Liverpool lost their manager. So did Manchester City. Only one of them should worry you.
Every Liverpool player in your first 31 picks sits in the riskiest group on the board. Half of City's sit in one of the safest. The difference is not the manager.
Two of the biggest clubs in the league changed manager this summer. Liverpool replaced Arne Slot with Andoni Iraola. Manchester City replaced Pep Guardiola with Enzo Maresca. Between them they account for a dozen players inside the first eighty picks of a Fantrax draft, and the instinct is to treat all of them the same way: nervous.
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.