Luck-o-Meter 26-27 - Gameweek 6

 

I'm continuing with this series of weekly reviews for a while (although they are rather irksomely time-consuming), using the simpler format I developed in the second half of last season: a tabulation of the major types of 'lucky' incidents. 

I will try to resist any extended commentary (although I probably will still indulge in a few diatribes about any particularly egregious penalty or handball incidents).

This week, as I'd expected, after the super-long international break, we're suffering quite a few injury absences, a lot of players looking a bit fatigued or out-of-sorts, almost nobody really quite at their best. Moreover, some teams are looking as if they've lost their way a little after a lack of regular full-team training over the past few weeks, and with very limited specific tactical preparation for this week's fixtures. Hence.... quite a few fairly unpredictable performances and unexpected results were likely - although we haven't seen too much of that so far.

Red cards awarded: Pascal Struijk plainly impeded Wilson Isidor and barged him to the ground when he was about to break on goal, only 25 yards out, with Struijk the last defender. It took a long time for VAR to call the play back - but eventually the correct decision was reached, after a pitch-side review (but that shouldn't have been necessary). There is an argument that the ball was running away from Isidor too fast for him to easily claim possession of it, and that the keeper might have rushed out to reach it first; but that's highly speculative (Verbruggen was on his heels, not yet looking to charge out) - and with such blatant 'professional fouls', I have no complaints about a red card being awarded.

Betancur's 'headbutt' on Luke Shaw may have been fairly token, but.... you just can't do that. And he probably should have been sent off for the preceding flying challenge anyway (he got the ball, but he was wildly out of control and could have cut his opponent in half).

Red cards not awarded: 

Penalties awarded: 

Penalties not awarded: Daizen Maeda may have looked like he tripped over his own feet, but that stumble just inside the box was clearly initiated by a clip on the side of his left foot from Ryan Sessegnon. If referee Lewis Smith missed that, VAR should have told him to take a second look - but they didn't.

Tight/dubious offsides:  

Goals wrongly allowed/disallowed: 

Surprise omissions/early substitutions/injuries: It was perhaps a slight surprise that Ben White got the start at right-back rather than Jurrien Timber; maybe White is now back in Arteta's 'good books', after a long spell in the wilderness. Poor David Brooks, getting a first start in ages thanks to the injujry to Alex Scott, was pulled off just before half-time (presumably that must have been down to a fitness issue, although there was nothing obviously wrong with him). Carrick started Leny Yoro over Diogo Dalot and just-back-from-injury Amad Diallo over Marcus Rashford. De Zerbi rested Van de Ven and gave a first start to Senesi instead.

Near misses: Emersonn signalled the start of Ipswich's comeback by thundering a header against the post, from a sublime Enciso cross.

Big misses/big saves: Leeds had all the best chances in the first-half, with Raya making a good point-blank block from Bogle, and later only just avoiding carrying the ball over his own goal-line as he raced backwards to catch Ampadu's looping header, and having to parry a fierce near-post drive from Gudmundsson just before half-time. In the dying minutes, Odegaard somehow miskicked an effort straight into Trafford's hands - from about a yard-and-a-half in front of an open goal! And moments later, Saka failed to convert a one-on-one break against Trafford.

Johan Manzambi had two good efforts denied within seconds, first from a last-ditch block by Kayode, and then from a smart save by Kelleher. In the second-half, Kelleher again came to Brentford's rescue with a double-save denying first Jackson's long-range shot and then McGinn's point-blank follow-up.

Pedro Neto had a fierce drive well parried by Petrovic barely a minute after Henderson's opener, but it availed Bournemouth little, as Morgan Rogers tucked home one of his trademark curlers just a few seconds later.

Cristian Walton made a terrific save with his foot from Kevin's fierce drive in the closing minutes, to hang on to Ipswich's hard-earned win.

Right on the stroke of half-time, Sunderland somehow left three Brighton players unmarked at the far side of the six-yard box, but Struijk failed to get any power on to his header and it looped tamely against the outside of the far post.

Dominic Solanke was gifted a chance early on when a lazy pass from Lammens was intercepted and broke to him just inside the area; but he couldn't convert his one-one-one opportunity. And in the second-half, he scooped an effort over the bar from six yards out. Amad Diallo also fluffed an excellent chance when played in by Mbeumo after a quick breakaway, failing to test Kinsky with his scuffed cross-shot from the edge of the box. Mbeumo also tamely failed to beat the keeper when he had a late chance to wrap the game up.

Outstanding goals:  Yehor Yarmoliuk's crisp half-volley from 17 yards to give Brentford the lead at Villa Park was an early contender for Saturday's best strike.

But Chelsea were having their own private 'Goal of the Month', or at least 'Goal of the Day' competition, with Joao Pedro's powerful strike being outshone by two even better scorchers from Jordan Henderson (although Cole Palmer owners will be wondering why he let Jordan take that free-kick!). Interestingly, Chelsea's xG was assessed at only 1.08 - much less than Bournemouth's! A positive delta of 4 goals is probably the biggest over-performance the Premier League's ever seen! 

However, Sessegnon's firm low drive from nearly 25 yards out to give Fulham the lead at Porman Road might have been even better. And Abdoul Ouattara's thunderous drive to level the score was better yet.

Outstanding performances: 

Big mistakes: 

Bad luck/good luck: John McGinn's goal took a massive deflection off Kristoffer Ajer's attempted block.

Morgan Rogers was a little fortunate to be credited with his goal, as the defender clearly made a deliberate attempt to head it clear, and it was that touch which took the effort away from Petrovic; these days, the attacker always gets the goal awarded to him so long as his original effort appeared to be on target - but it was not always so (and occasionally, the new rule seems a little over-generous). Evanilson's consolation goal for Bournemouth was even more fortuitous, as he instinctively flicked out a leg to block Caicedo's powerful goalmouth clearance.

Solanke's last-gasp equaliser was also a fortuitous attribution: he was falling over and got barely any contact on the ball; Tonali's inswinging cross was going in anyway.

FPL weirdness: It is utterly, utterly bizarre that Bruno Guimaraes, who was only on the pitch for 27 minutes, and didn't do much apart from nicking the late winner, claimed the maximum 3 bonus points (to the detriment of Rice, Calafiori, White and Madueke, ranked behind him on the BPS). The amount of credit given in the BPS system for a 'decisive goal' is just ridiculous.

Unexpected results:  This weekend's games have all gone much as expected so far, at least in terms of the final result; although Leeds gave Arsenal a damn good scare, Brighton might not have been expected to win quite so comfortably away at Sunderland (especially after going a man down quite early in the second-half), and Bournemouth were a little unlucky to take such a heavy spanking from Chelsea.

The 'Team of the Week', for once, doesn't look too weird - although few people own McGinn or Jackson, few will probably have risked unlikely-to-start Guimaraes, and just about nobody owns Jordan Henderson or any Ipswich defenders!  It's been a pretty unremarkable gameweek so far, with Brighton the only side managing to cling on to a clean sheet, but relatively few goals either - apart from the landslide at Stamford Bridge. The global average is still a fairly modest 37 points after 6 games played on Saturday. Few bizarre incidents, and, apart from the missed penalty award at Ipswich and the mildly contentious sending-off for Brighton, no egregious refereeing cock-ups so far; so, it's only a 2 out of 10 on the 'Luck-o-Meter'.

Dilemmas of the Week - GW6 (26/27)

Although I often say that international breaks don't usually produce many injuries, it was always quite likely that this latest, unprecedentedly extended one - 1.5x as long as any in the past, with 2x as many games! - might turn out to be an exception to that encouraging general rule. And so it has proven to be. We have had a fair old welter of 'injury flags' raised against some of our top FPL players over the last few weeks. 

At least the great majority of them have been yellow flags only, so... we might yet get away with it. But in many ways this is even worse: the uncertainty over whether players may yet make a miraculous recovery, pass a 'last-minute fitness test' and appear this weekend after all, or over whether they may only miss this one gameweek and we should probably try to find some way of hanging on to them (rather than shedding some squad-value with a quick sell-and-buy-back), all of this makes this week's selection decisions all the more perplexing. And we probably can't rely on managers to have been completely forthcoming about everyone's availability prospects in Friday's press conferences either.

For some years, I have found the 'Injuries & Bans' summary on Fantasy Football Scout the most reliable resource for this kind of information; although this site, Premier League Injuries, is a very good alternative (often a little quicker to update, I think - though it did go through a bit of a glitchy period for a while last year).  Go check these out for more comprehensive coverage. 

The Fantasy Premier League site itself now has a 'Player Availability' page (though hidden under 'The Scout' tab?!). That also seems to be reasonably comprehensive and up-to-date, but god knows how it's supposed to be 'organised' - maybe by 'date of injury'? Obviously, arranging it by club and alphabetical order would be more sensible; but the denizens of FPL Towers seem to have a deep aversion to the sensible.

I've recently discovered this additional resource, the weekly Predicted Lineups from Fantasy Football Edits. My longtime standby for this sort of news, Fantasy Footall Scout, does usually provide some explanatory commentary on its predictions, even including reminders of the key injury concerns, and sometimes also some discussion of possible alternate selections; so, if you like a bit more detail with your 'probable lineups' for the week, that could still be the preferable roundup to look at. But because FPL Edits is so stripped-down, it's rather more straightforwardly accessible, easier to scan through quickly; and I think it's also perhaps a tad more reliable with its expected formations and lineups, and a little quicker to update.

So, what are the conundrums we face ahead of Gameweek 6?

Does anybody need to be moved out because of injury?

The following suffered injuries during or immediately prior to our last batch of league games on the weekend of 19th/20th September: Declan Rice, Patrick Kluivert, Lewis Dunk, Pascal Struijk, Reece James, Joao Pedro, Cole Palmer, Milan van Ewijk, Takehiro Tomiyasu, Matt Targett, Harry Wilson, Kobbie Mainoo, Marcus Rashford, Benjamin Sesko, Amar Dedic, Tino Livramento, Lewis Miley, Jacob Ramsey, and Pedro Porro.

And the following apparently suffered injuries while on international duty: Max Dowman, Kai Havertz, Ezri Konsa, Christos Tzolis, Matty Cash, David Brooks, Alex Scott, Mikkel Damsgaard, Jamie Gittens, Vitaly Mykolenko, Anan Khalaili, Cody Gakpo, Alexander Isak, Jeremy Jacquet, Nico O'Reilly, Antoine Semenyo, Patrick Dorgu, Noussair Mazraoui, Dan Ballard, Brian Brobbey, Micky van de Ven and Jan-Paul van Hecke. Meanwhile, Dango Ouattara, Yasin Ayari, and Neco Williams have apparently been suffering with illness. Nikola Milenkovic and Igor Jesus have also joined Forest's injury list in the last few days.

Erling Haaland also signalled that he needed to come off with 25 minutes left in Monday's rematch against Portugal. This was apparently due to 'extreme fatigue' rather than any particular injury - but that might still be a concern going into Sunday's match at Anfield.

On the face of it, this looks pretty catastrophic. But one suspects that many of the pre-break problems were probably exaggerated - if not entirely concocted - to excuse players from international duty, and will have completely disappeared this weekend. Most of the problems that arose during the Nations League games were catalogued as 'unspecified' or 'minor', and appear to be listed so far as only 'yellow flag' issues. However, Dorgu, Brobbey, and Ballard appeared to have suffered significant hamstring injuries, Havertz a serious thigh-muscle strain, and Damsgaard and Gakpo quite heavy ankle knocks - so, they're probably the most serious concerns.

I drafted this roundup yesterday, before all the press conference news was out - although most of that wasn't ultimately very helpful. Max Dowman, David Brooks, and Milan van Ewijk are apparently OK, and Cole Palmer is rumoured to be; several others might yet feature after a 'late fitness test'. But this weekend, we're really going into the Great Unknown.

Do we have any players who are dropped, suspended, or not looking likely to get the starts we hoped for?

Taiwo Awoniyi is starting a three-match 'violent conduct' ban for throwing an elbow at De Cuyper in Coventry's last game. Phil Foden similarly starts a three-match ban for his rather less severe or clearcut 'retaliation' to Bruno Fernandes. Axel Disasi serves for the second instalment of a three-match ban for his high challenge on Ipswich's Jack Clarke.

Abdul Fatawu is serving a one-match ban for picking up two yellow cards in the last game against Everton.

Did anyone give other cause to consider dropping them?

There's a reason why Spurs, Fulham, and Coventry are anchored at the bottom of the table at the moment, and, while they may have the potential to turn things around slightly (curiously, I'd currently fancy Coventry to have the strongest chance of starting to achieve some better success, because they at least seem to pose some attacking threat), I wouldn't go near any of them with a bargepole for a while yet. Fulham are - bizarrely - the 'darlings of the week' in FPL-land (with some folks even blowing their Wildcards to treble-up on them!!), because naive managers believe the FDR assessments that the three promoted teams up next should be 'easy games' for them; they won't be - on recent form, Fulham aren't going to have any 'easy' games this season; and I can see them losing all three of these. Crystal Palace, I'm sorry to say, look the worst of the rest, and I wouldn't be touching any of their players either.

A lot of folks online have been speculating that Manchester City may suffer a collapse in morale in the wake of the announcement of the League's verdicts against the club on its multiple charges of financial deceptions in the first half of the Mansour era. As I discussed in detail yesterday, I think it's still pretty unlikely that any sanctions can be implemented against the club this season; and if City's owners choose to fight the case through the civil courts, we might not get any final resolution of the controversy this decade. For now, players, coaches, and fans seem to be accepting the club's official position that the charges are unfair, the verdicts incorrect, and that they are confident they will eventually be exonerated. That may seem far-fetched to many football fans; but, unfortunately, the League's case doesn't look at all watertight, and I doubt if it will hold up in a proper court. So,... I don't envisage any immediate panic within the City camp which might have a detrimental impact in performances on the pitch.

Did anyone play so well, you have to consider bringing them in immediately?

Well, after such a long break from full team training with their clubs, early season form is out of the window: we can't really say with confidence how anyone is going to perform this weekend, or maybe over the next gameweek or two either; we're essentially starting the season from scratch again (but without even the benefit of any pre-season training to get the players used to the club's tactical systems, or friendly matches to give us an inkling of who might be looking likely to most thrive in those systems).

So, I wouldn't be making any elective transfers this week. Some of the 'minor' injuries we take a chance on this week may prove to be more long-term. Some injuries may not even be disclosed before the FPL deadline. And.... I fear there's a grave danger that unregarded 'niggles' or fatigue issues picked up on international duty, combined with the shock of the much greater intensity of Premier League football and training, may lead to a rash of further injuries over the next week or two. (This is why I counselled that it was a bad idea to play the Wildcard over the break in Gameweek 6, because we just wouldn't know who was going to be playing well at this point, who was going to be fit, or who was going to stay fit during this tricky first week or two back in club football.) Thus, I think there's a strong argument for rolling transfers (and saving up the Wildcard, if you still have it) this week, in anticipation of likely greater problems a little way ahead. 

That may mean we have to take a lot of chances on injury-flagged players, and possibly end up without a full starting eleven this week. Not the end of the world; these things happen. Almost everyone's in the same boat (even some of those who played their Wildcards: they're caught between the players they really wanted having yellow-flags against them this week and the players they might get instead being probably very inferior alternatives if the prime picks are available to play again next week!).

The one player who did get my covetous juices flowing in Gameweek 5 (but then, I'd been coveting him since the World Cup, I knew that he was likely to be one of the hottest new arrivals in the league this year) is Villa's Johan Manzambi, who was immediately outstanding on his first league start for them.

BEST OF LUCK, EVERYONE!

The City charges - a sorry mess, a sorry irrelevance

 

The announcement the other week that City had finally been declared 'guilty' on 114 of the 115 financial irregularities charges brought against them by the Premier League has caused quite a furore over the international break. Almost all of that ruckus was naive, ill-informed,... and utterly beside the point. Nothing has actually happened yet; nothing is going to happen for a long time - probably ever. This latest announcement has stirred up a storm-in-a-teacup as sports journalists desperate to whip up clickbait copy have been manufacturing endless pointless bloody stories and discussions about it. I didn't want to be dragged into following suit; but I've decided that I will write something on it - as briefly and pithily as possible (so, not very brief...) - just to explain what utter bloody nonsense it all is.

Here then are my thoughts on various aspects of the City scandal...

It's not nearly over yet

Although the League's statement last week about the outcome of its hearing into the allegations of financial malpractice against Manchester City looks pretty damning, the case is probably still a long way from any final resolution. It took over four-and-a-half years after the Premier League instigated its investigation before the Independent Judicial Commission finally met to hear the evidence. It's taken nearly another three years for them to feel ready to announce their verdicts. And City then still had a right to immediately appeal those verdicts - before any sanctions were announced - which, unsurprisingly, they did. And that appeal process could still drag on on for a while yet. Although the second hearing is severely time-limited, having to convene within 12 weeks of the date of the appeal and being restricted to a very brisk five-day maximum, it will no doubt take the maximum time for a panel to be selected and for both sides to prepare their cases again. Even that timeframe is unreasonably short; and if things were to happen any faster than that, if there were any appearance that the League has been trying to 'fast-track' the appeal hearing to get to a quick resolution, that would only play further into City's hands, giving their lawyers more ammunition for claims that the proceedings were not truly 'impartial'. Even if the same decision is rendered a second time, there can then be an appeal against any proposed sanctions. The 'chattering classes' online are all acting as if sanctions are imminent, about to be announced this season. That's nonsense: this business could still drag on for a long time yet.

The final conclusion of the Judicial Commission hearings, still probably at least four or five months away, won't be the end of it; it will barely even be the beginning - because if the decision still goes against City, they will assuredly take the matter to court, to challenge the fairness and impartiality of the Judicial Commission and its findings. And, since the kind of sanctions being touted as likely in the case would be catastrophic and irrevocable, City would have no difficulty in obtaining injunctions to block any such sanctions from being imposed until that litigation is concluded. That might take a few years more; and if they eventually lose in the court of first instance, they will take the matter to the Court of Appeal - another few years at the very least (there's a long waiting-list for cases to get into the higher courts; and they tend to take a long time to prepare too); and if they lose there, they could try to take it all the way to the Supreme Court. 

We could still be ten or fifteen years away from any 'final resolution' of this matter. And I would confidently bet that the League will run out of the money, or simply the will, to keep fighting the case long before that. Indeed, I would say they have been foolish to pursue it even this far, given that, ultimately, they cannot possibly win. (And that's not at all to suggest that City must be innocent of the accusations against them; simply that in practical terms those accusations are almost sure to be unprovable to the satisfaction of a real court.)

Also, although, of course, in the popular mind, Etihad Airways, are indistinguishible from their owner, Sheikh Mansour, they are a separate legal entity - an important fact which the League seems to have naively overlooked so far. Since the core allegations against City involve supposed deceptions in regard to sponsorship payments being made by Etihad to the club, they are intimately involved in and affected by these proceedings; and the fact that they have apparently not been included in the hearings in any way - or asked to submit evidence - is a further massive weakness in the case the League has attempted to construct against City. More than that, it is a potentially disastrous tactical blunder, as it opens up a possible 'second front' of legal manoeuvring, as was signalled by the airline's press statement last Wednesday. The airline could challenge the legality or fairness of the Judicial Commission on similar grounds to the club; it might also possibly sue the League for libel. It is a nightmare for the League: they are going to get battered on all sides.

Why the case looks so unpromising for the League

UEFA mounted a case against the club over the same kind of offences much more swiftly in 2018-19; but their guilty verdict was rapidly overturned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, who found the evidence against City to be insufficient to support the charges (although they did find against them on a couple of lesser charges of being 'uncooperative'). That's not a good start. It is pretty certain that any proceeding in the English civil courts would reach a similar outcome. (The League's arbitration agreement with the member clubs specifically excludes appeal to the European CAS; but they can't block related actions in the domestic courts.)

Moreover, the leaked emails pertaining to the case would appear to show that we are not merely dealing with the kind of technical breaches of financial regulations, the 'sharp accounting practices' which almost all clubs have indulged in from time to time, but a blatant and thoroughgoing conspiracy to fraudulently doctor financial records - a conspiracy which ought to be subject to criminal investigation of the perpetrators. But, as yet, neither the Police nor the Crown Prosecution Service in the UK has shown any interest in getting involved in the case; again, not a good sign. (This may just be because the UK Government are so in thrall to Mansour and the Abu Dhabi government that they feel they dare not become directly involved in the matter, rather than because the Police and the CPS really think there is obviously no case to answer - but that might be interpreted as an even worse sign, if there is such high-level political resistance to pursuing the matter.)  Even worse, it seems that the League has not referred the matter to the Police for consideration, or offered to share its supposed 'evidence' with them; this again creates an appearance of weakness in their case against City.

Without a criminal investigation, access to the crucial evidence is likely to remain limited. A private plaintiff usually has limited resources to unearth evidence independently, and is largely reliant on the other party acting in good faith in the 'discovery' process and agreeing to promptly hand over all relevant documents requested. With a party determined to obstruct or hinder the process, there are all kinds of ways in which documents can be lost, hidden, or doctored. And another favourite tactic is simply to try to overwhelm the opponent with the sheer mass of potential evidence handed over - "Oh, you want to see all of our confidential emails? Here are 2 million of them. Good luck!" This is why, in practical terms, it is very, very unlikely that the League is going to be able to meet the evidential threshold necessary to satisfy a proper court that its charges are well-founded.

Moreover, the basis of the Judicial Commission's decision seems to have been that they chose to favour some of the evidence and arguments over others, and rejected most of City's submissions on the key points, flat out accusing witnesses of 'lying' and 'concocting' stories. That might well be the case, but it is very, very, very difficult to prove - and it does tend to suggest a lack of impartiality by the Commission. Such extreme accusations could even potentially lay the Commission open to libel charges.

The only way I can envisage that the case might suddenly break in the League's favour is if a senior member of the City management team, someone intimately involved in the conspiracy, should decide to defect from the Mansour camp and offer testimony against them. No sign of that happening yet. The paper trail, I fear, is simply never going to be adequate, even on unravelling all the complexities of the financial subterfuge that has supposedly gone on; it is almost certainly never going to be sufficient to prove that key witnesses were lying - unless one of them comes out and admits as much.

And in cases of this complexity, the sorry truth is that the most expensive lawyers always win. And City can afford better lawyers than the League. They look set to fight and fight and fight this issue through every possible avenue - and eventually they will exhaust the League's resources to continue the battle.

The system is partly to blame

Again, this is not to excuse the offences that the City management appear to have committed, but... I do sympathise a little with their alleged belief that they could get away with it - because the League's regime of financial regulations has always been a joke. They revise them every few years, but they seem to be perpetually badly framed, dangerously ambiguous on key points; and with such glaring oversights in them that massive loopholes can easily be found (like Chelsea's regularly being able to amortize its huge transfer spending over several years by signing young players to super-long contracts). The regulations are not framed securely enough, and the supervision and enforcement have been feeble. 

With a system like this, you really need almost continuous real-time reporting from the clubs, and the threat of regular spot-checks by inspectors - rather than just allowing clubs to kick problems down the road for months or years, until they become too large to 'hide' any more. The Premier League authorites have not been able to identify and charge offences under these rules, or to impose relevant sanctions, in any kind of reliable or timely manner. Even over smaller and relatively clearcut spending transgressions, we have seen numerous delays in the review process, followed by long wrangles and complaints about, and often appeals against the penalties initially imposed.

When a really big case comes to light, like this one against City, the League has proven utterly incapable of following it through to a successful conclusion within any reasonable timeframe. 

The League's executive really has been astonishingly inept and negligent in this matter. A key concern with the FFP/PSR initiatives was to try to stop a wealthy individual or organisation from funnelling additional funding into a club through other channels, outside of their original investment. When the major sponsor is owned by, or intimately connected with, one of a club's main shareholders, that is immediately a cause for concern. In fact, in any sensible world, it should simply be outlawed outright, because it obviously creates the opportunity to do exactly this - to channel additional funds into the club from its owner via an indirect route. Knowing that this was the situation, and having allowed the massive Etihad sponsorship deal to go ahead anyway, the League should have been monitoring the situation very closely at the time and identifying any improprieties almost immediately - not fortuitously stumbling upon the alleged malpractice many years later as a result of a German magazine article. There's 'shutting the stable-door after the horse has bolted' - and then there's this: all this portentous moral outrage over supposed financial wrongdoing that should have been caught at the time... and is now ancient history.

I'm not saying City didn't do anything wrong; and I'm not saying I hope they'll be allowed to get away with it - not at all. But the framework within which their wrongdoing has been identified and investigated, and will supposedly be punished - is just too rickety to achieve success in that process.

What could, should sanctions even look like, if the League did eventually win the case?

A lot of embittered rival fans are fantasising about titles being stripped away, about the whole of Pep Guardiola's period of triumph at the club being magicked out of existence. In fact, the charges refer primarily to the early years of Sheikh Mansour's investment in the club, and end with the 2017-2018 season (the first of Pep's six Premier League championship victories), just before the investigations were launched. Now, it is possible that similar financial improprieties have continued since then (but that is outside the scope of these proceedings); and an argument can be made that 'financial doping' in the pre-Pep era has continued to benefit the club subsequently. But the fact is that any sanctions imposed now will surely have to be restricted in reference to those years in which the offences actually took place; putative impacts in later seasons are just too remote and uncertain to be taken into consideration. Pep's successes with the club after 2018 are not at stake.

Anyway, stripping away titles seems pointless to me. Pointless, impractical, and messy - likely to cause huge additional problems for the League and the Football Association. If you start questioning the validity of the historical results of competitions, you may get all kinds of legal actions from other clubs who feel they were unfairly harmed as a consequence. The 18th-placed teams in the league may claim that they would have stayed up, if City had been excluded from the competition that year, sanctioned at the time with an automatic relegation (but what year would that have been, if such a sanction could have been handed down at the time? or should we just now imagine that City is removed from the league rankings for every 'tainted' year? and would that have any effect on any of the relegated teams??). The runners-up in the League and the FA Cup and League Cup may claim that they should now be awarded those trophies (though teams who lost to City in earlier rounds may also feel that they otherwise would have gone all the way that year!). All sorts of teams will feel hard done-by that they missed out on qualifying for European football (or missed out on a higher level of European competition than the one they actually gained entry to). But these hypotheticals become absurdly complicated: if City had not been allowed to take part in those seasons, different clubs might have been in the runners-up position or the relegation places on the basis of results against City being eliminated from the record; and all kinds of other results might have gone differently too, matches not even involving City (for example, game outcomes being potentially affected by players having picked up injuries or cards against City, or players who just got dispirited by a drubbing from City and played uncharacteristically poorly in a few games following as well....). 

I feel sure the English courts would reject all such claims as too remote and conjectural to support any claim for damages. But the League and the FA would find themselves under enormous pressure to reallocate trophies and rankings, and perhaps to retrospectively pay the additional prize money associated with those achievements (and they probably wouldn't be able to afford to do so, unless they were able to extract an enormous financial penalty from City that would cover it). It would be an horrendous can of worms - that the League really should not want to open. It is something akin to proposals we occasionally hear mooted to offer reparations to descendants of the victims of slavery in the United States - how can you ever quantify such losses? and what is the point of trying to make amends so long after the event?

What ultimately would be the point of any of this?? We all remember how well City played in those years, how they entertained us with their football, how they won those trophies in style. We've all enjoyed (yes, at the time, even the fans of some of City's bitterest rivals could not resist this) the drama and romance of Sergio Aguero's fantastic last-gasp winner against QPR to secure the 2012 League title. You can't undo any of that now; you can't rewrite history. And no-one would get any real satisfaction from being awarded a league title or a cup win in retrospect, an accolade they have no recollection of celebrating in the relevant year when it happened,... an accolade they know they didn't achieve on the pitch, but only through a legal procedure.

Even at the time, City's achievements were somewhat tainted by the obscene amounts of money we knew they had backing them; and we had suspicions that they were perhaps not fully observing the supposed 'fair play' regulations the League was trying to use to restrict the dominance of the bigger-spending clubs (although, in practice, those rules have largely served only to hinder the advance of the less well-off clubs). If the charges were eventually to be proved, would it really make any difference? I just don't see how it would. Even if a team had been shown, many years later, to have benefitted from taking performance-enhancing drugs (as is now widely believed to be the case with West Germany's World Cup win in 1954), or from an obviously incorrect refereeing call on a crucial incident (and even English fans probably now mostly accept that Geoff Hurst's decisive second goal - England's third - in the 1966 World Cup Final didn't fully cross the line), we'd just have to shrug and say, "Well, they still won it. Shouldn't have - but did. Can't change that now. We might regret that, resent it, disapprove mightily - but we can't change anything after the event."

We need to start cultivating a similar sense of realism about the City scandal. For heaven's sake, it's already receding into the mists of time: most of the charges refer to events 10-17 years ago; by the time the glacial progress through the Judicial Panel procedures and then through England's civil courts has concluded, we might be looking at events a quarter of a century or more distant. (The Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled seven years ago that some of the charges were already time-barred as too remote to pursue any further.)  You can't 'right wrongs' that old; it's foolhardy to even try to do so.

So, what would an 'ideal' outcome be?

If these charges could be convincingly substantiated, Sheikh Mansour and his entourage would appear to have committed a series of criminal acts. If it is not feasible (or diplomatically acceptable) to press criminal charges against them, they should at least be declared 'unfit persons' to be involved in the ownership and management of football clubs and required to give up their share in Manchester City immediately. (Ideally, they would also be banned from taking any ownership in any other football club, or any kind of sporting venture, worldwide; but we'd have to look to FIFA and other international sporting bodies to follow the English lead in order to achieve such a comprehensive ban, and I doubt if that's a realistic possibility.)  That is the most appropriate and needful sanction in an affair such as this. It is the owners who committed the wrongdoing; it is the owners who should be punished. (And, given how much money they have sunk into the club over so many years, to build it up into the flagship of their national propaganda efforts, it would hurt very deeply to have that taken away from them - far more devastating than simply a fine, however swingeing.)

Retrospective penalties such as reallocation of titles seem to me like fatuous grandstanding. As I just said above, it wouldn't truly rewrite the history of the game or people's memories of it; and it would cause endless complications and recriminations amongst other clubs seeking to gain some benefit from it.

Fines, transfer bans, massive points deductions, or even automatic relegation to the Championship (or expulsion from the Premier League altogether, which might force City to go cap in hand to beg for discretionary admittance into one of the lower leagues) have also been touted as possible penalties. But it seems harsh to me to punish the club - its players, fans, and coaching staff - for offences that were the responsibility of its financial management; and to punish it today for offences that occurred many years ago. If you can point to recent offences that have definitely continued to give the team an unfair advantage going into the current season, then those sorts of penalties would be quite appropriate and necessary; but to punish the club now for improprieties that may have occurred 8 or 9 years ago at the most recent, the majority of them far longer ago than that - it's just ridiculous. I would rather see a sanction that focused just on Mansour and the club's senior management, those directly responsible for the financial shenanigans.

 

But none of that will happen unless the case reaches some kind of satisfactory resolution. And I can't see that that ever happening through a judicial process: if the League keeps fighting the case, the English courts will eventually exonerate City on grounds of 'insufficient evidence' (you can't definitively prove exactly what they're supposed to have done wrong) or 'inadequately framed regulations' (it's not even clear that what they did was 'wrong' under these rules) or shortcomings in 'procedural fairness' (the Judicial Commission was biased in its handling of the case, did not conduct its proceedings in a truly 'independent and impartial' manner, perhaps appeared to have 'pre-judged' some of the issues and did not reach entirely reasonable conclusions on the facts and arguments presented to it). Probably almost no-one will give any credence to that outcome. But that is inevitably what will happen,... unless, as I fantasised earlier, somebody in the City hierarchy becomes a turncoat and testifies against the conspiracy.

Or, maybe..... we could hope for an internal coup, where directors or representatives of other major stakeholders pressure Mansour and his team into stepping down 'for the good of the club'. Since Mansour's investment vehicle, Abu Dhabi United Group, has a more-than-80% share in the club, though, it's probably unlikely that the other investors, even if they could present a united front, would be able to wield much influence in this regard. Would a fan rebellion be able to bring about such a backdown by Mansour?? Well, possibly; but at the moment, most of the fanbase seems to be sticking loyally by the club, and accepting - albeit hesitantly, uncomfortably - the official position that the charges have always been without merit.

The only chance of some more satisfactory conclusion to this matter is if the League can hammer out a backroom deal where City admit to and apologise for some wrongdoing, and accept a certain package of sanctions without any further legal resistance. 

That is the best - the only good - outcome the League might realistically hope to achieve. And it would, in the longer term, be the best outcome for the image of the club, I believe. It would certainly be good for the game as a whole, to achieve some closure on this long-running fiasco, and to have the League secure at least a token victory for its regime of spending regulations.

But the League doesn't have very much leverage to push for such a deal. And Mansour's minions seem determined to fight the charges to the bitter end. And that, I'm afraid, can only result in final humiliation and frustration for the League - and for all lovers of the game.

A little bit of Zen (115)

"If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased." 

Katherine Hepburn

A practical guide to better thinking

 

I was happy to stumble upon this the other day, a lecture delivered by John Cleese in 1991 on the theme of 'Creativity'.

Although the talk naturally includes a lot of jokes, it is fundamentally quite a serious exploration of the topic, and includes a lot of useful practical advice.

Cleese distinguishes two mental attitudes, 'open' and 'closed'. The latter is not entirely a bad thing: it's actually very useful for staying focused on task completion. But it is hopeless for more original thinking and problem-solving; for that, you need to work on recognising and cultivating the 'open' attitude. 

This really is one of the best sets of tips I've ever found for improving creative thinking - whether that is going to be directed towards writing, painting, launching a new business,... or picking an FPL squad. Well worth 35 minuts of your time.

Football 'Dad Joke' (1)

Darwin Nunez forgot to phone his Mum for a week-and-a-half.

So, she reported him missing.

Sometimes, an irresistible urge to silliness overtakes me....

Still chillin'....

 

Still 5 more days before our next FPL deadline....

In the first week of this inordinately long international break, time was dragging rather. But then I began to rather enjoy the unaccustomed leisure; indeed, it was feeling pleasantly like the summer break that we didn't really get this year, because of the extended World Cup.

The combination of a deluge of trading in the transfer window and an early international break means that it's pretty much impossible for any club to establish any settled form early in the season; and even if they had appeared to be doing so by Gameweek 5, the long halt in club training must surely have disrupted things again now. Effectively, we're resetting to the start of the season again, beginning again from nothing. I would not have liked to be playing the Wildcard over this international break because - as with choosing the initial squad at the start of the season - we'd all be essentially betting blind; we won't really have any idea which teams and individuals are in hot form for another two or three weeks yet; any changes you made to your squad between GW5 and GW6 are likely to be very soon regretted.

I think anyone who has been able to save their Wildcard should be able to reap much more benefit from it by playing it towards the end of this month, or at some point in November.

A dose of the spiritual - Monday Music Break No. 6

 

Some of my happiest musical discoveries have come about by the strangest chance.

Back in the early 1990s, I was doing a round-the-world backpacking year. During a month or so I spent in Fiji, I fell in with a couple of young American guys who were on a summer break before starting at grad school the following Fall. We kept in touch a little thereafter (this was back in the days when people still wrote letters!), and a couple of years later they mailed me a CD of 'Missa Luba', a recording of an African setting of the Catholic Mass, accompanied by some other traditional religious and folk songs from Kenya, performed by that country's Muungano National Choir (about whom there seems to be remarkably little online these days, apart from the fact that the group was supposedly founded in the late '70s by one Boniface Mganga; although there is at least a brief discography, and you can also apparently find some of their recordings on Spotify).

My American friends had conceived of a project to see if they could send the CD around the world back to themselves in a 'Six Degrees of Separation' kind of chain, each recipient forwarding it to another friend (not known to the previous sender). I can't recall what mechanism they'd devised for ensuring that it eventually found its way back to them. I think their address, and the detail of them having started the chain, was to be included in an accompanying letter with each new mailing, and when the music eventually got back to the States, the first recipient there was asked to send it back to them. Apparently, they didn't know anyone in Greenland or Iceland or Ireland, so I was its first port-of-call; and I didn't really know anyone less far away than China - so, we'd got it more than half-way home in just two hops! I never heard if the CD successfully completed its circumnavigation, or if it went astray - like poor Amelia Earhart - somewhere over the vast Pacific.

Anyhow, I played it a few times before I posted it on, and was so enchanted by it that I sought out my own copy at HMV. This piece, Kaung'a Yachee, is apparently a religious song - praying for strength to resist the influence of Sin in the world. You really can't tell: it has such an irresistibly joyous lilt to it. (This Youtube upload appears to be a concert performance rather than the original studio recording I owned on the CD.)

Whenever I fancy listening to some music with a spiritual dimension to it, this is one of the first albums I always think of. It has been a 'mellow Sunday morning' staple of mine for nearly three decades now.  [It's the kind of music I'd like to have played at my funeral, to stop anyone feeling glum.]

A little bit of Zen (114)

“Judge a man by his questions, not his answers.”

François-Marie Arouet ('Voltaire')

Appreciating something SPECIAL...

I've mentioned on here a few times before that I really fell in love with football watching Pelé's Brazil in the 1970 World Cup. 

Almost continuously now for the past 70 or more years, Brazil has been something extra-special, the one country that almost always looks likely to be a World Cup contender - and often the favourites! - in each successive tournament, the one country universally admired and beloved around the world, the one country other than your own that almost any football fan from anywhere in the world will root for. 

They tend to play a free-flowing, inventive style of game that is irresistibly entertaining. And they have skill to spare: even their defenders often look as if they could dribble past four or five opponents. While most countries count themselves lucky if they turn up one or two exceptional talents like Yamal or Musiala or Palmer every decade. Brazil regularly seems to have so many that a lot of them may get overlooked by the national squad; not just one or two, but ten or twenty breathtakingly skillful players at any given time (and dozens or hundreds more seemingly always waiting in the wings). I said a while ago that Cristiano Ronaldo would not get into my 'Top 50' of greatest players of all time - even if I limited the rest of the field to Brazilians; and I wasn't joking. The depth of talent in Brazil's player pool is just ridiculous: they are just so absurdly bloody good.

But why are the Brazilians so good at football??  Well, the answers collected in this short film I recently discovered from Youtuber Arneeb Ahmed aren't particularly surprising, but this is nevertheless a neat summation - and celebration - of the phenomenon. And I find it a nice bit of spiritual uplift during this long, bleak suspension of Premier League action.

Having a lie-in - Monday Music Break No. 5

Paul Heaton is one of the great English songwriters of my lifetime - not only a crafter of clever, quirky, memorable lyrics, but a composer of some startlingly beautiful melodies too; and a master of many different styles and moods. (We are of rather similar age; but he's done something with his life.)

He must be loving the footie this year, as Hull is his adopted home, and he famously insisted on naming his first group's debut album London 0 - Hull 4, a joking assertion that his group The Housemartins were only then the fourth best band in Hull, but still better than anything London had to offer.

This track, one of my particular favourites, a celebration of the glorious indulgence of the lie-in, is From Under The Covers, the third song on Welcome to The Beautiful South, the superb debut album from his second band, The Beautiful South.

Many of the songs from these two bands of his were particularly dear to my heart during a period from the late '80s to the mid-'90s. I happened to hear a performance of his memorably macabre The Woman In The Wall at an open mic event recently (it was supposed to be a celebration of Van Morrison's birthday, but they'd run out of Van's songs to cover, so threw in this one of Heaton's towards the end); and it brought back a flood of memories.

"Died in the arms of Big Ted..."

("'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished...")

A little bit of Zen (113)

 

"If you don't know who the worst player at the table is - it's you."

Ancient poker wisdom

Long before I was an FPL player, I was a poker player. And I only started to get good at it when I started being able to recognise how good - or not - everyone else I was playing against was.

It's much the same with any game; it's much the same with FPL. It's always rather easier to recognise what's wrong with someone else's squad than it is to notice the flaws in your own; but if you can't even do that, then you really have a problem.

Most FPL managers seem to look at other people's teams just to copy some of the more apparently successful selections it contains. They'd do far better to critique what's wrong with it - even if it belongs to the current global leader or the guy who's winning their works league at a canter. Try not just to spot people's weaker picks, but make sure you understand exactly why it's a mistake; and recognise if it's likely to be part of a generic flaw in this manager's thinking - a blindspot, a prejudice that may lead them to make many similar errors.

When you get really good at doing that for others,... you may get better at doing it for yourself too. Study your opponents to better understand yourself.

The Last Days of Ringpulls

 

I believe the Cambodia beer brand (my long-time favourite) was the first to kick the idea off. About 7 or 8 years ago, they started a lottery-style promotion on their products, printing a certain proportion of the undersides of the ringpulls on their cans with symbols indicating an 'instant win' prize. The majority of these wins were just 'one free beer', but occasionally there'd be a small cash prize (I've been lucky enough to catch a few $5 and $10 ones over the years, and $1 prizes are relatively common; I believe there were - much rarer - instances of $20, $50 or $100 windfalls as well). And, once-in-a-blue-moon - or so the marketers protested - you might even win a moped, or - even more vanishingly rarely - an SUV.

This initiative proved to be so popular that all the other beer companies eventually felt obliged to follow suit. And the idea even started to spread to a few other locally-manufactured products, such as soft drinks. But the beer market was its natural home, and it soon became central to Cambodia's drinking culture - and, indeed, to much of its social culture. Comparing your fortunes with those of your companions over the course of an evening's consumption, assiduously storing up your winners to redeem at your favourite corner store, or donating them to a favourite bar to help ever so slightly with their stressed bottom-line (it became a common moral discussion as to whether one was actually obliged to hand over winning ringpulls if you'd got them in a bar or restaurant; a few places started coveting them so greedily that they instituted a policy of opening your ringpulls for you and retaining them automatically...), or giving them to street kids who seemed to come to value them more highly than just small change - these engaging oddities were all a central part of the experience of life in Cambodia for the last several years. In rural villages, the ringpulls apparently even became a convenient medium of exchange for small transactions.

The beer companies, I suspect, increasingly felt trapped in a vicious cycle of competition: the promotions were boosting sales, but they felt obliged to keep increasing the number and value of the prizes offered to maintain their market position against competitors - and it may often have been costing them more money than it was actually earning from increased revenue. In the first year or two of the campaign, when it was an exhilarating novelty, it was pretty easy to redeem small prizes anywhere - at any bar or restaurant or mom'n'pop shop. But the beer companies got increasingly cranky about paying out, making the redemption process for retailers increasingly bureaucratic, and reducing the amount they'd get paid (or so I've been told a few times; obviously I don't have direct experience of this - and I've only been a visitor rather than a resident in Cambodia for most of this period): when they started only reimbursing the wholesale rather than retail price of the most common 'free can of beer' prize, not unnaturally small store owners were no longer willing to give you a can for a single ringpull, and before long it became fairly standard that you needed two 'one free beer' ringpulls to claim one can. And the whole thing was apparently such a hassle that the majority of stores stopped having anything to do with it quite a few years ago. It became a bit of a Grail Quest to find an amenable neighbourhood shop that would still give you free beers for winning ringpulls. And it got to the point where you could usually only redeem cash prizes, even the very small ones, directly from the beer companies at one of their offices (and they are few and far between, not easy to find or access; the Cambodia beer company used to have a small one right in the centre of Battambang, my 'spiritual home', and for a while that was my go-to for cashing in on my winning tabs - but it closed down a few years ago...). So, for many of us, the shine had gone off the idea somewhat quite a long time since. And yet... it was now such an ingrained part of daily life that it had the comfort of the faimilar about it: it was one of those distinctive things about being in Cambodia, one of those unique local quirks that you couldn't help but feel warmly about (even if you weren't a beer drinker).

Even though I'd always do my best to redeem or give away my accumulated winning ringpull tabs in the last days of any visit here, there always seemed to be a few that I'd forgotten about (scattered obscurely in pockets of trousers and the bottom of rucksacks) and a few more that I'd only acquired on my final night or two. And so, every time I come back I have a little plastic baggie of ringpulls that will make my first few days of beer-drinking here pleasantly subsidised. And for the past few years there's been a cheery old bloke in a little corner shop in Battambang who has happily taken all of these tabs from me at a good rate, and even accepted my cash winners (at, I think, 75% of face-value). It's become one of the little rituals of life here that I really enjoy. Of course, the guy uses it as an excuse to boost sales, insisting that I can't really take less than a case for such a large number of discount ringpulls, and so I always end up having to pay a bit of cash as well; I don't mind at all. But then, of course, you're trapped in an endless cycle. The rate of winners, although very variable from case to case, is overall quite high. I'm guessing it's probably 30-40% for the 'free can' wins, and can occasionally be much higher. I think I have generally been particularly lucky (for possibly the one-and-only time in my life!), and have achieved an overall win rate well above 50%. So, for every largely 'free' case of beers I get from my favourite pusher in Battambang, I end up with another little baggie of ringpulls which has got me well on the way to needing to get another one.

Oh, but now this simple, silly pleasure is about to be squelched by the killjoy government. There have been dark rumours for two or three years now that, bowing to foreign pressure (the country is still heavily dependent on foreign aid to pay for most of its infrastructure, and foreign NGOs do a huge amount of work in the health and education sectors) to tackle excessive alcohol consumption, the Prime Minister was about to introduce measures to limit or ban these ringpull promotions. Indeed, it was widely believed that a complete ban was imminent in 2025, and many people told me then that a definite date for it had already been announced. It seems that was not in fact correct, and the government has been dragging its feet on announcing such legislation for a year or more, but.... finally, it seems, the ban really is happening. All such promotions are supposed to cease from October 1st. From what I've read online, it would appear that that is the date on which winning ringpulls should no longer be produced or sold. But, since it takes a while to clear out stocks, what actually seems to have happened is that the distribution of new winning ringpulls has already been phased out over the last month or so, and October 1st - or probably in fact September 30th - is being treated as the last day on which you can redeem them.

This imminent disappearance of what has become a cherished national institution has had a lot of rather weird little effects in the beer market ecosystem and in the drinking culture over this past month or so.....

People have always been a bit superstitious about certain stores or bars having a greater incidence of 'winners'; or about certain times of year being more propitious (that belief is in fact well-founded: the beer companies do indeed dramatically increase the proportion of small-prize ringpulls just before major holidays); or about certain cases being overstuffed with lucky tabs (probably so; but no-one ever seems to have discovered a reliable means of identifying them). This sentiment has been acutely heightened in the last days of the promotions: people are moving around to different bars, to try to find ones where they seem to be 'luckier'; some are even (sacrilege!) switching away from their preferred brand in the hopeful belief than an inferior rival may yield a higher percentage of wins.

The beer companies have also started putting out openly advertised non-lottery cans, to wean people back on to the idea of beer without prizes. But at the moment these are so universally shunned, and such is the value that people attach (probably exaggeratedly) to the prize promotion, that they have had to sell these at a substantially lower price. Bars which have tried to save money by preferring to buy these no-win cases are now pressured by their thrifty - and probably gambling-addicted - patrons to pass this saving on to them rather than keeping it for themselves. Much ugliness and pettiness has suddenly broken out as a result of this seemingly trivial adjustment to the country's marketing laws.

But all of this stress and furore will soon be over. Few of the winning ringpulls are still in circulation. And it would probably be difficult now to redeem them, in the last week before the ban formally takes effect. If I should acquire any more now, I think I'll probably just keep them - as a souvenir of a strange but happy time.

'But what has any of this got to do with FPL?' I imagine my notional reader asking.

Well, I have often commented on my discomfort and distaste for the strong element of gambling addiction involved in the appeal of the Fantasy Premier League game. And in my sidebar profile here I have labelled my own devotion to the game an addiction (jokingly; but all jokes have a core of devastating truth).

And the ringpull lottery is one of the purest, simplest forms of gambling there is. Interestingly, you don't really stake anything in the conventional sense (you're paying for the beer, not the 'lottery ticket' that goes with it - although, in effect, the beer companies have been charging you a small, invisible premium to participate in this lottery). But it occurs to me that what you're really always staking in a bet is your hopes and dreams, the possiblity of disappointment; a cash stake is just a concrete manifestation of that; it's the emotional investment that you really feel, it's that which gives you the thrill of success or the despair of failure.

And it has recently struck me that this is at the root of FPL's hold over us. We don't have to pay money to participate; but we do put a very heavy emotional investment into it.

And this realisation has led to the further thought that although many people protest that they want to prosper in the game by 'skill', to be acclaimed for their superior insight and judgement, that's just not the case at all, they are deluded. The appeal of the game lies precisely in the fact that it is almost entirely a matter of luck: we want something for nothing, we want to feel 'lucky', we want to feel 'blessed', we want to feel that Fate or Destiny or God or the Universe has been kind to us for once in our lives.

I feel we can never, or only very rarely, experience anything like that intensity of joy and validation from being justly rewarded for our skill and effort. And this, I think, is because dissatisfaction is the fundamental motivator for all animal life. We can't help it: that's just the way evolution has built us, that's why we've survived so long and prospered so well as a species - we almost always feel dissatisfied with everything. That's what makes us constantly strive for more. Even when we do receive reward or praise for our achievements, we tend to overvalue our own abilities, and so we inevitably feel that the praise/reward falls at least somewhat short of the due mark. And even if we might occasionally acknowledge that the level of praise/reward we receive is absolutely appropriate, we feel that it is no more than our just desert - and we don't get much of a thrill from it. We can imagine what such a thrill ought to feel like; we desperately want to experience that. But our satisfaction/dissatisfaction threshold is set too high. We still crave more: we feel we somehow deserve to be over-rewarded. And thus the accomplishments of our intellect, capabilities, industriousness - they rarely give us full or lasting satisfaction: we never feel that we are getting due recompense for being so smart and wonderful.

But when we find a winning ringpull, when we win a bet, when we have a good gameweek in FPL,.... for one brief, rare moment we are getting the thing we seem to most crave - being over-rewarded. We're getting something for nothing: and that is the best bloody feeling in the world.

Fantasy Premier League is so ridiculously enjoyable - and so insidiously addictive - precisely because it's nearly all LUCK, because whatever success we achieve in it feels essentially undeserved; and that gives us a ludicrous rush.

One further analogy comes to mind, though. Although the beer can ringpull lottery was heavily weighted towards customer satisfaction with a very generous win ratio, you could still occasionally hit a long succession of blank ringpulls. And those no-win experiences hurt, each and every one of them; every blank tab was a cruel taunt, it seemed to be scornfully jeering 'Loser!' at you. A long run of such blanks could be profoundly depressing. So too in FPL: a succession of low-scoring gameweeks, or even a single gameweek in which all of your top players fail to return.... deflates the spirits something awful. Getting that mood rollercoaster under control is, I think, the main challenge involved in playing the game: we have to try to learn to dismiss the bad results, to laugh them off; we can enjoy our occasional good gameweeks, but we must ignore the bad ones and not let them dishearten or annoy us.

Do Wilcard transfers affect prices??

 I don't know.

I don't believe anyone (not ordinary FPL managers struggling with the game, anyway) does know for sure. Although a lot of people have convinced themselves that they do know - on no obvious basis. The idea that transfers made under a Wildcard are excluded from affecting the price-change mechanism in the game seems to be no more than a pervasive myth.

FPL Towers declines to publish any rules on how the price-change mechanism works (because, presumably, they don't want people to get too good at 'gaming the system'). And none of the online guides I've looked at over the years, guides which claim to have deduced the main 'rules' from close observation of price changes over an extended period, has ever suggested that Wildcard transfers are excluded from the process. Moreover, FPL frequently makes tweaks to this mechanism, without announcing or explaining them; so, even if such a 'rule' might have been in place at some point in the past, even last season, it might not necessarily still be in effect now.  So, nobody can really know for sure; and anyone who claims they do is a victim of self-delusion (a sadly common ailment in the FPL community).

I would imagine that this notion arose because it is fairly obvious that transfers made while a Free Hit chip is in play are so excluded from affecting prices; and so it might seem reasonable to suppose that the similar Wildcard chip is subject to the same proviso.

But there is a very obvious difference with the Free Hit: those are not 'real transfers' - they're all going to be automatically revoked within a matter of days.

With the Wildcard, however, the expectation is that all changes may persist indefinitely; and almost certainly some will remain in place for a long time, perhaps for the remainder of the season. And even those which are rapidly reversed, while the Wildcard is still in play, are nevertheless reversed by a conscious decision of the manager playing the game - based on his appraisal of unfolding circumstances. Even if a transfer has only been 'in place' for 24 hours, it is still a 'real transfer'; there is no good reason for disregarding its possible impact on overall ownership levels and price-change cues just because it was made under a Wildcard.

The purported rationale for such a strange and pointless rule is that it is intended to dissuade people from trading for profit on their Wildcard (particularly over an extended gap between gameweeks, such as the current extra-long international break - as I discussed at some length this morning).

There are two problems with this explanation. 

First, individuals trading for profit, or even quite large groups of managers trading for profit, are not generally going to have any decisive impact on price-changes. You usually need huge numbers of managers making the same trade within a short space of time to trigger a change. There are only going to be very rare gameweeks where you do have a very substantial percentage of managers all using their Wildcards at once - such that this might become an issue.

Second, since a Wildcard can be played retroactively at any point before the next gameweek deadline, such a 'deterrent policy' can be easily circumvented by paying points for the transfers initially, and then wiping out that points-spend with a subsequent playing of the chip. [There is now in theory a cap of 20 transfers per gameweek - which is not applied to the Wildcard or Free Hit chips; but that really is a huge number of transfers to make, even in a very extended gameweek. When I have tried speculative trading, I don't think I've come anywhere close to making that number of transfers. So, the prospect of being able to use 'unlimited transfers' with the Wildcard isn't much of a factor in seeking to guard against this supposed 'abuse', I don't think.]

My own - yes, superficial, anecdotal - experience of trying out Wildcard trading over international breaks (when, presumably, very large numbers of managers - perhaps responsible for the majority of the transfer volume in these periods - are indeed on their Wildcards) is that Wildcard trades do appear to play into the price-mechanism. (There wouldn't be such large volumes of transfers every single day unless a lot of them were being produced by Wildcards. There may, of course, be a further question as to whether Wildcard transfers - and perhaps Free Hit transfers also - are publicly counted in the official transfer numbers, but kept apart from a second, secret number of 'real' transfers. But I don't think the denizens of FPL Towers are capable of that level of sophistication in their cruelty - or simply in their administration. I repeat that my impression has been that the large numbers of transfers we see over an extended gameweek like this must be largely due to Wildcards in play,... and they do seem to be affecting price changes.) But, like I said at the outset, I can't be sure; and there is really no way to tell.

However, it doesn't really any difference. Whether or not you yourself are playing your Wildcard is utterly irrelevant to the price-change mechanism in the grand scheme of things. The only factor that would make a difference is if very large numbers of other people are also playing their Wildcards at the same time. And if that is the case,.... well, FPL Towers would be rotten kill-joys if they excluded those transfers from the price-changes. But... maybe they do, maybe they don't.  So what??  We seek to trade-for-profit based on the transfers we can see happening (and our own appreciation of which players are likely to become popular or unpopular). We don't know who those people making the trades are, we don't know if they're on a Wildcard or not; we just have to accept the transfer numbers that the game publishes, and act on those. We may resent that the actual number of transfers may be much higher and is not being fully counted, we may bridle at the thought that our own - and our fellow Wildcarders' - transfers are perhaps not contributing to the price shifts we hope to benefit from. But we have no way of knowing what's going on behind the scenes at FPL Towers; we have to accept the transfer picture and the likelihood of price changes that is presented to us.

The common idea that Wildcard transfers don't affect prices is not only - in all probability - an unfounded myth; it is, ultimately, utterly unimportant, it has no bearing at all on how we approach trading-for-profit on a Wildcard.