Introduction
So far this season, Trent Alexander Arnold has picked up 47p in PB, which on the surface sounds brilliant but his price point of over £10 is frankly ridiculous and it means that if he gets the same next season, he's going to return just £45 worth of PB for every £1,000 spent on him.

The £10k+ investment needed to buy 1,000 shares in Trent, would return just £450 worth of dividends... Could be worse... but by contrast... Gaston Ramirez from Sampdoria, has picked up 40p worth of PB so far this season, having played just 27 games. If he were to repeat that next season, that same £1,000 investment in him would return just short of £870 worth of PB, almost double what the £10k+ investment in Trent would return. A £500 bet on Gaston Ramirez, would return almost the same amount of PB, as a £10K+ bet on Trent.

Can Ramirez return the same next season? I'll let you figure that one out... but the point is... we've had just 1 season under the new PB matrix and the fellas on the list below have all won PB multiple times, which suggests that they have it in them to win it again.

So, here's the top 40 PB players who earned 17p per share this season... ordered by how much they would return if you bought them today... and they reproduced their winnings next year. (Check out my boy Cuadrado...)

Important Note
In an ideal world, I would have based this list on 'Players Who Won PB At Least Twice', to rule out any 1 time flukes. I can't find a list of such players, so I limited the selection to 'Players Who Picked Up At Least 17p Worth Of PB', as it ensures every player on the list won PB on at least 2 occasions this season.

Sadly this leaves out guys like Henderson and Fabinho who both should be on the list, given that Henderson won PB on 3 occasions even picking up Star Man. If Henderson replicated his 8p worth of PB next season, he would be 33rd on the list and Fabinho would be much higher at 19th, well above "PB players" like Kroos and Kostic, which is especially impressive given that the Brazilian spent half the season on the injury list.

The 16p cut off, also rules out Bruno, given that he's on 16p worth of PB since joining Man Utd. With only 12 games at Man Utd, it's hard to do a full Bruno comparison... but assuming he picked up 4x more PB next season he'd average a similar amount to KDB. Let's be right... you're buying Bruno for MB more than PB.

Seria A teams have more fixtures remaining than other clubs, especially those who are still in European competitions.

Fixtures Remaining

• Prem = 9/10
• Seria A = 12 /13
• Bunds = 8
• La Liga = 11

Of the teams that are still in Europe, Juventus, Napoli and Roma have 12 league games, whilst Inter and Atalanta have 13 league games.

• Atalanta are already through to the next round.
• Inter have both matches with Getafe still to play.
• Juventus were losing 1-0 to Lyon (Lyon are away in the return fixture)
• Napoli were 1-1 with Barcelona (Napoli are away in the return)
• Roma have both matches with Sevilla still to play

This means Inter has 15 PB fixtures scheduled, plus potentially another 3-5 games if they make it to the final of the Europa, which will be determined by how many legs the Quarters and Semi's are played over. (Usually it's 2 legs but there's talk of them just being 1 leg each).

To put that into perspective, Inter have 15-20 PB games, where as teams in Ligue 1 don't have any games left.

@Fletch

I can see from your post that you're entire view of the index, appears to be, that a player is only worth something, if they are producing dividends. It's a sound world view, hard to challenge with anything tangible... it's just not how I see the market.

Football Index to me, is a lot like Poker. The cards are important but the reason the same poker players make it to tournament finals isn't because they have the statistics of every combination memorised... it's because they play the man, not the cards. So while you're looking for the player who's going to trickle you in the dividends, I'm looking for the guy, I think others are going to be looking for.

The cycles of FI, mean that what works in January, isn't the same thing that works in February. So whilst your dividend approach might be super powerful for a few months out of the year, it might also be terribly weak at other points of the calendar. Which is why we see so many top end traders crying at the minute, where as those trading at the lower ends are making it rain. There will come a point where that flips but there will then come another point where the middle of the market is booming. Seems to me, the key is to be flexible and willing to change your strategy up as the market moves.

I was on here all day yesterday and I don't know how I missed this thread but... apology accepted my man.

It takes a certain level of character to make a public apology like that, it's mighty big of you and very much appreciated.

Here's hoping we get some good news on Tuesday, and we can all get back to our profitable trading.

"When more users join, his price will grow."

We've all probably said it at some point or used it to justify some of our portfolio decisions but, sadly, as I'm about to show... it is a complete myth. Nothing more than a misnomer, spread through the community, often by people, who don't realise they are spreading a lie.

Sure, if you open up the current top 100 and pick a player at random, chances are really high that he has grown in the last 12 months... but what happened to the players who were in the top 100 this time last year and are now squad players? I don't have the tools to look back and see which players were in the top 100 this time last year, but here's a bunch of players that we're higher in value last year, than they are now, despite the market's impressive growth rate.

Player: Last Years Peak Price > Todays Price

• Alexis Sanchez: £2.08 > £1.44
• John Stones: £1.09 > 88p
• Chiallini: 43p > 33p
• Rudiger: £1.11 > 72p
• Varane: 77p > 64p
• Naby Keita: £1.91 > £1.52
• Kevin De Bruyn: £2.52 > £2.40
• Thauvin: £1.73 > £1.69
• Lukaku: £1.70 > £1.50
• Aubameyang: £1.49 > £1.32
• Aguero: £2.06 > £1.45
• Ronaldo: £4.43 > £2.66
• Pjanic: £1.33 > £1.20
• Milinkovic-Savic: £1.37 > £.1.29
• Xherdan Shaqiri: £1.04 > 56p

You could point to any of these players and give a specific reason for their individual decline, be it age, rape, injury, position change, etc, but the point is, there's a lot of players on FI who do decline even with the markets impressive growth and even with personal success such as Aubameyangs Golden Boot.

The Transfer Pattern
One group of people worth monitoring closely are the high profile transfer prospects. Here's a list of top transfers from last year...

PLAYER > NEW CLUB > PEAK > CRASH > RECOVERY

• N'Zonzi, moved to Roma: 45p > 28p > 30p
• Mahrez, moved to Man City: £1.15 > 65p > 90p
• Lenglet, moved to Barcelona: 63p > 39p > 52p
• Jean Seri, moved to Fulham: 73p > 40 > 53p
• Odriozola, moved to Madrid: 64p > 35p > 44p (worth researching)
• Nainggolan, moved to Inter: 61p > 22p > 31p
• Arthur, moved to Barcelona: £1.12 > 80p > 92p
• Emre Can, moved to Juventus: 55p > 34p > 48p
• Fred, moved to Man Utd: £1.06 > 62p > 64p
• Thomas Lemar, moved to Atletico: 95p > 59p > 82p
• Higuain, moved to Chelsea: £1.47 > 58p > 72p
• Courtois, moved to Madrid: 62p > 28p > 40p
• Jorginho, moved to Chelsea: £1.34 > 87p > £1.02
• Alisson, moved to Liverpool: £1.01 > 54p > 75p
• Fabinho, moved to Liverpool: 93p > 49p > 57p
• Sokratis, moved to Arsenal: 45p > 29p
• De Vrij, move to Inter: 65p > 30 > 41p

Most of these players followed the same pattern. A huge spike, then a massive drop for months on end with occasional short-lived bounces, then they stabilised at the bottom and have since started to rise again.

Joining The Premiership
One of the interesting take-aways from this, which I think flies in the face of typical forum-user-logic, is that joining the Premier League... doesn't appear to prevent players prices from falling after the transfer.

Alisson, Fabinho, Mahrez, Higuin, Jorginho, Fred, Sokratis all joined the Premiership's top clubs and are still down significantly in price, even though some won the Champions League, the Europa League and the domestic treble. These players all have different positions, ages, team seniority, but the results seem to be the same across the board.

The Exceptions
It's worth noting that major drops aren't 100% inevitable either... Vinicius Junior, was under a pound when he transferred to Madrid last July and QUADRUPLED in value before dipping a pound after a major injury. Likewise, Shaqiri rose from 55p to £1.04 after joining Liverpool, before picking up a groin injury that saw him take a bit part role.

Summary
Yes, the market will grow and this time next year, the top 100 will have graphs that show long periods of growth but that doesn't mean the people who are in the top 100 right now, won't have graphs showing the exact opposite.

Players who are about to transfer, will most likely drop by a significant amount for a long period of time and in all likelihood will not have recovered fully by this time next year BUT this time next year... a portion of them MIGHT start looking super attractive...

Experiment Of The Month
Based on nothing except looking at curve patterns for hours on end today, I've determined that Manchester United's Fred, appears to be at the bottom of his curve. With that in mind, I've just market sold out of Maguire whilst writing this thread and bought 300 of him to test my curve pattern observations. It's a random punt from me, and possibly the dumbest thing I've done today, so obviously this entire thread was made for this one Fred plug. (BUY FRED NOW!)

OK... so I've uglied up the data from @TotalPunt a bit... but basically, Willian appears to have the 10p 'Forward of The Month' in the bag... probably...

There's one or two who I think might be able to nick it, but it's a bigger ask than maybe some folk might realise. Here's the data.

• Messi and Benzema have no fixtures so can't catch him.

• Sanchez has 3 fixtures but needs 255 points which is 20 points more than his highest score all season. If he can't register the massive 255 PB points from a single game, he's' going to need 460 points from 2 of his remaining games. It just seems unlikely Sanchez will catch Willian given that he has only broken 200PB twice this season but the fact that he's on the board tells you the kind of form he's in, so it's not impossible.

• Insigne needs 280PB points. He did start the season with a 302+ but he hasn't broken 260 since. He'd need to average 222 points per game from 2 of his last 3 fixtures. It's not impossible... but is it likely? Probably not. He does have a half decent chance of pinching 3rd place by posting a 192 though.

• Ronaldo has a ridiculous 4 games remaining, who wants to bet against him? Interestingly his highest score since returning from COVID has been 201 points and that's despite playing almost every minute of every game and scoring for fun. His highest points registered so far is 170, so he'd need 524 points out of 2 games. If anyone can do it, it's Ronaldo but his PB for July hasn't left him in a strong position and surely the lad is getting tired sooner or later. He's already played 4 full games in July.

• Sterling might just be the most likely to come close... He registered a monster score with his 287 and has recently worked out where the goal is. If I were going to bet on anyone taking top spot from Willian, it would be Sterling. He's unlikely to do it in one match but he needs 407 points out of 2 games which isn't completely out of the realms of possibility. Man City play Norwich and Watford... both games could be absolute decimations... I don't think he'll do it... but I wouldn't rule it out. He's arguably underpriced given the City/Champions League debacle too and with the Euro next year... now might not be the worst time to buy....

For perspective, Willian is £1.20... if he wins that 10p, it's 8.3% dividend return... Sancho would need to win £1.14 worth of dividends to match it.

@Fletch

I underestimated the impact of Corona on the football world, so please don't think I'm poo-pooing your thoughts here as you could indeed be right.

That said... I believe what we have seen so far, is an exaggerated version of the 'Season End Sell Off', where PB players lose their value and MB players take over. Some folk were faster than others to act and the swing to MB coincided with Corona fear, as well as PB crashes for unexpected Champions League failures such as Liverpool. (Hence the likes of Trent dropping 60p.)

If we look at how PB big hitters such as Messi, Neymar, Kimmich and Banega finished their 2018/19 season, we can see that they all dropped significantly in price as the season came to a close. Messi and Neymar both lost over £1 in a month, Kimmich dropped 12%, Benega fell 33%. Some of these were deeper drops than what have seen so far.

Rightly or wrongly, I dare say many of us on here believe this is similar to when a player is injured, with growth all but guaranteed to follow. Usually there are two dips when a player is injured... one when the injury happens and another when we find out how long for... my guess is, we've had the first dip and the size of the second dip, will depend purely on how long football is out... but as we get closer to the season return we'll see fast growth in PB players, just as we did in July/August.

Growth has unquestionably flattened but looking at the index, we're still seeing certain players increase over a 24 hour period, which shows that money is going in/moving as punters are adjusting to the new conditions. Would you be surprised to see the FOMO kick in for players like Trent once the next fixtures are announced?

In the meantime, FI will no doubt keep stimulating the Index and I wouldn't be surprised to see quite a bit of extra promotion over the coming months. Perhaps they'll move their media review forward... or start rumours of a share split... or come up with a ton of new dividends for us to get excited about. It's in their interest to keep this train moving... even if that means they take a short term loss to restore confidence. Can you imagine the marketing boost this will be for the platform, if they can get the index rebounding faster than the stock markets? It could encourage some big fishes to take the platform more seriously going forward.

Perhaps it's just wishful thinking on my part but it's worth looking at the likes of Italy.... we here in the UK are 3-4 weeks behind them.... or put another way... they are 3-4 weeks ahead of us in the recovery process... Could it be that we see Serie A return before the Premiership? It could lead to cycles of spikes for each division as they all eventually return...

Back in summer, I googled 'Top Transfers 2018', clicked a link and worked my way through the list of players to see how prices had been impacted by their transfers. After a day of trawling over the data, looking carefully at the graphs, I identified a fairly common pattern.

• Players typically peaked just before their transfer, then crashed hard for months on end, before rising again slowly.

The research led me to the surprise conclusion that I should ditch Harry Maguire and buy Fred, which at the time seemed like utter madness given that this was Fred's 1 year graph.

Looking at their 6 month graphs now though, it appears to have been the right move.

Anyhow, @AllyHibs 'Transfer Tips' thread, reminded me of the research, so I've updated it with current prices below. (*I wrote this few days back, prices might have changed.)

The Transfer Pattern

PLAYER > NEW CLUB > PEAK > CRASH > JUNE 2019 }} UPDATED PRICE

N'Zonzi, moved to Roma: 45p > 28p > 30p }} 41p
Mahrez, moved to Man City: £1.15 > 65p > 90p }} £2.18
Lenglet, moved to Barcelona: 63p > 39p > 52p }} £0.98
Jean Seri, moved to Fulham: 73p > 40 > 53p }} £0.38* (2nd move)
Odriozola, moved to Madrid: 64p > 35p > 44p }} 56p
Nainggolan, moved to Inter: 61p > 22p > 31p }} 65p
Arthur, moved to Barcelona: £1.12 > 80p > 92p }} £1.44
Emre Can, moved to Juventus: 55p > 34p > 48p }} 95p
Fred, moved to Man Utd: £1.06 > 62p > 64p }} £1.38
Thomas Lemar, moved to Atletico: 95p > 59p > 82p }} £1.44
Higuain, moved to Chelsea: £1.47 > 58p > 72p }} 69p* (2nd move)
Courtois, moved to Madrid: 62p > 28p > 40p }} 42p
Jorginho, moved to Chelsea: £1.34 > 87p > £1.02 }} £2.31
Alisson, moved to Liverpool: £1.01 > 54p > 75p }} £85p* (rose to £1.11 pre-injury)
Fabinho, moved to Liverpool: 93p > 49p > 57p }} 83p* (Injured)
Sokratis, moved to Arsenal: 45p > 29p }} 31p
De Vrij, move to Inter: 65p > 30 > 41p }} 60p

Most of these players followed the same pattern. A huge spike, then a massive crash for months on end with occasional short-lived bounces, then they stabilised at the bottom and have since started to rise again.

Joining The Premiership
One of the interesting take-aways from this, which I think flies in the face of typical forum-user-logic, is that joining the Premier League... doesn't appear to prevent players prices from falling after the transfer. (Worth considering when looking at Bruno)

Alisson, Fabinho, Mahrez, Higuin, Jorginho, Fred, Sokratis all joined the Premiership's top clubs and then nose dived in price, even though some won the Champions League, the Europa League and the domestic treble. These players all have different positions, ages, team seniority, but the results seem to be the same across the board. The good news is, most of them rebounded 12-18 months later. Presumably after their adjustment period at the club.

Summary
Players who are about to transfer will most likely drop by a significant amount, for a long period of time and in all likelihood will not have recovered fully by this time next year BUT this time next year... a portion of them MIGHT start looking super attractive... and then this time in 18 months there's a good chance they will have have bounced back even higher than they are now.

Experiment
Harry Maguire has dropped in price significantly since his transfer. His graph, kind of looks like Freds did back in June.

Given that the Euro's are approaching... and the pattern that the players from 2018's big transfers followed... I'd say Maguire looks like he's probably worth a punt. It will be interesting to see where his price is this time next year.

(Full Disclosure... I haven't bought back in to Maguire but I would if I had spare cash floating about).

@DelBoy92 said in Team of the month!!!:

Exciting...

Celebrate people.

I am over the god damn moon at this addition!

@MickTurbo said in Rolling matchday thread: 7/8/20:

De ligt, dubois, cancelo, jesus. Hopefully ramos is quiet

Gonna need Juve to sort their shit out tonight. Been useless of late.

@Coriolanus said in Punt Money - Tim Kleindienst (24p):

Yikes off to Gent now worth £0

Yeah, it's not ideal... coulda been worse though. He's gone from 0 PB games to some high profile PB games.

Jonathan David (who he's replacing) is obviously a few years younger but he's sitting at £2.50 right now. Gent are a creative team, scored the highest in their league last season so with a bit of luck he gets a decent tally and impresses.

Could be a long year though.

@Tom77 said in Barry1955:

@doyerownreserch

Feels like a trap for QAnon

@Moukoko said in Chandler Bing!:

@GDS are you saying you can't sell ANY players at profit?

The past week or so I have sold Marcus Rashford, Bobby Firmino and Enock Mwepu for profit. On Firmino I made 9% roughly by buying on ME and then IS'ing(not the true IS, but you get it)

I am no master trader and I deal in very small numbers, I'd just be intrigued to see your port. I have some shitbags I can't sell without making a huge loss, but they are mainly punts like Onyekuru and Cabot.

And surely some of the liquidity should come from divs? Obviously doesn't work if you have bought a 3 quid plus player as chance of returning 3 quid in divs over 3 years is small, but for bottom end there seems ample opportunity to return the value of a player in divs alone over 3 years

It's not good enough to just sell for profit. I'm up 250% on one player but if I sold him now, I'd get around 10% profit. So, should I wipe off 240% to get in on a player who would then have to do incredible numbers just to get back to the position I'm in now?

Look through my posts and you'll see within minutes of TOTM being announced I made a post telling folk to get on Willian and within minutes of the IPD, I did the same with respect to Ronaldo... in both cases the player rose significantly and are picking up divs but even though those things were obvious, I couldn't get in on them without putting new money in and I'm not going to do that, just to trap more money.

@jonathan-rolfe said in What of the Underachievers?:

im struggling to decide which of several underachieving players (not picked much or just bang out of form/bad team form etc) i should keep an eye on especially as for me a quality player having a period of bad form normally mean great opportunity. Let me make a list of a few off of the top of my head. some i have others i dont.

Harit
brekalo
Diaby
pelligrini
Orsolini
Serdar
Torres
Suso
Odergaard
Isak
Valverde
Tonali

obviously in many cases they are younger players, who are more likely to hit periods of bad form

What are your thoughts and are there others you think are due a resergence next season?
( i know there are plenty of injured players who im not including as part of this thread.)`

The two Mendy's come to mind. (Bejamine and Ferland). Injury soured Ben's Man City career but he has everything in him to be one of the most attacking wingback in the league. Similar story for Ferland to a lesser extent.

@Jamiearsenal93 said in Juve Mid - Wheres the PB divs coming from?:

@Dan-The-Man spot on. You just need to time the exit properly

I think he'll get reclassified by Opta to 'Defender' status, which should boost his already impressive PB by giving him the clean sheet bonus and if you want an exit point, I think next years Champions League is an easy out.

@Tikka-Mo-Salah said in Juve Mid - Wheres the PB divs coming from?:

Anyone recommend a PB midfielder for Juventus for next Season?

Cuadrado - Too old to get into now

I would reexamine the idea that Cuadrado at 32 is "too old", especially in Serie A, where the golden boot was won last year by a 37 year old and is being competed for this year between a 31 year old and a 35 year old.

Juve has a 35 year old winger, who happens to be their top scorer.

Ronaldo 35
Messi 33
Vardy 33
Aubameyang 31
Benzema 31
Lewendowski 31

And the thing about Cuadrado... Sarri uses him as a RB then moves him up to RW.... or depending on what subs are available he starts as a RW and moves to RB. As a result, he typically outscores his team mates, which is important for Champions League single match gold days.