With The Guardian Reporting that Ben Chilwell could have Knee Ligament Damage and the player having 20.1% Live Ownership at the time of writing, many of us will be thinking about possible replacements.

It's been a while since I wrote an article of this nature, my analysis has had to learn what the return of fans means to my selection process but I'm going to give it a go, and see what drops out.

Fixtures Analysis

I begin by looking at my analysis of Expected Goals Against (xGA), Relative Fixture Difficulty and whether that fixture's home or away. I then apply a weighting (which is slowly learning) to correlate these values with the likelihood of that team's players appearing in the top players for that Gameweek.

The teams that I highlight in yellow (or blue which doesn't appear in this screenshot), are teams whose defenders are also on Set Pieces so my personal bias is towards these players. There are the likes of Joao Cancelo who's very attacking and not on set pieces though so given that I analyse Expected Goals (xG) and Expected Assists (xA) later, perhaps this isn't as wise as I thought before starting to write this paragraph.

Options

So looking at all of the players who have had some involvement in the past 5 matches (i.e. Form > 0) and looking at players from Spurs, Liverpool, Leicester, Man City and Chelsea, we can prioritise them as follows. I include data for minutes played, xG, xA which I then extrapolate an FPL score from and assign each player an indication of their Value (FPL score / Price). I also include per 90 stats.

It's a long list and those that follow FPL and the Premier League won't be surprised to see the names in the Top 5.

Alexander-Arnold, Cancelo and James are the top 3 points scorers in the game. Chilwell and James are the top 2 for Points Per Game.

It also shouldn't come as any surprise then that the 5 most transferred in players at the time of writing are as follows:

With the amount of data available these days and the experts analysis, Transfers In appears to be a decent metric to who you should be considering.

Consistency

When you're looking at average data over 5 matches, it can easily get skewed by 1 match (at home to Norwich or Man United) so as a sense check, it's wise to see if this is the case.

• Alexander-Arnold has had 2 games in which he was pretty much anonymous (Brighton (H) and Watford (A)) but can also be explosive (Arsenal (H) and Man Utd (A))
• The consistency of Reece James appears to be the most impressive in this group.
• Reguilon's stats have picked up significantly since Conte took over and with Tottenham's great run of fixtures coming up, could prove to be an astute pick (he has the lowest Live Ownership of the group at 12.9%).
• Cancelo appears to either provide Goal Threat or Assist Potential - rarely both... Actually, let's add something to these stats...

That's better. The above all still holds true - it's just clearer now.

Budget Options

Many of us will already have at least 2 players from this list and might be considering a cheaper option. Without expanding this research to more teams and working with the data we've already seen, these are the sub £5m options.

I'm quite surprised by how low Emerson Royal is here, I thought he'd be higher and perhaps under Conte, this will change. I'm not going to go into any deeper analysis on these players because if you're looking for a Chilwell replacement which is what this article's all about, you'll have the budget to get somebody from within the main options.

Other Options

It would be totally wrong of me to write a Ben Chilwell replacements article without mentioning Chelsea's natural replacement - Marcos Alonso. He's averaged 5.6 Points Per Game this season and (despite some rumours) will almost certainly take up Chilwell's position in the team and along with it, much of his attacking threat. Definitely another one to consider.

Please Share Your Thoughts

Please let me know what you think. Are you a Chilwell owner considering any of these replacements? Are there other options you're looking at? What do you think of my analysis?

I haven't posted much on Hive - it took too long for my meagre power to recharge so a big thank you to @stevec for his kind delegation which should also allow me to reply to any comments too (and amend any typos!)

(👍 @stevec 20% beneficiary as an additional thank you for this kind act)