Aventum Fantasy Football - Manager of the Month October

The well-known saying is true, the best laid plans of fantasy football managers often do go awry. After fine returns to the Premier League, off the back of blistering campaigns in Serie A last season, it seemed apparent the smart move was to shuffle your team and find a place for the expensive Romelu Lukaku and/or Cristiano Ronaldo. How quickly times change. After scoring 19 points in his first two matches, Ronaldo followed it up with six points in four games – finally returning to form against Spurs in week 10 with a goal and assist. Meanwhile, Lukaku bagged 23 points in his opening three matches, before a goalless run of two pointers in each of his next four games, and an injury that is expected to keep him out for a few more games yet. Fair to say, October has not been a good month for either player. While Lukaku’s injury made the decision on transferring out easy, the dilemma for many is whether to stick with the proven force of Ronaldo, or get rid and free up significant funds for elsewhere.

The only thing managers have been able to bank on this season is that Mo Salah will deliver. Salah returned scores of 13, 13, 24 and five in October, and now has 112 points to his name – over 50 more than the next highest scoring player. Over 70% of managers now have Salah in their teams, and unsurprisingly this includes all the top performers in the Aventum Fantasy League. Our October Manager of the Month, Clive Bevan of Brown Bevan Insurance Brokers, took full advantage of Salah’s form, captaining him in the latter three games, including for his hat-trick against Manchester United. Alongside Mason Mount, who also bagged a hat-trick, and several goal-scoring defenders that week, it gave his team FPL is EZE a whopping 125 points. Congratulations Clive, a bottle of champagne is on its way to you.

It may feel like the season has still only just started, but we’re already over a quarter of the way through, and in the overall standings the table is getting more drawn out. At the end of September 94 managers were within 100 points of the leader. At the end of October that’s down to 33. Mark Horgan tops the league thanks to showing unbelievable consistency across the opening 10 games. While yet to win Manager of the Month, he finished fourth in August, second in September, and second in October – very impressive in a league of 249 managers. With 724 points, he sits 27 points clear of his closest challenger, but as our October Manager of the Month showed with his 125 point haul in one week, this gap means very little, and anybody could still be in contention for the top prize of an Apple Watch come the end of the season.