The Draft Society / Pickup Timing Study

When managers actually move

The lineup cliff

Premier League team sheets are published 75 minutes before kickoff. If managers were reacting to them, you would see it in the clock. You do.

The whole season, by the clock

Every pickup, binned by how long before the player's own kickoff it was made. The distribution is two-humped: a large mid-week mass, then a spike jammed against the lock.

All pickups

minutes before kickoff — note the scale runs to a week

The final three hours

the same data, zoomed

Nothing is different about those five gold minutes except that the teams have just been published.

Where the pickups land

WindowPickupsShare

Does moving sooner get you a better player?

After the announcement everyone has the same information, so speed can only be a queue advantage. Among pickups that produced a starter, here is what each window got, and what share of the players actually available at that moment it represented.

Points, by how much runway the player had

adds that produced a starter

Share of the available upside captured

50% would be picking at random from what was free

Managers who can see the lineups still pick close to randomly from what is on the shelf. The information tells them that a player is starting, not which starter is best.

Supply is not scarce. At the moment of a typical snipe there were around 45 unowned players still free who went on to start that gameweek, and the best of them was worth about 21 points right down to kickoff. Nobody is racing anybody for the best free agent — they are mostly not finding him.