You won’t have needed to be too eagle eyed to have noticed the EA Sports logo on screen when you’ve been watching the Premier League this season, especially when any statistics have been presented.

EA Sports have taken over from Actim as the official stats provider and that includes what was the Actim Top 100 Index, which has been a regular monthly(ish) feature here at Aston Villa Central.

Although the Actim system was proprietary and they didn’t divulge exactly what was measured and how, we did have a decent overview. At this stage I’m not sure whether EA Sports have acquired that same system, whether it’s still produced by Actim and licensed or EA have developed their own, but since it’s currently throwing the names to the top of the list I would expect, I’m going to assume it’s at least very similar, if not identical.

On that basis, following the same format as last season, we currently have eight players in the EA Sports Index:-

• 8th Ashley Young – 108 points
• 12th Stewart Downing – 105 points
• 38th Stiliyan Petrov – 80 points
• 42nd Brad Friedel – 79 points
• 48th Marc Albrighton – 76 points
• 50th Luke Young – 75 points
• 59th Stephen Warnock – 71 points
• 94th James Collins – 58 points

And those eight players rank highly enough to place us 4th in the overall table, which you shouldn’t be surprised to find is dominated by Chelsea:-