like Salah are what I like to call fixture-proof, meaning that I start them no matter their opponent.

What else can you do with this information? One important aspect of FPL is planning ahead, and to do that you need as much information as possible. By looking at a team's upcoming fixtures you can choose to transfer one of their players in or vice versa. For example, looking at the fixture difficulties for each team below, Spurs have some good fixtures coming up, so it might be time to transfer in Kane. On the other hand Burnley have some difficult fixtures coming up, so it might be time to find another goalkeeper to rotate with Pope.

See the actual fixtures here.

To conclude: the FDR on the actual Fantasy Premier League website is not very useful, so I've created a new FDR instead. Use this new and improved FDR as a guideline for choosing your team for gameweek 19!