Why is Man City’s left-back less popular than Tariq Lamptey and Luke Ayling?

Occasionally we stumble upon something in the Stats Centre that stops us in our tracks.

Case in point, Oleksandr Zinchenko’s (£4.5m) ownership.

The Ukrainian left-back has been a regular for Man City since around the time they started their winning run, which extended to 16 games in all competitions after victory against Spurs last weekend.

The 24-year-old has added 50 points since Game Week 16 having featured in every game except City’s FA Cup ties.

Zinchenko is evidently Pep Guardiola’s first-choice left-back at present so why does he only appear in 0.5% of Dream Teams?

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Astonishingly, he is currently less popular than Tariq Lamptey (£1.8m) and Luke Ayling (£1.9m) — the former hasn’t featured for Brighton in over a month while the latter is a fixture of the second-worst defence in the Premier League.

Perhaps Zinchenko’s price is the reason gaffers have been reluctant to recruit?

At £4.5m he’s the seventh-most expensive defender in the game.

You would only have to scrape together another £0.1m of budget to afford Ruben Dias (£4.6m), who has 37 more points than his team-mate and is one good Game Week away from becoming the second-best defender overall.

If you’re still taking Dream Team seriously at this stage of the season then it’s highly likely you’ll have at least one Man City defender in your ranks.

Given the choice, it’s understandable that you would opt for someone other than Zinchenko but it still doesn’t seem right that the starting left-back for the champions elect (too soon?) features in so few teams.

Those eyeing up a drastic strategy could redistribute their budget and go for an exclusively Man City defence with Zinchenko, Dias, Joao Cancelo (£5.6m) and John Stones (£4.8m) in front of Ederson (£4.4m).

This would mean a minimum 25-point influx every time City kept a clean sheet (excluding cards) and likely more since you’d expect some 7+ ratings.

Just something to consider…

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