PLFantasy

The premier league game offers us the choice from over 500 players, though as we all know a majority of these will never even catch a glimpse of Premier League turf this year, never mind play well enough to warrant consideration in our hallowed fantasy lineups. Players are excluded from consideration for a variety of reasons: injury, lack of opportunity, an overly steep price tag or simply not being very good. This year, rather than simply having a list of players I consider 'ownable' (though don't necessarily love), I've tried to make the pool a bit more presentable. Now, I must add a caveat here as unlike the majority of information you find on the site, a number of the views taken in the below table are pretty subjective. My opinion on a player's long term playing time and/or short term fitness is based on reading other news sources rather than any 'inside' information which roughly translates to a number of them being guesses. I do my best to stay up ...

Depth is universally seen as a virtue. We all like to be well informed to avoid being 'shallow'. Managers praise the depth of their teams, and, well, no one wants to take a dive into a paddling pool. The same is true in fantasy - the deeper the pool of talent, the more options we have, and the more opportunities there are to differentiate our teams. With the international break giving us time to catch our collective breath, I thought it might be useful to look at the current pool of talent, and assess how it looks after 7 weeks. The below are the players who I feel should register on our radars. I'm not saying they all represent great investments right now, just that, as things stand, they could hold some value in the short-medium term. A couple of points to clarify before we start. Anyone suffering from a long term injury (even if close to returning) is excluded. You can't be caught picking up injured players too early and so the likes of Glen Johnson or Steve Gerr...