Overthinking Draft Busts: November International Break Edition

Looking at the names who have underperformed their draft position in the first third of the season

Hello (Happy Thanksgiving to our US subscribers) and welcome to our second deep dive of this break. Because of the holiday time, we’ve got a slightly adjusted schedule for this Gameweek, so you’ll be receiving this instead of the Preview this week. The Roundup will also come out a day later than usual (after Monday Night Football) but we will get a split-out Transactions article out for Subscribers ahead of waivers. Now that’s out of the way, it’s time to talk Draft Busts!

There’s loads of information available to us when putting together our draft ranks each year. There’s great tools to help you do it. But sadly, there’s always the looming spectre of the great draft bust ready to ruin seasons for Fantrax managers.

We are a third of the way through the year, so we wanted to take a look at some of this season’s notable draft busts so far and to talk a bit about why they’ve struggled. We’re also going to play the predictions game and make a guess as to whether they can put things right in the remaining two thirds of the year.

In order to write this article, we had to:

1. Define what we mean by a ‘bust’

2. Apply some exclusions (mostly to remove boring names)

So we’re going to define a bust as someone who sits twenty spots or more outside of their draft range, based on either expected Fantrax points or Total Fantrax Points (so long as there is no injury reason for their performance). This should allow us to find players that are underperforming and those that might have been dropped by their managers. We’re also going to focus this dive on the Top-30 names. You might remember we had a pre-draft series about this group making the upside and downside case, so expect to see this liberally referenced!

We’re also going to not include players with major injuries (Kevin De Bruyne, Christopher Nkunku) or players that have left the league (Harry Kane). This is hopefully both obvious and a mercy to the readability of the article.

Let’s get on with it.

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Trent Alexander-Arnold - Liverpool - Consensus Rank 6

Why has he bust? Trent’s first round credentials have been proven multiple times in his Liverpool career. His rare down years typically coinciding with those in which Liverpool as a whole have underperformed. But confusingly this year, despite Liverpool having been fairly good, Trent has just not returned anything close to what we’re used to seeing from him in this new Liverpool set up. His xFpts average is sitting at 10.33 in 9 starts. His actual points per start are lower, at 9.78 and it has him sitting as the 73rd Overall Player in Fantrax so far this season.

And you can see a big part of why even on just the top-level stats. He has just one Assist this season, despite having only finished outside of double figure Goal and Assist tallies once in the last 6 seasons (in 2020-21, where he still got 9). Playing from deeper and in the middle of the field, he’s often the man expected to use his range of passing start a move, rather than the one playing the killer pass itself. One other notable change to his role at Liverpool this year is that he’s taking his lowest number of corners per game. This takes away some of his Key Pass and Accurate Cross set piece floor and, combined with the reduction in his open play Goal and Assist numbers, he’s just not done enough to make up for Liverpool’s early aversion to keeping Clean Sheets.