Fantacalcio, the international break: who is owed and who has already paid

The league restarts on 11 October. Two weeks without matches are the worst moment to look at last matchday's ratings and the best moment to look at the accounts.

The method is always the same, and it fits in two lines. You add up what a player has produced, meaning the chances he has created for himself and those he has served to his teammates, and you compare it with real goals and assists. Whoever produces and does not collect is owed. Whoever collects without producing is in debt.

The tally on our calls

On 16 September we put nine names in writing. After matchday five the balance is this.

Lautaro Martínez was the first of the credits, and he scored in two matchdays in a row: 3 goals this season, and he is still below his output, 4.37 expected goals. He is the kind of credit you collect in instalments.

Hakan Calhanoglu was the biggest debt and still is, with 2 goals from 0.09 expected goals in five matchdays. Three shots in the whole league season, two of them went in. He has added nothing since we flagged him.

Donyell Malen we had pointed to as the player perfectly in balance, 5 goals from 5.03 expected, and he has stayed that way: on matchday five he did not score, and nothing strange happened.

Then the two mistakes, which remain open. Paulo Dybala has still not scored: 18 shots, 1.86 expected goals, zero goals. Armand Lauriente neither: 19 shots, zero goals. They are the same two bets as two weeks ago, and they keep not paying.

Six calls out of nine went in the right direction. It is an honest balance, not a boast: over five matchdays, with these numbers, six out of nine is also compatible with luck.

The biggest credit right now belongs to Douvikas

Tasos Douvikas has 1 goal from 3.16 personal expected goals, with 11 shots. It is the biggest negative gap in the league, and it is the most interesting case because none of the three conditions he needs is missing.

He plays in a Como that has played 61 balls into the opposition box in five matches, the third-best figure in Serie A behind Roma and Inter. He shoots more than twice per game. And the quality of what he creates is high: 3.16 expected goals from 11 shots works out at almost 0.29 per shot, meaning shots from inside the box, not from outside.

A striker like this goes back to scoring, and when he does he does it all at once. If you can still find him at the price of a striker in crisis, now is the moment.

Behind him the heaviest credit remains Dybala's, though his is a different shape. His 18 shots are worth little, 1.86, but the 20 chances he has served to his teammates are worth 4.21 expected goals: nobody in Serie A comes close to that number. Four of those chances have already become goals, and the day six of them do, he will be the one collecting the assists.

The list is completed by John Yeboah, 1 goal from 2.47, Gonçalo Ramos, 1 from 2.33, and Mattia Zaccagni, 1 goal from 2.27 with 16 shots: the latter with the aggravating factor, for anyone who has him in their squad, of playing in a Lazio that has 13 points from 8.00 expected.

The debts, meaning who you are about to overpay for

The new name on the list is Diego Moreira: 3 goals from 0.87 expected goals, five shots in the whole league season. Three out of five went in, and it is the kind of return that never repeats itself.

Below him the usual company: Calhanoglu, then Alphadjo Cissè with 2 goals from 0.48, Edon Zhegrova with 2 from 0.53, Martin Baturina with 2 from 0.60, Hassane Kamara with 2 from 0.69.

Antonio Raimondo deserves a separate note, since two weeks ago we put him among the debts with a word of caution. He had 4 goals from 2.26 expected, now he has 4 goals from 3.01: he did not score on the last matchday but he kept creating chances for himself, and the gap has almost closed on its own. This is exactly what we mean when we say a debt is not a sentence: if the volume holds, the price justifies itself.

Same story for Giorgi Kvernadze, 3 goals from 1.73 with 13 shots, and for Gustavo Varela, 4 goals from 2.62 with 11 shots. They are above their output, but they shoot enough to stay close to it.

Serie B: Palermo, and why the method stops here

Our player data covers the five main leagues, Serie B does not. So on Palermo and the rest we cannot do the same list, and anyone promising you expected goals per Serie B player is using models nobody has validated in public.

What we can say, match by match, we told on Saturday. Dominic Vavassori scored his first brace in Serie B, and not from two isolated moments: he moves in the box like a centre-forward and attacks the space in behind every time the ball goes to the left winger. Dennis Johnsen served both goals, and in the second half Padova had to double up on him with two men.

For anyone playing Serie B fantasy football, these two names are the chain almost all of Palermo's danger passes through, and they produce together: if you take one, watch the other. The third name is Mattia Fortin, who has kept the result standing in two consecutive matches.

The next one is on 10 October at Empoli, at 15:00.

The honest summary

We do not have the ratings and the fantasy ratings: our collection stops at last spring, so here we reason about shots, expected goals and chances created, not about the tenths in the sports newspaper.

And then there is the usual limit. Five matchdays, for a striker, are fifteen or twenty shots: enough to see a trend, not enough to be right. A credit is only collected if the minutes, the shot volume and a team that creates all stay in place. When one of those three things goes, the credit stays an old number.

The next review comes after matchday six, with the updated list and, as always, the mistakes too.

T.L.

Do you want to see how much each team really deserves its league position? The Meritometro compares real points and expected points. For those who want models and not headlines, there is the Nerd Zone.