There is a wealth of information out there now related to Fantasy Football. The good news is that so much of it is well worth a read when considering changes for your #FPL squad. This article is no exception, a fantastic guest post from @fpl_mentor on the Midfielders your team needs to be thinking of! The link at the bottom will take you to the original article. Highly recommended.

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Must Have FPL Players – Midfielders

If you’ve been following my team over the last few weeks, you’ll know that I used my January wildcard in GW22. One of my main objectives was to come out of DGW22 and DGW23 not only having exploited them as much as possible, but also to end up with RVP and my dream midfield.I say my dream midfield, but it’s turned into somewhat of a template midfield in FPL terms – the Magic 5 of Mata, Walcott, Bale, Michu and Fellaini.

Having said that, the player with the lowest owned % of the 5 is Gareth Bale at 16.7% so that’s the absolute maximum % of FPL managers who have this midfield. Realistically it’s more likely to be closer to the lower end of the 5-10% range at most, if even that, so it’s not quite as common a 5-man midfield as you may have been led to believe.

So why is this 5 so special then? What makes them the ‘Magic 5’?

Let’s have a look at some of the important figures – minutes played, total points scores, and most importantly in my opinion, the number of points they score per 90 minutes played.

I’ve taken the 10 highest scoring midfielders so far this season so you can see how the Magic 5 compare to the other 5 that make up the top 10. The following table shows all 10 listed in descending order according to their total number of points. Ignore the 2 columns on the right for now, I’ll get to those shortly.

Rank	Player name	% of teams owned by	Current price	Minutes played	Total points	Points per 90 minutes played	Value for money
1	Mata	27.0%	10.0	1589	137	7.76	77.60%
2	Michu	49.0%	8.4	1878	130	6.23	74.17%
3	Cazorla	19.0%	9.6	2025	129	5.73	59.72%
4	Gerrard	7.0%	9.5	2070	128	5.57	58.58%
5	Hazard	21.6%	9.4	1789	127	6.39	67.97%
6	Walcott	21.7%	9.4	1226	121	8.88	94.50%
7	Bale	16.8%	9.8	1661	118	6.39	65.24%
8	Fellaini	34.2%	7.7	1614	111	6.19	80.38%
9	Lennon	8.0%	7.3	1992	98	4.43	60.65%
10	Silva	6.6%	9.4	1561	96	5.53	58.88%

The ever-consistent Juan Mata leads the way on this one, as you probably already know. This is just so you can see who makes up the top 10 more than anything. You might have expected the Magic 5 to be filling the top 5 spots but this isn’t the case, with Cazorla, Gerrard and Hazard joining Magic duo Mata and Michu in there while Magic trio Walcott, Bale and Fellaini only only take up places 6, 7 and 8 in this rankings table.

So why aren’t Cazorla, Gerrard and Hazard in the Magic 5 then? Don’t they deserve to be if they’ve score more points than Walcott, Bale and Fellaini??

Link to original article to Read more »