Division 3 Season 3 Stats and facts

Stuck in the middle with you !

The league where there has to be a price to pay.

 Almost half of the managers in Division 3 have decided to sacrifice depth of squad for a strong starting team.

You would expect those managers to have made a good start and to a large extent they have.
However as the season progresses 1 or 2 injuries, rating changes or suspensions will start to hit home meaning blips along the road.

Monaco and Marseille have the strongest overall squads if not the best starting teams, they haven't had the greatest starts but are still within distance of the top contenders.  Bilbao , Besitkas and current leaders Aston Villa also have strong balanced teams with a good depth to the squad. Ready reckoning suggest you need an average rating of 87 to gain promotion. This gives over half the teams a fighting chance.  Of the teams who don't have a great deal of depth Genoa or Stoke look best placed to gain an automatic spot if all goes well.

Then we have the enigma of Leicester. Never has it been so easy to sit on a team of players and wait for them to rise. They will do as well as their team does in real life at the start of the next premier league season , they could well gain automatic promotion or quickly fall by the wayside. 
Of the relegation candidates there is little to choose between them , although Bordeaux have the better keeper , which could be crucial. 

Division 3 soon becomes a division to pass through on the way up or down and naturally has the biggest through put of teams. What has occured already is that with 6 better teams coming down from above and 6 improving teams coming up from below there are a dozen or so teams more than able to fight out for the elusive promotion spot, this makes it increasingly tough for the lesser lights to pick up the scraps and avoid relegation.

	Gk	Def	Mid	Att	Top15	Top21	Average
AS Monaco	88	89	89	90	87	86	88.17
Olympique Marseille	91	88	89	89	86	85	88.00
Athletic Club	90	88	88	88	87	86	87.83
Besiktas JK	88	87	88	89	87	87	87.67
Aston Villa	88	88	87	88	87	86	87.33
Genoa CFC	89	88	89	90	86	82	87.33
Stoke City	89	88	88	89	87	82	87.17
Hoffenheim	88	87	87	88	86	86	87.00
AS Saint-Etienne	89	87	88	87	86	85	87.00
SC Internacional	88	87	88	88	86	85	87.00
Swansea City	88	87	88	89	86	83	86.83
Udinese Calcio	87	87	87	88	87	85	86.83
Sunderland	87	87	87	87	86	86	86.67
Leicester City	89	88	88	90	84	80	86.50
PSV	87	88	87	88	85	84	86.50
Southampton	89	89	87	89	85	80	86.50
Cruzeiro	87	87	87	87	86	85	86.50
Crystal Palace	87	87	88	87	85	82	86.00
Girondins Bordeaux	88	87	88	88	85	80	86.00
Galatasaray SK	87	88	88	88	84	80	85.83