Fantrax Team Previews: Part One

With the season approaching, we turn our powers of prediction towards each of the 20 teams competing in the league this season and make our Fantrax forecasts.

Fantrax (and football in general) loves to make a mockery of predictions. Anyone who had Arsenal second, Chelsea and Liverpool out of the top 4 and Brighton to be the most fun team in the league this time last Summer would’ve been very wealthy if they’d backed that at the local betting shop. But half the fun of the Summer season is in boldly predicting how things might play out.

With that in mind, in this two part-series, we’ll go team by team and look at some of the questions around them this year and provide a Summer “bold take” for each team. And we very much look forward to looking back on these in a few short months time to see just how off-base we were!

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Arsenal

When you leap from 5th place to a title challenge, all eyes are going to be on what happens next. And Arsenal really are not resting on any laurels in the transfer market, having gone out and spent large sums on Declan Rice and Kai Havertz, as well as adding Jurrien Timber. Clearly the ownership group is backing Arteta to build on what he did the year before. We talked a bit about Havertz in the Signings Roundup and I have some questions about whether the proposed usage as an 8 is a good bet to make with £65m. But I’m a big fan of Declan Rice and think he buys you a fair bit of leeway in terms of your other midfield spots.

So if I’m starting from a position of trusting that last year’s progress was real and that the signings this Summer are generally upgrades, are they a title challenger again? A lot of it falls on their young attacking group. And in particular, I’m looking at whether Bukayo Saka can make yet another leap, into stratospheric territory. He’s going to be 22 this year and he’s had two straight years of over 0.5 npxG + xA per 90. That was good enough to power him to 4th in Total WAR last season. And it somehow feels like there’s potentially still more to come from him in terms of ruthlessness.

Bold Take: Bukayo Saka will finish in the Top 3 for Total Points (and WAR) this season.

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Aston Villa

In a vacuum, Youri Tielemans is a fairly savvy signing. A full international, with good underlying numbers (including for Fantrax). And he’s going into a team who ended the season on a high under Unai Emery. He’s also a good passer and Unai Emery teams need good midfield passers.