Manchester United had 71% of the ball at the MKM Stadium and lost 2-0. Semi Ajayi put Hull City ahead, Nobel Mendy added the second, and United never got one back.
Both scorers cost £4.0m and both are defenders. Neither is owned by more than 1.1% of the game.
More than half of FPL owns Bruno Fernandes at £12.0m, and nearly two in five own Bryan Mbeumo. Another fifth own Luke Shaw. Opening day took all of it apart in ninety minutes, and the first thing to say is that you should probably do nothing about it today.
What the board had, before a ball was kicked
Our ratings are built from Premier League matches. That is the whole method and it is also the whole limit, and before Friday’s deadline it read like this.
| Rating | Rank | Owned | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bruno Fernandes (£12.0m) | 1571.5 | 3rd of 369 | 51.9% |
| Bryan Mbeumo (£8.0m) | 1497.8 | 40th | 38.8% |
| Luke Shaw (£4.5m) | 1431.9 | 214th | 21.5% |
| Semi Ajayi (£4.0m) | no rating | unranked | 1.0% |
| Nobel Mendy (£4.0m) | no rating | unranked | 1.1% |
Hull have 36 players in the game and not one of them carries a rating, because not one of them had played a Premier League match. The same is true of 31 of Coventry’s 33 and 31 of Ipswich’s 33. Across the league, 231 of 600 players have no number beside their name.
Mendy is 23, Senegalese, and signed from Rayo Vallecano this window. There was never going to be a Premier League rating for him. He scored anyway.
Arsenal 3-0 Coventry: the half that worked
Friday night went closer to plan, and it is worth separating which half.
Gabriel is the highest-rated player in the entire game on our board, at 1596.8. David Raya is the highest-rated goalkeeper, 4th overall. Arsenal kept the clean sheet, and the 30% who own Gabriel, the 38% on Raya and the 40% on Riccardo Calafiori were all paid.
The goals were a different story. Kai Havertz opened the scoring, and he sits 121st. Martin Ødegaard added the third from 178th, which is barely above the league average of 1440.9. Only Bukayo Saka, 10th overall and owned by 9.5%, came from where the board said goals should come from.
Viktor Gyökeres, the £7.5m striker rated 199th and below the league average, did not score.
One clean call, two the ratings had nowhere near the top, and a £7.5m forward the numbers were cold on staying cold. That is a fair night’s work for a defensive rating and a poor one for predicting who finishes.
The transfer you should not make today
Eight games of Gameweek 1 are still to play. Fulham against Chelsea does not kick off until Monday night, and until that whistle goes no rating on this site moves at all, because the ratings update on a completed gameweek rather than on a completed fixture.
So anything you do before Tuesday is a reaction to one bad afternoon with no new data behind it. There are two reasons to sit still, and one player worth looking at anyway.
Bruno Fernandes remains the best-rated midfielder in the game by 44 rating points. One away defeat at a promoted side does not move a number built on 35 appearances, and United host Ipswich next before travelling to Everton. The fixtures that made him worth £12.0m on Friday are still on the fixture list.
Prices have not changed yet and your transfer is free next week either way. Taking a hit on Saturday lunchtime to fix a Saturday lunchtime is how a season gets expensive in August.
Luke Shaw is the one worth examining, and he was worth examining before this afternoon. He is 214th on the board overall and the 97th-best-rated defender in the game, owned by 21.5%, and he was already in this site’s Gameweek 1 list of players carrying more ownership than their rating supports. Nothing about this afternoon made that better.
What this actually changes about picking
Here is the part worth keeping, because it is not about one result.
A fixture against a promoted club looks like the easiest thing on the list, and every ratings model in the game agrees, including this one. But nobody is rating those squads, because there is nothing to rate them on. The confidence is borrowed from the badge rather than measured from the players.
That cuts both ways and both ways are useful. The danger is paying premium money for an easy-looking opener that is not measured. The opportunity is that Ajayi and Mendy cost £4.0m each, are owned by roughly one manager in a hundred, and just produced an attacking return apiece against Manchester United.
The £4.0m and £4.5m bracket at a promoted club is the one place on the teamsheet where the market and the models are equally blind. That is not a reason to load up on Hull. It is a reason to stop treating an unrated player as a bad player, which is the mistake that leaves those returns entirely to the 1% who guessed.
Where the numbers go next
The board updates once Gameweek 1 closes on Monday night. Ajayi and Mendy will carry a Premier League rating for the first time, built on one match, and it will be a provisional thing rather than a verdict. Bruno’s will move for the first time this season.
Come back Tuesday and it will say something. Today it says what it said on Friday, and pretending otherwise would be inventing information rather than reporting it.