That is your player’s season in one line. James did not get worse. He got less of the game, and how much of the game a player gets is settled by somebody who is not in your league.

Is it the player, or the minutes?

James is one case, so here is every one of them. Since 2020, 372 players have appeared at least 15 times under one manager and 15 more under the man who replaced him, at the same club. Each is a dot below, with what happened to his minutes along the bottom and what happened to his points up the side. Nobody moved club, so nothing else is doing the work. The line is not fitted to the dots: it is what a player would score if his minutes changed and nothing else did.

The dots track that line, which is what it looks like when the scoring holds and the minutes do the moving. Alex Iwobi is James in reverse: 52 minutes a game at Everton became 89 under Frank Lampard, and 4.9 points became 8.5.

So keep his scoring rate and redo his minutes. That beats assuming nothing changed 68% of the time. It is not everything, mind. Michael Carrick took over at Manchester United and Bruno Fernandes went up 6 points a game while Amad Diallo went down 7, and most of Diallo’s fall had nothing to do with minutes. That is the part nobody can call in advance.

So where do you find the minutes?

Find it in how many changes the manager makes. There are 900 minutes of outfield football in a match, and the more players he uses, the fewer each of them gets.

Eighteen of the twenty clubs, and how freely each manager reaches for the bench. David Moyes makes 3.3 changes a game and Fabian Hürzeler nearly five, which is seven minutes a game between them for the average player. The marked clubs are the ones where the evidence is thinner, and the hollow dots are the two changes where the man who left has a record too. It travels, though: a manager’s own record beat the rest of the league’s as a guide to his next season, cutting the error by a fifth. A lookup, not a guess. And it is not a rich list in disguise: how good the squad is barely moves the order, which is why City sit in the middle of it.

Two clubs are not on the chart. Fulham is a technicality and the key explains it. Hull is the interesting one: it came up through the playoffs and Sergej Jakirović has never managed here, so there is nothing to plot. Last season, his players got less of the game than any other club in the Championship. Dragging that number up a division needs three corrections and they disagree enough that any dot would be a guess. The direction survives: draft a Hull player and expect a manager who makes changes.

So who do you draft?

Eight clubs had the same manager for all of last season, and there the draft has already seen the minutes. At the other twelve the price was set at least partly by a man who has gone. Tottenham look like an exception and are not one: De Zerbi has the job, but he only took it in April, so last season’s Spurs numbers are mostly Thomas Frank’s, and the two of them make the same number of changes anyway.

• Both changes cut the same way. Guardiola made 3.4 changes a game and Maresca makes 3.8; Slot made 4.1 and Iraola makes 4.4. Neither is dramatic alone, but both point down, and they land on the three most expensive names on the board: Erling Haaland goes at an average draft position of 2, Dominik Szoboszlai at 5, Florian Wirtz at 7. Those prices were set by a season somebody else picked the team for. Maresca also has the thinnest record on the chart, two seasons at Chelsea, so City is the one to hold loosest.

• Buy Everton, because nobody else wants to. Moyes uses fewer players than any manager in the league, so an Everton starter finishes games that other clubs’ starters do not. James Tarkowski goes at an ADP of 27 and James Garner at 25, which is what an unfashionable club costs.

• Pay full price at Brighton and know why. Hürzeler makes nearly five changes a week, the most of anyone still working. Pascal Gross has an ADP of 40 and Yankuba Minteh 42, and neither is underrated. You are buying good players at a club that shares the game out.

Premier League league matches, outfield players, Fantrax scoring. A case counts when a player made 15 or more appearances under the manager before a change and 15 or more under the one after, at the same club, so no transfer is doing the work: 372 cases across 265 players, 2020-21 to 2025-26. The substitutions chart starts at 2022-23, when the league went from three substitutes to five, because that change alone moved the average appearance by nearly eight minutes and managers either side of it are not comparable. It covers 18 of the 20 clubs at three grades of evidence, marked on the chart: a full Premier League record, a thinner one, or no Premier League record at all, in which case the manager is measured in his own league and shifted by that league’s gap from this one. Fulham and Hull are left off, for reasons the chart’s key gives. These are minutes and points players actually produced, not a projection of anyone’s next season.

First, the scope: this is about sackings during a season, and only those. A summer appointment cannot be measured this way, because the squad turns over across the break and you can never tell the new manager apart from the new signings. Sack a man in November and the players on either side of the swap are near enough the same people, which is the only honest way to ask what the change itself did. There have been 36 of those since 2020.

A permanent hire is a small nudge up, a caretaker a small nudge down

Bring in a proper replacement and the players tend to score a little more: 66% ticked up, and the typical move is under 0.5 points a game. Hand the team to a caretaker instead and it leans the other way by a little less.

Then look at how far the two clouds overlap. Both leans are small, and in either group plenty of players went the other way. The sacking on its own is not the story.

So which of your players will improve?

Leeds is the clearest case: Bielsa to Marsch left the squad almost exactly where it was as a group, while the defenders were up 2.5 a game and the forwards down 5.2. Chelsea’s Tuchel to Potter is the mirror, and even flatter as a group: the same defenders down 2.4, the same forwards up 3.1. At Nottingham Forest, Cooper to Nuno was worth 2.7 a game to the midfielders and cost the defenders 1.6. Newcastle is the one to watch out for: their players averaged more under Eddie Howe than under Steve Bruce, but the men who were there for both scored less in every position, because that improvement arrived in the January window rather than from the dugout.

Read the new manager, not the sacking

So the question is never “is the new guy good?” It is “where was the old one leaking points, and does the new one plug that hole?” Both halves are knowable on the day of the appointment. You already know which part of your player’s team has been bad, because you have been watching it all autumn, and managers do not change what they believe on the way to a new club: a defense-first coach pours points into the back half of the team, a wing-back system pays the full-backs, a front-foot setup pays the forwards.

Look at where the two meet. At Leeds, Bielsa’s football asked his defenders to attack and it was costing them: they were scoring 2.8 a game below what a Premier League defender averages, the worst department in his team. Marsch came in and the defenders gained 2.5 while the forwards gave back 5.2. At Aston Villa, Gerrard had every group below the league line and the attack worst of all at 1.9 down; Emery arrived and lifted the midfield 2.9 and the forwards 3.4. At Nottingham Forest, Cooper’s weakest department was his midfield at 1.8 below the line, and Nuno’s arrival was worth 2.7 a game to exactly that group.

Chelsea is the version that costs you money. Tuchel’s defenders were 2 points a game above the line, the best thing about that team, and his attack was 1.3 below it. Potter arrived and did what Potter does: the forwards gained 3.1 and the defenders handed back 2.4. If you were holding a Chelsea center-back, the sacking was the sell signal, and everyone else in your league was still looking at the clean sheets.

Two honest notes. A club sacks its manager because results have gone bad, so part of any lift is a bad run ending rather than a better coach: the sacked man’s spell was running about 0.75 a game below what his club had managed the season before, and his replacement claws back only about half of that. And the best squads score well whoever is in charge. This is about the shuffle inside a club, not about turning a bad team into a good one.

So, buy, hold or drop?

If a caretaker has the dugout for a fortnight, do nothing. The dip is slight and it is noisy, and it is nowhere near big enough to cut a good player over. Hold him, keep starting him, and wait for the permanent appointment, which is the thing that actually matters.

If a permanent manager is coming in, do two pieces of homework. First, work out which part of that team has been bad, because that is the hole the club just paid to fill. Second, look up how the new man plays. Where those two answers meet is your pickup: the full-back at a club whose defense has been leaking, about to inherit a wing-back system; the striker at a club that has not scored, about to get a manager who actually plays one; the holding midfielder about to start racking up tackles for a defense-first boss. Your league-mates are all staring at last season’s totals, which were produced under a different coach and are about to be worth a couple of points a game more, or less, to somebody on that roster. Watch the first 3 or 4 games to confirm which way it went, then claim him before the rest of your league notices.

Premier League 2020-21 to 2025-26, league matches only, scored on Fantrax rules. Mid-season changes only, with the club and season held fixed, so the players are near enough the same on both sides of the swap; a manager appointed between seasons cannot be measured this way and none are included. 36 permanent handovers qualify, each manager having taken charge of at least 5 matches; where a caretaker sat between two permanent managers the handover still counts and the caretaker’s matches belong to neither man. The caretaker cloud in the first chart holds 23 spells, at whatever length each one lasted. The positional figures, and the club figure they are compared against, use only players with at least 5 appearances under each manager. Whether a manager’s style lets you call the move in advance is not something 36 sackings can settle, and only 13 of the incoming managers had a Premier League record to read beforehand; the named examples are descriptions of what happened, not a tested forecast. These are the points players actually produced under each manager, not a prediction of what any single change will do next.

The instinct is wrong, and the reason is worth six seasons of checking.

The test

Take every manager a player has spent a real stretch under, ten starts or more, and work out his average fantasy points per start under each of them separately. Then ask whether that manager got an above-average number out of him, which means 9.5 a start for a defender, 10.3 for a midfielder and 10.5 for a forward.

If any manager ever failed to get that number out of him, he comes off the chart entirely, so what is left is only players with a spotless record. Then two questions. Does he still have one of the managers who produced it? And how far clear of the line was he when he did?

Start with the players who kept their manager. Nothing has changed for them, and it still matters enormously how good they were: the elite cleared their line again 72% of the time, the merely above average 49%.

Now the players who lost him. The elite came through 65% of the time, barely moved. The above average fell to 33%, less than one in three, and the split points the same way in all five seasons checked.

That is the whole article, and the two middle numbers say it fastest. An elite player walking into a new dugout, 65%, is a better bet than an above-average player who kept the man who produced him, 49%. A new manager does not ruin an elite player. It exposes a merely above-average one.

Which is why Liverpool are the problem and City are not

Every Liverpool player on this chart is in the worst block. Florian Wirtz goes seventh overall on a record that cleared his line by a tenth of a point. Dominik Szoboszlai goes fifth at +1.4, Cody Gakpo at +0.7, Virgil van Dijk at +1.3. None was ever elite, and the man who oversaw all of it has left. Alexander Isak is worse still, because his file is not a Liverpool file: the +2.7 belongs to Eddie Howe at Newcastle, so the new manager is the second change in his record rather than the first.

Manchester City lost the better manager and are in better shape. Erling Haaland cleared his line by 5.4, Jeremy Doku by 5.1, Rayan Cherki by 4.1, Marc Guehi by 3.2, all four past the elite line for their position. Not all of them, though: Phil Foden landed on +3.4 against a midfield elite line of +3.6. A rounding error is still a miss, and it puts him in the Liverpool box.

Van Dijk is the cleanest illustration. Two managers produced from him, Klopp and Slot, which sounds like the safest thing on the board, but his best was 1.3 over the defender line, and two managers protect nobody once both are gone.

So who do you draft?

Elite, and the man who did it is still there. Bruno Fernandes at 2 and Bukayo Saka at 3. Better than three in four repeat it.

Elite, but a new dugout. Haaland at 2, Cherki at 12, Palmer at 30, Doku at 30, Joao Pedro at 33, Guehi at 40, Reece James at 66. The change costs them something and they were far enough clear to absorb it.

Above average, whoever is in charge. Rice at 9, Odegaard at 29, Gabriel at 31, Timber at 61 and Calafiori at 80 all still have Arteta, and even that group repeats less than half the time.

Above average, and the manager has gone. Szoboszlai at 5, Wirtz at 7, Munoz at 18, Gakpo at 24, Van Dijk at 29, Isak at 31, Foden at 78. Fewer than one in three, priced like the top of the draft.

The rule to carry to the table: a new manager is not the risk. Being only above average is.

Premier League 2020-21 to 2025-26, league matches only, scored on Fantrax rules. A start is a game the player was named in the starting eleven. A manager counts once the player has made ten starts for him, and only from the season the player first broke out, so nobody is judged on the manager he had at nineteen. A player is scored at the position he was listed at in that season, and drafted at his 2026-27 one. Both lines come from each position’s own distribution: above average is its top-twenty line per start (9.5 defenders, 10.3 midfielders, 10.5 forwards), elite its top-five line, which lands at +2.2, +3.6 and +3.6 above those. One flat threshold would not be one standard, since three points clear is the 97th percentile for a defender and the 88th for a forward. The percentages come from replaying the test across all 267 qualifying player-seasons since 2021-22, classifying each on prior seasons only: being past the elite line is worth 26 points of repeat rate (95% interval 13 to 38) against 15 for keeping the manager (1 to 28). The split is strong for midfielders and forwards (+32 each) but does not clear noise for defenders (+13, interval -10 to +36), who repeat least often in every box. Draft positions are current average draft position in Fantrax leagues. These are points players actually produced, not a projection.

How each manager builds an attack

Crossing and dribbling are the two habits that separate managers cleanly. They barely move with how good the attack is, so they describe style, not quality. Plot every manager on those two axes, size each dot by how much his team threads the ball through the middle (its key passes, the third habit), and this season’s managers sort out like this, each at his most recent season.

The honest picture is that most of them cluster: a modern Premier League attack is a bit of everything. But the edges are the tell. Fabian Hürzeler’s Brighton and Keith Andrews’ Brentford cross the most. Unai Emery’s Aston Villa barely cross at all, working narrow and central. Roberto De Zerbi’s Tottenham get it out wide both ways. The biggest dots, Michael Carrick’s United and Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal, thread it through the middle most, feeding a central creator rather than a man out wide. Now look at the quadrant labels: each one names the player that style quietly feeds. Cross it in and the full-backs cash in; dribble it in and the wingers do. That is the tell worth drafting on.

The same map, but for players

Those quadrant labels are a claim. Here is the proof, on the very same axes: drop every attacking role where its own crossing and dribbling put it, and each one lands in a corner.

Full-backs sit in the CROSS corner, exactly where the crossing managers are. Wingers and out-and-out strikers sit in the DRIBBLE corner, with the dribblers. Target men keep it narrow. The elite wide creator sits out wide and is the biggest dot of all, doing a bit of everything, which is why he is worth a pick under any manager. The one role these two axes cannot place is the central creator, the attacking midfielder: his trick is the key pass through the middle, the third way to build an attack, and the possession clubs are built around him.

So the two charts are one picture. Find your manager’s corner on the first, read off the role sitting in the same corner on the second, and that is the player his system quietly feeds: a crossing manager’s full-back, a dribbling manager’s winger, a threading side’s central creator. And that full-back is not only a clean-sheet pick, he is a chance-creation pick too, drafted late because everyone else takes full-backs for the shut-out alone.

The managers you have to estimate

Seven of this season’s managers have no recent Premier League form to read. Five can still be placed as estimates, the orange diamonds. Xabi Alonso’s Leverkusen and then his Real Madrid barely crossed, threaded a pile of key passes and carried it on the dribble, so expect a Chelsea that feeds its central creators and its wide dribblers, not its full-backs. Marco Rose is a Klopp-schooled transition coach whose Bournemouth will dribble and counter more than cross. Pierre Sage’s Lyon were untilted, a bit of everything. Frank Lampard and Gary O’Neil come up from the Championship, where their Coventry and Ipswich sides crossed hard and created plenty; dominating a weaker league flatters the raw numbers, but the lean, wide and direct, should carry.

The last two read from reputation. Álvaro Arbeloa’s Fulham should press and keep the ball, an attacking, creation-first side. Sergej Jakirović’s Hull sound compact and defend-first, which in fantasy terms means thin attacking returns, the sort of side whose attackers you mostly leave alone. An estimate is a prior, not a promise, but it beats a shrug.

Who to draft

• Threading sides (Arteta at Arsenal, Maresca at Man City, De Zerbi at Tottenham, Iraola at Liverpool, Carrick at Man Utd) feed their central creators, the key-pass machines:

  • Bruno Fernandes, Declan Rice, Dominik Szoboszlai, Phil Foden. (Chelsea’s Alonso is a new-manager estimate, so his creators sit in the section below.)

• Crossing sides (Hürzeler at Brighton, Andrews at Brentford, Howe at Newcastle, Moyes at Everton, Farke at Leeds, Lampard at Coventry) hand cheap points to two roles nobody reaches for:

  • Full-backs: Jake O’Brien and Vitalii Mykolenko (Everton), Michael Kayode (Brentford), Gabriel Gudmundsson and Jayden Bogle (Leeds), Lewis Hall and Valentino Livramento (Newcastle), Mats Wieffer (Brighton).

  • Target men: Dominic Calvert-Lewin (Leeds), Kevin Schade (Brentford), Thierno Barry and Beto (Everton).

• Dribbling sides (Rose at Bournemouth) are thin this year, and thin on standout wingers, but the wide man who beats his defender is the pick. (O’Neil’s Ipswich now lean wider than dribble, and have no draftable Premier League history yet.)

• Elite wide creators cash in anywhere:

  • Bukayo Saka, Mohamed Salah, Jeremy Doku, Bryan Mbeumo, Florian Wirtz, Rayan Cherki, Cody Gakpo.

Where the fit is still a guess

There is no avoid list of good players. A good player in a settled side scores whatever his manager’s style, and if he is staying put under the manager he already thrived under, nothing here changes that. Style only warns you when the system is new. For 2026-27 that means four clubs with a new manager and an established squad: Chelsea (Xabi Alonso), Bournemouth (Marco Rose), Crystal Palace (Pierre Sage), and Fulham (Álvaro Arbeloa). Every player there is drafted on what he did under a different boss, and the new man’s style is only an estimate, so the move is to discount the style-dependent upside, not to avoid.

• Bournemouth’s cross-heavy full-back under a counter-coach. Adrien Truffert projects as a top-ten asset partly on his overlapping, cross-heavy game, but Rose’s sides dribble and break rather than work the byline. If the crosses go, so does a chunk of that ceiling.

• Fulham’s overlapping full-backs under a possession coach. Antonee Robinson, Kenny Tete and Timothy Castagne are valued for bombing on; Arbeloa’s Fulham should keep the ball and invert, asking them to hold, not fly. Alex Iwobi, the central creator, is the safer bet on that team.

• Palace’s marauder into the unknown. Daniel Munoz goes early, around pick 17, for his overlapping runs, but Sage’s Lyon were untilted, so whether that license survives the new man is anyone’s guess.

At Chelsea it cuts the other way. Alonso’s estimate leans threading and dribbling, so his central creators, Enzo Fernandez and Cole Palmer, and his wide runners, Pedro Neto and new signing Morgan Rogers, are the safest fits among the newcomers. The wilder bet is his wing-backs, the role Frimpong and Grimaldo turned into an auxiliary-forward gold mine at Leverkusen. Reece James has drifted central since his injuries and Malo Gusto is only a maybe, so the wide berths likely fall to the summer signings, Marco Palestra and the teenage left-back Denner, who carry no Premier League record to project yet. Whether they cash in comes down to whether Alonso imports that Leverkusen shape or the more orthodox one from his Real Madrid year. A manager’s style tells you who cashes in, but at these four clubs the style itself is still a guess, so treat the fits as bets, not reads.

The rule to carry into your draft: the manager tells you which of his players will quietly pile up points. Read how he builds an attack, then draft the man his system feeds.

Premier League 2020-21 to 2025-26, all outfield players, league matches only. “Crossing” is accurate crosses per 90, “dribbling” is successful dribbles per 90, “threading” is key passes per 90; all three are Fantrax-scored. Crossing and dribbling are the style axes because they barely track how much a team attacks. This season’s foreign arrivals are placed by their style within their own league, mapped onto the Premier League scale and marked as estimates; two arrivals with no data in a covered league are read from their reputation. Every manager shown handled at least 200 player-appearances, and the player rosters are as the draft board has them. Where the avoid list cites the draft market, that is average draft position on early 2026-27 boards, set against this projection’s own rank. These are the stats players actually produced under each manager; the 2026-27 calls apply that history forward, so treat them as leans, not locks.

That is not a fluke, and it is not really about clean sheets. It is about what a defender actually does out there. In Fantrax a defender banks points for tackles, interceptions, clearances, blocks and headers won, not just for the shut-out. The manager decides which of those his defenders get to rack up, and that turns out to matter more than the club badge.

Which managers’ defenders score the most

Line up every manager by how many fantasy points his defenders produce, and the top is not the list you would guess. Jürgen Klopp leads, and the elite clean-sheet sides are up there with him. But so are Dyche, Oliver Glasner and Régis Le Bris, whose clubs spend most of the season fighting relegation.

The blue names are the tell. Dyche, Glasner and Le Bris run mid-table or promoted sides, and their defenders score right alongside the giants’. The red names are the warning, and we will come back to them.

It comes down to the kind of defender

The reason is the type of defender each manager sends out. Split every Premier League defender by the role he plays, count only the seasons he genuinely started, and two things separate the types: how high the ceiling goes, and how many of each are actually worth drafting.

Attacking full-backs and wing-backs have the highest ceiling, but there are not many. When one hits, he is the best fantasy defender on the board. A Trent Alexander-Arnold or a prime Kieran Trippier plays so high up that he scores like a midfielder, assists and key passes stacked on top of the clean sheet, and lands near the top of the whole chart. Among genuine starters they score highest of any type. But only about eighty were worth rostering across six seasons, fewer than the aerial center-backs, and the group runs from those league-winners down to full-backs who barely start. The elite ones are worth reaching for. The rest are coin-flips, and you cannot count on landing one.

Aerial center-backs are the deep, reliable value. A James Tarkowski or an Ethan Pinnock wins headers, clears his lines and throws himself in front of shots, again and again. Every one of those is a fantasy point, and they pile up whether or not the clean sheet arrives. The group is high-floored and deep: clearer the rosterable line than any other type, and they fill about half of the top thirty defenders every season. Miss one in the draft and there is another on the waiver wire. This is Dyche’s and Glasner’s edge, and the one you can rely on. Tarkowski scored more fantasy points at Everton than Virgil van Dijk did at Liverpool, simply because he did more.

Defensive full-backs sit a rung below. Play deeper and stay wide, do more defending and less creating, and the attacking returns dry up. A few still score well off clean sheets and defensive work, but fewer clear the rosterable line, and the group averages more than a point below the attacking full-backs.

The elegant ball-playing center-back is the thinnest at the top. William Saliba and Marc Guéhi are fine footballers who keep clean sheets, but starting attacks does not show up in a box score. Fewer than thirty were worth rostering across six seasons, the fewest of any type. The clean sheet is most of what they give you, and a clean sheet on its own is worth less than a clean sheet plus a mountain of headers and blocks.

That is the whole story. Guardiola’s defense is built on ball-players who keep clean sheets. Dyche’s is built on aerial bruisers who keep some clean sheets and do a pile of other stuff besides. In a format that counts the other stuff, the bruiser wins, and he wins reliably.

The trap at the bottom

Now those red names. Chris Wilder, Kieran McKenna and Paul Heckingbottom ran sides whose defenders make plenty of tackles and clearances, and they score the fewest fantasy points of any managers in the league.

The culprit is the missing clean sheet. Their teams sat deep and defended for their lives but conceded anyway, keeping a shut-out in fewer than one game in ten. Defensive actions are worth a little each. A clean sheet is worth a lot. Rack up the actions but never keep the shut-out and the points just do not add up. Do not chase a big tackle count at a team that ships goals.

Isn’t this just squad quality?

Half of it, yes. Guardiola’s and Tuchel’s defenders keep clean sheets because their teams are excellent, and everyone at your draft already knows to take the elite-club defender. That is why he goes early.

The half squad quality does not explain is the type of defender a manager fields. A stat-hoovering aerial center-back at a mid-table club is not on a great team, and he still out-scores the ball-player at a great one. That is a system choice, and the edge you can actually use.

So who do you draft?

• For reliable points, aerial center-backs at organized deep-defending clubs. The Tarkowski profile, under a Dyche, Glasner or Le Bris. High floor, few duds, and the deepest pool on the board, so you never have to reach. This is the value pick.

• For upside, the elite attacking full-back in a forward-pushing system. The Alexander-Arnold, prime-Trippier profile. When it hits it is the best defender on the board, clean sheets plus midfielder-level attacking returns. But the good ones are scarce and go early, and the rest are coin flips, so only reach for one you believe in.

• Be cautious with the ordinary full-back. The deeper, defend-first full-back scores more than a point below the attackers once you set the elite aside.

• Be wary of the fashionable ball-playing center-back at a giant. He keeps clean sheets and does little else. Fine, not special.

• Avoid the tackle-monster at a leaky team. All of the defensive work, none of the clean sheets, low points.

The rule to carry into your draft: a defender’s fantasy value is set by his manager’s system, and the system that wins turns defenders into stat machines. More often than not, that is an organized mid-table side, not a possession-heavy giant.

Premier League 2020-21 to 2025-26, league matches only. Scoring is a defender’s mean Fantrax points in the games he started (60 or more minutes). Playing-style types come from an on-pitch-role classifier; full-backs are split into attacking and defensive by how far up the pitch they average. The type chart shows one dot per season a player started at least 15 times, with the rosterable line at roughly the fiftieth-best defender each season, about replacement in a 10-team league. Every manager shown handled at least 200 player-appearances. These are the points defenders actually produced, a description of where the points came from rather than a claim about coaching.