Thuram is doing more this season, on fewer minutes

Our player of the day is Marcus Thuram, Inter's striker, 29, from France, priced at 28 credits in our list under the letter A, attaccante (striker). He is one of the most expensive forwards in Serie A, and this start of the season comes with a twist most fantasy managers would sign up for straight away: he is playing less than a year ago, but every time he steps on the pitch he weighs more. He has started only two of his four appearances, and he is already on 2 goals and 2 assists. Today we try to work out how much of that rate is solid and how much is simply a small sample.

Last season in Serie A he finished with 29 appearances, 24 of them as a starter, for 1,913 minutes: 13 goals and 6 assists, 56 shots with 29 on target, 29 key passes. He won 129 duels out of 258, exactly half of them, and completed 17 dribbles out of 28 attempted (60.7%), with a passing accuracy of 75.0%. His API-Football average rating for that season is 7.04. Those are the numbers of a first-choice striker at a top club: consistent rather than explosive.

This season the total is 230 minutes, above the 180-minute threshold we set before using per-90 values, but still few: read them with that caveat. That said, the Serie A against Serie A comparison is clear. Goals per 90 minutes rise from 0.61 to 0.78 (+28.0%), assists from 0.28 to 0.78 (+177.2%), total shots from 2.63 to 4.70 (+78.2%) and key passes from 1.36 to 2.35 (+72.1%). The only figure going down is his involvement in build-up: 20.35 passes per 90 minutes against 22.58 last season (-9.9%), but with accuracy up from 75.0% to 86.0%. In short: he touches the ball less, uses it better and shoots almost twice as often.

Our FantaTB fantasy scores, which we calculate ourselves and which are not a newspaper's ratings, tell the same story. His average rating is 6.75 and his fantasy average 8.75 over four appearances with a rating: the two-point gap between them is all bonus points. His latest FantaTB scores are 6.0 on matchday two, 9.5 on matchday three, 12.0 on matchday four and 7.5 on matchday five. Among strikers on our list that fantasy average sits in the 95th percentile out of 73 players with the data, his price in the 97th out of 116, and for goals plus assists per 90 minutes in this Serie A (1.57) he is first among the 42 strikers with the figure available. His FantaTB starting likelihood, however, stays at 70%, the 91st percentile: that is the real question mark.

Around him is the most prolific attack in the league: Inter are second with 13 points from five matchdays (four wins, one draw), 15 goals scored and 8 conceded, three goals a game on average, 63.0% possession and 23.2 shots per game with 7.4 on target. The side produces 2.55 xG per game (this is the team's xG, calculated on the four of five matchdays that carry a statistics block) and concedes 1.07. On matchday six Parma visit them at home, on 10 October at 16:00 UTC: fifteenth with 4 points, form LLDLW, 1.40 goals conceded per game, no clean sheets in five matches and 1.63 xG conceded per game. On paper, this is the right fixture.

On availability, our data flag no injury and no suspension. We put his chance of starting on matchday six at 70%: in the most recent matchdays he started two times out of three and came off the bench once, and he appears among the starters in the projected line-ups 79% of the time. That is the whole point for anyone who has him in their squad: his per-90 output is the best in his position, but on 230 minutes across four matchdays the sample is still short and the rotation with Inter's other forwards is a fact. If Inter keep taking more than twenty shots a game, even half an hour can be enough for a bonus; expecting ninety minutes every week, for now, is another matter.