Beat Your Manager! Fantasy Football is a game which is similar to “Football Manager”, but applied to live football, where you manage your favourite Club and pick lineups, bench, formations and substitutions, all in real-time. When fans play the game, the Beat Your Manager team can get a picture of the popularity of different players, by looking at how frequently they are selected for the lineup.
Tim Krul is the most popular international Goalkeeper:
Newcastle United and the Netherlands share more than a similar-sounding name; they also both boast Tim Krul in goal, the 3rd-most popular player in our list, scoring an impressive 96 per cent rating with Toon fans. Arsenal’s Wojciech Szczesny and Crystal Palace’s Julián Speroni both scored marginally higher than Krul with their respective fans (97 per cent each), but as Poland didn’t qualify and Speroni didn’t make it into the Argentina squad, Krul bows out of the World Cup at the semi-final stage but makes our lineup here.
Premier League defenders did well in World Cup 2014
The four highest-rated Premier League defenders to qualify for World Cup 2014 are Germany’s Per Mertesacker (Arsenal; 95 per cent), Holland’s Ron Vlaar (Aston Villa; 93 per cent) and France’s Bacary Sagna (Arsenal; 92 per cent) & Patrice Evra (Arsenal; 90 per cent). Arsenal’s Mertesacker is in the final, Vlaar made it to the semi-final, while France exited at the quarter-final stage taking Sagna and Evra with them. None of the top four defenders exited the tournament earlier than the quarter-finals, making defenders the highest-performers on average from the Premier League
Premier League midfielders? Not so impressive in World Cup 2014
By contrast, the three top-ranked Premier League midfielders all exited World Cup 2014 at the group stage. Ivorian Yaya Touré (Man City; 98 per cent), England and Liverpool’s Steven Gerrard (94 per cent) and Spain’s Juan Mata (Man Utd; 90 per cent) all had disappointing World Cup campaigns. Despite high ratings by Club fans (Yaya Touré was the 2nd-most popular player in our list), these individuals were ultimately unable to lift their teams to greater glory.
Reality matches Hype in the Chelsea strike partnership that never was:
It’s only slightly better upfront, where the England pairing of Ricky Lambert (Southampton; 96 per cent) and Daniel Sturridge (Liverpool; 93 per cent) are just held off top spot by Uruguay’s Luis Suárez (Liverpool; 98 per cent). Suárez may be leaving Sturridge behind as he makes a fresh start in Catalunya, but he goes with the endorsement of Liverpool fans ringing in his ears; he was the top-rated Premier League player to play in World Cup 2014.
Overall Premier League World Cup 11 based on Popularity (ranked by Average Popularity):
To simplify the choice, we limited limit the candidates to just the countries that actually qualified for Brazil 2014 and also to just the squads picked by their respective Managers. Then, we looked at the Beat Your Manager! Fantasy Football data for all the football players that played for English Premier League teams during the 2013/4 season.
