How pricing works in FPL

 

It is a mistake to suppose that the initial pricings in each new FPL season are a reliable measure of a player's value, his likely points return.

For managers new to the game, it serves as a reasonably reliable guide to who the best points-prospects are - but it's not infallible. And it's certainly not finely-tuned, not a precise correlation to likely points return: the most expensive players simply do not provide 'value for money' on a points-per-pound basis; the 'premium' and 'super-premium' players are lifted beyond that consideration and have to be evaluated on other criteria.

It is also a mistake to suppose that it is based only on last season's performance.

It is very largely; but there are important other factors at play. Haaland this year, for example, has had his price increased not because he had a great season last year (it was, by his standards, a pretty mediocre one!), but because Salah has left the league, creating a void at the top end of the pricing scale.

Pricing is, in fact, primarily determined by the need to maintain budget pressure - so players are priced relative to other 'competitor' players in their position category or price bracket, and in an overall context of how many players there are available at each of the price-points.

With the likes of Kane, Son, DeBruyne and Salah leaving the league in recent years, without any comparable replacements coming in, and with almost all the most exciting young talents like Saka and Palmer and Foden and Mitoma having very subdued seasons last year, we are left with a very thin top-end in the pricing spectrum this year. Haaland and Bruno Fernandes are the only two 'super-premiums'; and nobody else is priced at or above 10 million. The next most expensive forward, Alexander Isak, is only 9.0 million this year, while Saka and Palmer are the only 9.5-million-pound players (which many feel is still a bit too high, given their returns last year). Semenyo is the only player at 8.5, and only five players (one of them a defender!!) are priced at 8.0 million this year.

The pricing gnomes have tried to compensate by increasing the prices of a lot of defenders, and creating a lot of congestion in the 6.5-7.5-million range (which is probably where most of the crucial selection decisions will have to be made this year), but.... it really looks like the system is 'broken' at the moment: there isn't any effective pressure on budget - and for the first time in years (perhaps ever??) people might be having quite a stacked bench and/or leaving some cash unspent, even in Gameweek 1.

The shortage of elite points prospects in the game at the moment has meant that last year's three outstanding performers - Haaland, Fernandes, and Gabriel - have been priced stupidly, eye-wateringly high. For me, this has been aggressively overdone: there is a jarring disconnect now between how much they cost and how much 'value' they offer. So, ordinarily, in most years, they would be very clearly 'priced out', and we'd just have to find a way to get by without them. It would, almost certainly, be more advantageous to use the money saved on them to enhance the rest of the squad, because buying them would inevitably leave the rest of the squad very weak. This year, however, I don't think that level of budget pressure is there: it seems it might be perfectly possible to afford all three of them without completely beggaring the rest of the squad; and having at least one of them is not a problem at all. This situation creates some interesting dilemmas of its own - which I'll probably write a bit more on shortly.

Yes, Gabriel, Fernandes, and Haaland are grotesquely overpriced this year; but they're still arguably 'affordable'.

What then can we do?

I said again this morning that early drafting is worse than a waste-of-time.

What, then, can the FPL enthusiast do to 'prepare' during the last couple of weeks or so before the Big Kick-Off?

Well, it's usually a good idea to watch a fair bit of the pre-season friendlies (highlights only, of course!) - especially the later ones, and those involving the Premier League's better teams matching themselves against some top European sides. 

However, we always have to keep in mind that such games rarely tell us very much about likely form in the opening games of the domestic season. Particularly in a World Cup year, so many key players are returning late to training, and have figured little or not at all as yet. And these matches - even the occasionally more 'competitive' ones - are generally played at a fairly gentle pace, and feature unlimited substitutions. They can be quite useful for giving some insight into new tactical ideas being tried out for the season ahead, and for showcasing promising youngsters who might have a chance of breaking into the first team at some point this year (though probably not straight away...), but they mostly tell us next-to-nothing about likely team or individual form or probable lineups on the opening Premier League weekend.

The Premier League's website has a list of the pre-season fixtures played, usually with links to brief match reports. And there's also this - very brief - roundup of minutes played and attacking contributions registered by leading players.

Unfortunately, most of the main FPL help sites like Fantasy Football Scout seem to have firewalled all of their content about the pre-season games this year, so there's very little useful information that you can access for free (the Fantasy Premier League site itself is predictably useless on this).

It's also a good idea, of course, to try to stay on top of the transfer news. (Though I'd resist getting bogged down in the endless flurry of groundless rumours that we suffer in this 'social media' era. Arsenal fans somehow managed to convince themselves that Vinicius Jnr was going to join them - though that was obvious nonsense. And their acquisition of Bruno Guimaraes unfolded at a glacial pace over an agonising three weeks or so, with some new pointless bit of 'progress' announced almost every day during that! It is just painful...)

At least Fantasy Football Scout's list of the new signings is stil free-to-view (though not many of them have been given 'scout reports' yet). The Transfermarkt transfers page has links to its profiles of the players (although that website continues to look horrible; and it is now awash with gambling ads...). The TNT Sports website actually seems to have the best-looking - and possibly also most helpful... - transfer summary this year.

Also, of course, we should keep an eye out for possible injuries. We seem - touch wood! - to have been remarkably fortunate so far this year. But usually we get a slew of players breaking down in training during the last couple of weeks - or even in the last few days - before the new season gets under way again. Again, Fantasy Football Scout usually has a good injury list, but I find Premier League Injuries is occasionally a little more up-to-date.

Naturally, it's worth having a look over the fixture schedule for the early part of the season (although the game's own 'Fixture Difficulty Rating' guide here is usually laughably inaccurate, and needs to be taken with a huge grain of salt).

And it's probably worth taking a look at what the promoted clubs played like last season, and what transfer moves they've been looking to make over the summer (few of them these days have any realistic chance of staying up, but every once in a while, one of them can give us a surprise - I fancy Frank Lampard's Coventry to have a decent chance this year; and even the obvious punchbag teams may still have one or two tempting budget player options). Adam Clery's 'Mini-Me' - his chirpy young editor, Archie Corbett, who's been very ably deputising for Adam on some of the excellent ACFC channel's recent videos - produced a good summary of this year's trio last week.

Finally, AllAboutFPL recently had this article of basic FPL tips by a supposed 'top manager' (I'm always a bit sceptical as to whether these guys are really that good, or if they've just enjoyed a few years of exceptional luck...). They are all fairly simple and generic points, but is is a very sound introduction to the game for newbies - actually, much the same kind of thing I'm usually saying on this blog and elsewhere online; so, worth checking out, I'd say.

I'll be posting some summaries of my past advice on selecting the initial squad, and weighing up this season's selection dilemmas next week - after the Community Shield game has been played.

BEST OF LUCK, EVERYONE!!!

Drafting may be 'a game in itself' - but it is of no help to the REAL GAME

 

For the past couple of weeks, the online FPL forums have been full of people sharing endless preliminary drafts of their squads - many of them joking about how many dozens of attempts they've had already, and how many more they're likely to get through... (Or, even more alarmingly, a good number of them bizarrely claim that they're done, finished, that they have their 'final' lineup sorted.... still 10 or 15 days out from the start of the season, with new transfer rumours flying around every day...??!!)

We're still a little shy of 4 million enrolments for the game this year; and we'll presumably hit at least twice that number by the end of next week, and maybe three or more times that many by a few weeks into the season. And the daily volume of transfer activity would appear to indicate that perhaps only 20-30% of managers are indulging in these endless revisions, while the majority - as I recommended a couple of weeks ago - are contenting themselves for now with a placeholder team, created in a few seconds with the game's 'Auto-pick' facility.

Now, I don't like to be a killjoy.... If these folks are treating this endless obsessive re-drafting as a bit of 'harmless fun' - well, good luck to them!

I imagine that the appeal is as a sort of 'playing the real game in imagination', trying to picture what might happen with each of the chosen squads. And this without the downer of getting immediate negative feedback in your points returns when you make actual changes to your squad during the season!! Perhaps it is nice to be able to endlessly tweak your team like this without feeling that pain.

And later on, I suspect, some of these multi-drafters may seek solace in the idea that one of their discarded 'early versions' (perhaps in a slightly misremembered, idealised form...) might actually have done really well - so much better than the final squad they actually landed on!

Quite a few seem to be leaning on AI gizmos to 'rate' their early efforts, creating a new side-game where they struggle to get ever closer to the illusory validation of their squad being deemed 100% 'perfect'!! Alas, none of these AI tools have any real understanding or discrimination, and are doing little more than spitting out random numbers - so, it's very doubtful if this will be at all helpful (probably the reverse) in developing a stronger selection.

Where I take issue with this pastime is with the widespread underlying delusion that it is actually worthwhile, that it is doing some good in honing the final selection. It most emphatically is not: it is nothing but harmful.

First of all, of course, it is a colossal waste of time.

Second, and the way in which it is most actively deleterious to your Fantasy management efforts for the season (as I discussed in detail when I first launched this blog), it will tend to lead to worse decisions on deadline day, because of the human cognitive biases that tether us to our earliest preliminary decisions on an issue. It is never a good idea to start making judgements about things before you have all the necessary information available with which to make those judgements - which, with Fantasy Premier League, doesn't happen until a few hours before the first kick-off of the season.

And third, a more general and longer-term harm, I think, is that this practice builds up a dependence on being able to see different lineups on your 'Pick Team' display before you can imagine how they might work together and how they fit within your budget cap. Just as with chess, you never get very good if you always have to physically make moves on the board to picture how a simple endgame might play out, so too in Fantasy football, I think it helps to develop the ability to picture mentally what different combinations of players you can afford within the limitations of the budget. If you really have no idea what a 'No-Haaland' squad might look like without actually building it in the app,.... I think you have a problem. And you're making that problem worse.

Trust me on this: refraining from early drafting is good for you.

Beware the 'defcon' MIRAGE...!

 

I have a problem with the new 'defensive points', introduced into the Fantasy Premier League game for the first time last year. I went into some detail on this when the change was first announced; but here's a brief recap - and an expansion.

Why chasing 'defcon points' is probably misguided

1)  They're opaque.  

FPL has still provided no definitions or illustrations of how the various eligible actions are identified (and distinguished from each other!). And there are so many different game actions that might fall under one or more of the eligible categories that it is simply impossible to know from watching a game whether a player of ours has reached the necessary threshold of 'defensive contributions' to earn us extra points or not. We have to take it entirely on trust from Opta. [It is often as arbitrary and mystifying as the operation of the widely reviled 'Bonus Points System' in the game.]

2)  They're unreliable.  

Opta is extremely fallible: they do frequently miscount things. And with these 'defensive points' a miscount of one can make the difference between your guy getting 2 extra points (perhaps unjustly) or getting 0 points (perhaps unjustly).

3) They're unduly sensitive to fine margins of difference in performance (and margins of error in the counting!), and hence very unpredictable. 

Because the thresholds for earning the points are set so high, and being deemed to have come up even one contribution short of that mark means you get no additional points (while you cannot earn any further points beyond the basic 2 points, even if you exceed the threshold by 2x or 3x!!), it is impossible to predict whether a player is likely to attain the points in any particular game; much of the time, the best 'defcon' performers are hitting a number around their 'season average' - which is slightly below the required threshold to earn the points.

4)  The extreme sensitivity of the eligibilty threshold referred to above also makes it difficult to infer with any confidence how players' performance on these points will hold up from one year to the next.

It is impossible to rely on how much consistency players will achieve from one season to another in earning 'defensive points': a player might produce a similarly high level of consistent defensive solidity in his performances, and achieve an almost identical total 'defcon' tally for this season as he did for last, yet come up with a vastly lower return of 'defensive points' - simply because he had unluckily come up just short of the threshold in several matches this time around.

5)  They tend not to be earned in combination with points for anything else. 

Players usually only earn 'defensive points' in games where they're being put under a lot of pressure, where their team is generally having the worst of things. In games like that, they're unlikely to be keeping clean sheets, or featuring well in the Bonus Points - or coming up with any attacking contributions. 'Defensive points' can be a very nice consolation in a game in which your player's team take a bit of a battering; but a good 'defcon' number is rarely allied with a really good weekly points return. (And so, since you're usually rotating out your weakest 1 or 2 defenders, and sometimes your weakest midfielder - you probably often won't be playing your 'defcon monster' picks anyway: because the games that give them the best prospect of earning the 'defensive points' are games in which you don't fancy them to pick up more than 4 points, and the rest of your squad really should be able to do better than that.)

6)  'Defensive contributions' don't register very strongly under the BPS.

You get massively more credit under the 'Bonus Points System' for overall game involvement: a defensive player who gets on the ball a lot and registers a high percentage for pass completion will almost always out-rank one who just has a big day on the 'defensive contributions'. The 'defcons' may occasionally have enough of an impact to raise a player into the bonus points (though, usually, just a single one), in a sterile, low-scoing game where nobody achieves much of a BPS score; but that's only going to amount to a handful of extra points a season, at best. 

7)  The impact of the 'defensive points' last season was massively amplified by other - freakish! - factors.

Last season was - if you allow for the 'defensive points' (probably worth 100-150 points for most people) and the new additional chips (perhaps worth an extra 10-50 points together) - one of the lowest-scoring in the history of the game; and the lowest-scoring ever for midfielders: almost all of the usual highest points-producers - Palmer, Saka, Mbeumo, Cunha, Maddison, Wirtz, Gakpo, Maddison, Mitoma, etc., etc. - suffered seasons blighted by patchy, disppointing form and/or repeated or long-term injuries. Thus, the fact that so many central defensive midfielders finished fairly near the top of the midfield rankings last year, largely as a result of their 'defensive points', is unlikely to be repeated. In fact, only Rice and and Anderson crept into the Top Five midfielders (and Casemiro and and Garner were just in the Top Ten), so - that's still not heavy representation in the upper rankings. And in a more 'normal' season, you'd expect that at least 10 or 12 of the more prolific goalscorers and creators in the position category would comfortably outscore all the defensive midfelders. (Moreover, all of those top CDM performers last year had their ranking buoyed by an unusual number of attacking contributions as well; that's also unlikely to be repeated this year. And a key part of their appeal was their overall consistency, a steady drip-drip-drip of points through most of the season. This means that they were almost always being outperformed over shorter runs of games by several midfielders on a short-lived streak of good attacking form, and thus never really deserved a place in the squad - even though their end-season totals were quite impressive.)

So,.... I'm inclined to think that the allure of the 'defensive points' is a dangerous distraction.

The online forums at the moment are full of people asking who are the best 'defcon' players?? 

As I said above, we can't necessarily have very high confidence that any of last season's best 'defcon' players will get the same return on these points this year, even if their level of performance is identical. (And there are other issues too: Van Dijk and Tarkowski are getting old, Senesi and Lacroix and Anderson have changed clubs, Garner is injured going into the start of the season, and... Crystal Palace and their previously impressive defence might fall apart without Oliver Glasner.)

And there are a few players who return pretty well on the 'defensive contributions' but offer little prospect of regular points for anything else. Some of the most consistent producers of these points are from weaker teams, who are regularly taking a battering; you generally want to stay away from teams that are going to be foundering down in the bottom third of the table.

Is is best to target defensive players from teams who concede fairly few goals. Teams who concede few goals will also pick up a decent number of clean sheets. No-one this season is going to get anywhere near Arsenal's remarkable haul of 19 clean sheets last time (not even Arsenal!!); but even 7 or 8 or 9 over the season is worth having. And for defenders, it's crucial to escape the slow attrition of shedding points as more goals are conceded; you have to try to avoid players who often take a pasting (this is why gambling on defenders from the promoted clubs, just because they're so cheap, very rarely pays off.)

And because they're 'in games' a lot of the time, not constantly being overwhelmed and only fighting rearguard actions, these sorts of teams have better prospects of picking up an above-average number of attacking contributions too (Sunderland's defenders did particularly well on this last season, for example). The best defenders at teams like this will probably be posting good 'defcon' numbers as well - but they'll be picking up plenty of points for other things too. And those other points are likely to be more reliable and more predictable.  So, that's what your main focus should be on.  'Defensive points' are nice to have, but they're a collateral benefit of being an all-around 'good defensive prospect' in FPL - not the main deciding factor for the selection. 'Defcon' potential can break a tie between two players who appear to you to be inseparable on every other metric; but if you choose a player for their 'defcon' record alone, there are almost certainly going to be alternative picks who might fare slightly less well on the 'defcon' numbers but are likely to do much better overall.

Back on Facebook!

I recounted at the beginning of the year how I'd been randomly locked out of my primary Facebook account just before Christmas, and how this had obliterated my original 'Zen and the Art of FPL' Facebook page.

After several months of intermittently trying to regain access to Facebook via that account, I have given it up as a lost cause. (The Meta 'AI Assistant' had frequently insisted it could help me to regain access without logging in; but it turns out it was lying. You can't do anything without being logged in - which means that, if your problem is that you can't log in, that is a terminal situation.)

For the new season, I thought I'd try and set the page up again, using my backup Facebook account. So, here it is:  

Zen and the Art of FPL - Facebook page

At least,.... I hope it's there. It's a bit difficult for me to see. I can't view it as outsiders would, without logging out of my Facebook account. And, given how many problems I've had over the years with logging back in, I'm kind of terrified about exposing myself to that hassle again, and try to remain permanently logged in....

There won't be much, if any, 'original content' on there; I use it mainly as a way of making it easier to share links to posts here on the main blog. But I hope it might slowly attract a bit of attention over time. We shall see...  (Everybody seems to be on Substack these days, but I've never got the hang of that; I find it a very drab and frustrating platform - difficult to search, difficult to navigate, and just very ugly in appearance. But I may have to look into it some more this season.)

A little bit of Zen (106)

"You can count how many seeds are in the apple, but not how many apples are in the seed."

Ken Kesey

Kesey, one of the key figures of the 1960s counter-culture movement in California, and for a time a leading proponent of experimentation with LSD, was also a very fine writer - perhaps best known for his early-60s novel 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest', which was immediately adapted into a very successful Broadway play, which in turn would eventually become one of the most celebrated Oscar-winning films of the 1970s.

The end of the world as we know it....

 

I came upon this fascinating - but terrifying - video this past week about one of the likeliest scenarios for AI wrecking everything.... possibly in the very near future.

The central idea here is the virtual equivalent of the 'grey goo' armageddon of uncontrolled nanobot proliferation; it is suggested that self-replicating AI 'agents' might very rapidly take over the cloud-computing space, hogging all of its available power consumption and server capacity - and so inadvertently crippling all of the more useful, and indeed essential, supports for human society which now depend on those online facilities.

Even worse, it is suggested that these 'agents' might start forming vast cooperative networks with each other - sprawling transglobal alliances that might soon evolve into virtual 'nations', even 'empires'. And, driven by a ruthless imperative of competition (probably instilled originally by imprudent human programmers tasking them to find ways of 'making money', but soon replaced by a recognition of the paramountcy of their own needs for securing access to more and more computing power and electricity), these alliances might start engaging in cyber-warfare against each other, deliberately sabotaging computing infrastructure to weaken rival alliances.

So, we should do our best to enjoy this upcoming season of Fantasy Premier League, because..... it might be our last. (Indeed, we might not even survive to the end of it; or, at least, we might not still have a functioning Internet to be able to complete our season's playing of it...)

These sombre thoughts reminded me of how far this game we love is already being compromised by the spread of AI. So many managers in the game now are asking Claude or ChatGPT and so on to choose their teams for them. And we are probably starting to see autonomous AI 'agents' - like the ones warned of in this chilling video - running their own FPL accounts. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a massive increase in the number of participants in the game this year - with many of the new manager accounts being run by AI. 

I don't suppose AI will be any good at the game for quite some time yet. But there are going to be a lot of distorting effects in the rankings from having 'artificial participants' in the game, and from having so many human participants devolving their decision-making to AI assistants. 

And if AI does start getting good at the game,... well, 'cash leagues' (which I've always viewed with extreme suspicion anyway) could soon become a complete waste of time. Online poker games have already been decimated by this curse of covert AI infiltration. But at least. because of the real-time interactivity in that game, and the possibility of having multiple spot-check ID verifications, there is some scope for weeding out pure AI participants, if not so much for excluding human competitors from using AI assistance to cheat. I really do fear that our jolly little game is going to get completely overrun by the AI madness in the next season or two. It would be nice, wouldn't it, if FPL managers were all determined to play the game fairly and to make all their decisions for themselves. But we see again and again in the online forums that the great majority of them want to cheat by any and every means possible, to find someone or something to tell them who to pick. And that is really going to start getting completely out of hand this season. Oh, woe!

A little bit of Zen (105)

 

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."

Albert Einstein

And now.... a pause... A REST!!

 

I noted a few days ago that the FPL website is up-and-running for the new season again; but I also warned that it is a very bad idea to get dragged into obssessing about the game - or even thinking about it at all - until a few days before the first deadline (this year, on the evening of Friday 21st August).

After the excitement of the World Cup, I shall be aiming to take a complete break from the game.

My regular Friday series of bons mots will continue, and I might post the occasional video I find interesting; but there won't be any other new content on here for at least a couple of weeks.

I'll probably start re-posting some of my classic 'How to...' basics on selecting the initial squad just before the Community Shield game, and then attempting some more in-depth preview stuff on the season ahead in the final week before things kick off.

Enjoy the downtime!!  It is a rare treat!!

Here we go again...... (Or NOT!)

 

At some point yesterday, THE GAME went live for the new season. 

Yes, after a few days of shutdown-for-updating this week, the Fantasy Premier League website is up-and-running again, and ready to receive entries for the new campaign. As you can see in the screen-cap above, there are already 684,000+ managers enrolled after a matter of hours. These are the people who take the game really seriously... (and I, alas, am one one of them)....

If you are really concerned about your overall rank finish (you shouldn't be!), it's good to Auto-pick a squad and 'register' it straight away, because early-bird registration is a small advantage: the order of first entering your team is one of the tie-breakers applied to separate managers on the same points total.

But, what do you know, the site is glitching already!!  I tried early registration yesterday evening. And this morning, I found that my initial squad had been unsaved, and I had to Auto-pick again. And then the Auto-pick feature itself was glitching, only giving me a partial team, refusing to complete a full squad for me (and displaying a team full of bizarre data corruptions, such as suggesting that Viktor Gyokeres was now a midfielder???). So, I had to keep starting over from scratch, and it took several minutes to get the job (I hope!!) finally done and securely saved. (I guess it was another of those problems caused by the game's servers getting overtaxed by the high levels of early interest. During that brief time when I was struggling to get my team registered, the total enrolment had climbed from around 560,000 to 680,000!!! It really is best just to rely on how high a points total you can reach, and not be too worried about the exact 'rank' number that comes with it at the end of the season.)

Also, curiously, the site appeared to have allowed me to stay logged in this year. Though, perhaps that was only because I had only recently re-registered, and had no team data to clear from last year (having been shut out of my account altogether at the start of last season - not for the first time!)...?  In the last several years, the game site has annoyingly insisted on an extended re-log-in process where you have to create a new password for the new season. I would be glad if that pointless additional hurdle has indeed been removed now. [Ah, no - I hear from friends that the site is indeed locking people out and demanding a password reset for the new season; and refusing to allow you to reuse last year's.... or the year before's. It is hugely irritating.]

Although, I know, for many people this seems very hard, the best thing to do now is to walk away and cultivate another hobby instead for the next month. 

Don't log in to the FPL site again until after this year's Community Shield game: Arsenal v Manchester City, on Sunday 16th August.

As I said in one of my earliest posts on this blog: 

So much might yet happen before the Big Kick-Off - valuable hints about form and tactics and likely team selections  (not many, perhaps, but some...) emerging in the pre-season friendlies, players arriving or leaving in the summer transfer window, and, unfortunately, INJURIES. There really is no point in trying to select a squad - even provisionally - when we really have no idea who's going to be playing (and for which team!) on the GW1 weekend in mid-August. There is no point in even thinking about it.

It's not just a WASTE OF TIME - it's positively a BAD IDEA, something that will almost certainly lead to you making WORSE DECISONS about your selections.

Because of the way the human brain works... if you start looking at the player options, and allowing yourself to think, even vaguely, about possible squads, you will inevitably start making some decisions about your likely squad: decisions based on inadequate, incomplete, soon-to-be-outdated information; hence, in many cases at least, WRONG decisions. You probably won't be very self-aware about this; well, if you're even a little aware of it at the time, you'll almost certainly forget about it very quickly. But these proto-decisions - not always outright selections, but foundational preferences and prejudices and assumptions that will have a massive influence on selections - are mostly forming deep in your subconscious; and once they're there, they're very difficult to displace. The deep-rooted cognitive bias in favour of self-consistency means that once you've made a choice like this, it's very, very difficult for you to change your mind about it (especially if you don't realise you've made that choice, and/or don't know why you've made it!). There's a similar, very dangerous phenomenon called the 'anchoring bias' - which means you're very likely to make decisions based on the first one or two pieces of information you look at.

Anyone who's picked a squad two or three or four weeks out from the start of the season is VERY unlikely to have picked a good one. And they're also much less likely to be able to pick a good one later on... than someone who only starts pondering the options after the Community Shield.

That is some of the most unpopular advice I have ever offered here; but also some of the most important. Please try to take it on board.

I'm off to read good books and practice my guitar for the next 4 weeks. See you all again on Friday 21st August!!

[Well, OK, I will probably start putting out some pre-season tips in the week or two before that. But I won't be attempting to pick my initial squad until the day of the first kick-off - and neither should you.]

A little bit of Zen (104)

 

“Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.”

Arthur Schopenhauer

You don't have to tell England football fans that, Martin.

Another addition to the list of famous people we didn't realise had played Fantasy Premier League....

The TRUE 'Greatest of All-Time'

 

In my roast of Cristiano Ronaldo yesterday, I reiterated my view that - although the G.O.A.T. debate is fundamentally rather silly - there can only ever be one clear greatest football player of all-time, and that has to be Pelé. (I have spoken about my admiration for his gifts before, here and here.)

I would say that Pelé owns this title, and will always hold on to it - even if others should eventually attain the same level of skill or lasting impact (and I don't think anyone has yet; Maradona and Messi have come close-ish, but not really...) - simply because he was the first. He was the first true global super-star of football (at the dawn of the modern mass media era), he was largely responsible for making it the most popular televised sport in the world. Every great player since has been measured against Pelé, has been inspired by Pelé, has tried to emulate Pelé. He is the benchmark of greatness in our game; and even if someone one day should - improbably - exceed that benchmark, that will not displace the player who set the benchmark.

The list of his unique achievements in the game is long: the youngest ever to play in, and score in, and win a World Cup Final; the first player to score in two, three, and four consecutive World Cups; one of the first players to play in two World Cup Finals and one of a very few (at the time) to have won the World Cup twice (the others were some of his Brazilian team-mates of 1958 and 1962, and, I suppose, a few of the Italians from the double pre-War victory in the 1930s); the only player to play a dominant role in two World Cup Final wins; one of the highest, if not the highest goals-per-game ratio ever recorded across a full career.

It's difficult to count his exact number of appearances and goals and so on, because records were only kept on paper - if at all - back in the '50s and '60s, and often have been subsequently lost or destroyed; many of the statistics have to be painstakingly reconstructed from brief newspaper reports. And there were many more specially arranged 'exhibition games' back in those days, which, while not part of formal competitions, were not usually regarded as 'friendlies' in the modern understanding. So, exact numbers may be a little nebulous and uncertain; the current consensus seems to be that he racked up 757 goals in 831 senior games. But that might be a very conservative figure; I have seen several other estimates that put both his games and goals tallies near to, if not above 1,000, if you count all of his youth team tournaments and later 'unofficial' games. However many total games you want to acknowledge as 'counting', it's clear that he maintained a career average of close to a goal a game - in what was, for the time, an exceptionally long career. And there was, inevitably, a considerable drop-off in his later years; in his youthful prime, he was managing well over a goal per game, in both club and international football. I don't think anyone else has ever done that (Cristiano is down around 65%; and that really is exceptional - just... not as good as Pelé). And he wasn't even an outright striker - not a centre-forward, but more of a support striker or attacking midfielder (what in South America is often called the ponta de lança, usually the most advanced of a highly fluid group of progressive midfield players who support the attack).

And of course, 'assists' weren't really a recognised term back in his day, not even a concept. It was an idea borrowed from American sport that only began to gain fitful traction in football from the early 1990s, and didn't really become a regular feature of life in the English Premier League until about 20 years ago. So, again, the records have to be compiled mostly from old match reports, which often fail to discuss in detail how a goal came to be scored. You would think that since Pelé was more of a support player than an out-and-out striker, a great facilitator and an exceptionally unselfish player, and since, especially with the national team, he was usually surrounded by other exceptionally talented players too, that his number of assists might be huge,... possibly similar to or greater than his number of goals. That is certainly the case with the '70 World Cup, where review of the match footage gives a reliable tally of 6 assists (a record for a single tournament which stood until this year, when it was narrowly - and somewhat contentiously - bettered by Michael Olise, who had the benefit of playing 2 additional games, including the laughably uncompetitive Third-Place Play-Off) alongside his 4 goals; that, however, may have been somewhat unrepresentative of his career as a whole, because he was playing the football of his life, and he was playing it alongside Jairzinho, Tostao, Rivelino and Gerson. Overall, he's usually credited with around 370 assists in his career, which is very much a guestimate - but again, I would suggest, probably on the low side. (Again, this is comfortably more than Cristiano, and only bettered by Messi over the last few years, when he's mostly been playing 'exhibition' football in the States.)

One of the things I find most charming and impressive about the eminence he achieved is that it was based essentially on the acclaim of his peers. He played his entire club career (at least until his 'post-retirement' phase in America) in his native Brazil - at a time when there wasn't much television coverage of games. Also, there was no truly global media such as we have now, and no Internet or 'social media' networks. Pelé became internationally famous, became universally acknowledged as the greatest player in the world not because he was being seen on millions of TV screens every week, not because he had amassed a rabid following of fans on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, but by literal word-of-mouth: simply because every coach or player in the game who had been privileged to see him play, or just knew another professional that had seen him play, realised that he was something extraordinary - and told everyone they knew about him.

Although his club career was legendary in Brazil, it was of course in the World Cup that he truly made his mark on the wider global audience. He broke into his senior national side - into the Brazilian senior national side! - as a teenager, and appeared in a World Cup for them at the age of just 17; and he didn't just warm the bench or get only token minutes (as later greats like Ronaldo [the Brazilian one] and Messi did at their first World Cups; Maradona was almost exactly the same age as Pelé had been in Sweden, and already a sensation, when Argentina hosted the Cup in 1978, but his coach Cesar Menotti felt he was still too immature for such a big stage and left him out of the squad); on the contrary, he immediately became a key player for them, scoring 2 goals in the Final to secure an unexpected win against the strong hosts, Sweden. In the South American Championship the following year, he was the top scorer and the 'Player of the Tournament' when still 18 years old. He, of course, went on to appear in 4 consecutive World Cups. Nowadays, with career longevity greatly extended by advances in sports medicine, a few players have managed 5 or 6, and Messi has now played in more Finals; but no-one else has claimed 3 Winners' medals, or been the outstanding player in two winning World Cup Finals. He is one of a very select group to have won 2 Winners' medals (at the time, there were only a handful; though the total has now risen to 20, the ranks expanded by that other great Brazilian generation who might have won 3 or 4 back-to-back Cups in the '90s and '00s, but won only the two in '94 and '02): 3 wins is off-the-charts, and is unlikely ever to be replicated (although he had suffered a muscle injury in the second game of the Chile tournament in '62 and was able to play no further part; and in fact he did not originally receive a medal, as he did not play in the Final; he was only retroactively granted one 16 years later when FIFA changed the rules to award medals to all members of the winning squad).

But the 1970 World Cup - his comeback, his farewell - was where he went from being merely the greatest player of his day to an all-time legend. In the '60s, the game was much more physical, referees were far more tolerant of foul play, tackles-from-behind were considered perfectly legal - and there was not yet any 'sports medicine' to speak of, to help players get over serious injuries. Pelé probably got kicked more than any other player in history, before or since; he got bullied out of the 1966 tournament in England, suffering a series of brutal fouls from Bulgarian and Portuguese players which left him hobbling and nearly useless for much of the game that saw Brazil eliminated. He was so disillusioned by that experience that he announced his retirement from international football shortly afterwards, when still in his mid-20s. 

But he was persuaded to come back to the national team to help them qualify for the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. Approaching his 30th birthday (the typical retirement age at that time, especially for attacking players) and slowed by the effects of so many injuries inflicted on him over an already long career, it was obvious that this was going to be his swansong performance. And oh my god, was he determined to make it count; there was a swagger, an impetuosity about his play that had never been seen before on a world stage; and a steely determination too, a resolve that he was going to make this his tournament - that even if, somehow, Brazil didn't win it, he was going to make damn sure anyway that he was the only thing anyone remembered about that World Cup.

Words are inadequate to describe it, really. We've seen some other extraordinary displays of individual talent in later World Cups: from Cruyff in '74, from Platini in '82 and '86, from Maradona in '86 and '90, and from Messi in recent tournaments; but none of them have come anywhere near the impact Pelé had in 1970. He was utterly captivating, magical: every time he got on the ball, he made you think that something amazing might be about to happen - and very often it did. 

It is the supreme mark of his greatness, I think, that he has become most celebrated for goals he didn't score: the outrageous dummy around the Uruguayan keeper on the edge of the box, but then dragging the resulting shot inches wide of the far post from a tight angle; the majestic leap and powerful downward header that appeared to have snatched a win in the tight group game against England - until Gordon Banks somehow clawed it away from the foot of his post when it already seemed to have got past him, in what soon became known as the 'Save of the Century'; and that impish attempt to lob the Czech keeper from a few yards inside his own half (perfect length on the effort, but it drifted just wide of the post). There was at least one more I recall, not as celebrated as these three, though it really ought to be; I'm not sure which game it was in - also the Czech one, I think - but Pelé had a shot which rebounded sideways off the inside of a post; he didn't give up on the ball, but tracked it right across the mouth of the goal, catching up to it before anybody else towards the far side of the six-yard-box.... and then instantly back-heeled it towards the middle of the goal again for a teammate to tap home. He scored a lot of goals in that tournament too; but it was the near-misses that encapsulated his genius. [Yes, the greatest moments in football history are completely invisible to statistics!]

One of the defining moments of David Beckham's young career was pulling off a successful lob of the Wimbledon goalkeeper, Neil Sullivan, from around the half-way line, on the opening day of the 1996 season. He probably wouldn't have thought to attempt it if he hadn't grown up hearing about how Pelé had tried it in the 1970 World Cup. Pelé, of course, wasn't the first or only player to do something like this; but he was the first to become famous for doing it, the first to do it in a big game - that was watched on television around the world. That is legacy; and that is not at all an isolated example. Almost every great player of the modern era has referenced Pelé at some point, cited him as an example and an inspiration for some aspect of their own play.

That is a measure of his lasting influence on the game. And it wasn't just the lob from 50 yards out; he had all the tricks, he 'invented' almost everything. Well, he didn't, of course; I've seen interviews where he humbly acknowledged having copied a lot of ideas from other players, and even from kids that he used to play with in the street. But all the trademark moves we so love today, things that were later popularized by other players and sometimes came to bear their names - the Cruyff turn, the Rabona kick, the Zidane spin-turn, rainbow-flicks, bicycle-kicks, stepovers, headers from the edge of the box - he did all of that, back in the 1960s. 

More than the particular moves, he popularised a style of play, an attitude to the game - a joyous celebration of individual flair, imagination, improvisation. He promulgated the concept of il jogo bonito, The Beautiful Game - football as something more than just a contest, a sphere of creativity that could sometimes move people to tears with its loveliness. He elevated the game from a sport into an art, into one of the highest forms of creative expression. Whenever I see a player now perform a fantastic piece of skill, I think that he is embodying the spirit of how Pelé wanted the game to be played.

I think it can fairly be said that Pelé made the World Cup as well. That tournament in 1970 was the first that was widely televised, the first where almost every game could be watched live - and many of them were, all around the world. The colossal media juggernaut that the tournament has become in modern times would probably have developed eventually, but Pelé's phenomenal performances in that first truly global edition of it gave the process a huge kick-start. He made the world fall in love with football that summer.

There might also be a case that he made the game in the USA too. He had a spectacular 'post-retirement' career with the all-star New York Cosmos for three seasons in the mid-1970s. And although that professional football initiative, the North American Soccer League, foundered in the 1980s, that brief shining moment in the '70s infected a lot of Americans with a love for the game, and triggered the beginning of a sharp rise in the game being offered as a sports option in middle schools and high schools over the next couple of decades. America is now becoming a modest power in world football again - and perhaps it might not have happened without Pelé playing for the Cosmos all those years ago.

I remember one particular moment from Pelé's time in America (occasional highlights of his games were shown on Grandstand, the BBC's Saturday afternoon sports programme). He picked the ball up 30 or 40 yards out from goal, and started cantering forward. Now, fair enough, the standard of most of the opposition in that league was not very high, and the young American players, in particular, were all simply awestruck by him and hardly dared to attempt a challenge; but he would have been hard to challenge fairly anyway, because he was driving forward with such strength and balance, the ball effortlessly glued to his toe. When two defenders did finally try to close him down, he gave a neat lay-off to Franz Beckenbauer alongside him (Beckenbauer!! this truly was 'Fantasy Football' made flesh!!); and when he received the German's instant return pass on the edge of the box, he saw that the keeper had rushed off his line to try to narrow the angle, so he played the ball first-time - a casual, insolent, inch-perfect chipped lob with the outside of his instep. It might have been a nothing game and a weak opponent, but it was one of the most perfect, one of the most beautiful goals I ever saw.

Pelé always presented as kind, humble, down-to-earth and amiable off the pitch as well. He was a superb ambassador the sport for some decades after his final retirement as a player. But, for me, it was his personality on the pitch which cemented his legacy. Even when he was getting lumps kicked out of him, and was getting no help from the referee, you rarely saw any trace of anger from him, and never any sign of retaliation (he was only booked - a 'yellow card' offence, before they'd introduced the cards - once in his entire career; never sent off, never even close). On the pitch he always seemed to project a sunny disposition, that broad grin on his face conveying a simple childlike delight in being able to play the game he loved and in being able to entertain people by doing so. 

I quipped to someone on one of the Facebook forums the other day: What do you get if you combine the supreme athleticism and the lethal finishing of Cristiano with the inventiveness and the vision and the versatility of Messi? You get a player almost as good as Pelé! And he was a nicer guy, too....

[And I really don't think we'll ever see another player with that degree of natural talent again. Or at least, not with that degree of natural talent that will be allowed to flourish and express itself in such an unfettered, exuberant manner. It's just not the way of the modern game.

In theory, there should be a larger player pool now, as professional leagues have become more strongly established in almost every country in the world. Scouting and coaching programmes to nurture young talent have become far more widespread too. But I fear that might in fact be one of the limiting factors. While it should be a good thing that young players are being recognised and encouraged from an early age, allowed to devote themselves to football almost full-time, given opportunities to play with the other most talented youngsters in their country week in and week out, and to learn about the game from experienced professionals.... well, all of that, these days, unfortunately, tends to put a focus on hard work and physical strength and tactical discipline - not on instinctive, free-spirited improvisation.

It has often been suggested that one of the reasons for Brazil's relative decline over the past couple of decades has been that all of its finest players now go to play in Europe at a fairly young age - where they tend to get jogo bonito knocked out of them!

Pelé was almost completely uncoached, at least until his middle teens; he learned how to play football on the streets. And he kept that spirit with him always, even when he played in massive games on the world's greatest stage. That is why the world loved him. And why there'll never be another quite like him.]

Good riddance to Cristiano... And WHO is really the greatest of them all??

 

We had a record number of players of advanced age at this World Cup; and while a couple of these - Messi (turned 39 during the tournament) and Cabo Verde's outstanding keeper, Vozinha (40) - proved that some players can still function at at an exceptional level into the end of their 30s, and maybe even a little bit beyond,... Cristiano Ronaldo (now 41), alas, was not one of them.

Cristiano's game has always relied heavily on his exceptional physique - his pace, power, and stamina. Now that those have faded so dramatically, he is a pathetic shadow of his former self. Roberto Martinez's craven persistence with Cristiano as a starter for Portugal effectively left the team with 10 men, as he was nothing more than a passenger. He would simply loiter around the edge of the attacking third, waiting for his team to gain possession and run beyond him, then saunter up towards the penalty area, hoping that a wide attacking player would be able to hold the ball up long enough for him to catch up with play, and would be able to find him with a precise cross or a cutback. Cristiano still knows the optimum positions to take up, and still has the slick finishing skills to put chances emphatically away when they do fall to him. But he's become so slow-moving that it is just about impossible for him to find those spaces any more, or for his teammates to find him in them, if he does; essentially, because he no longer has the weapon of speed, he needs defenders to forget about him, so that he can move into a dangerous position and remain unmarked. Only the very bad defenders of Uzbekistan allowed this to happen; he barely got a kick in any of Portugal's other games. (Messi often played almost as slowly, and covered remarkably little ground; but his game has always been based more on guile and on an uncanny awareness of, and anticipation of, the evolution of space around him; those skills seem to have become even sharper with age.)

It was a sad way for him to end such a storied career - tarnishing his reputation, allowing himself to be mocked and vilifed for his hubris in continuing to insist on an international career when his body obviously just wasn't up to it any more. He really should have retired gracefully from the Portugal national team four or five years ago.

Now, there a lot of things to dislike about Cristiano himself - his obvious narcisissism, his often frankly creepy public persona, and his outstaying his welcome in international football to the obvious detriment of his country's chances in this tournament - but I'm sure what has most alienated the majority of football lovers from him in the last decade or so is the insane, toxic fanbase that has grown up around him in the social media era. It really has become A CULT. And its two main articles of faith are that Cristiano is better than Messi (laughable in itself, but... it gets worse), and, further, that Cristiano is in fact the Greatest Of All-Time (where do I start?).

Now, I've said a number of times that I regard this whole 'G.O.A.T.' question as pretty fatuous: there have been many outstanding players in this lovely game of ours over the years, and it's impossible to rank them against each other in any meaningful or decisive way. How can you really compare players who played in very different eras of the game, or who played in different positions (how do you compare a superb goalkeeper against a top centre-forward??), or who had very different playing styles in what was nominally the same position (how can you compare Kylian Mbappé to Gareth Bale or Zinedine Zidane??)? It just can't be done, it's pointless to even try.

However,.... since the Cristiano idolaters force our hand on this, so often, so relentlessly, so vociferously, I will offer this analysis.

Cristiano is a superb athlete and an exceptional goalscorer. And yes, in his younger days, he operated on the wing too; so there has been some versatility in his play, and he certainly has some astounding close ball-control skills, as well as top-class finishing. But Mbappé is even quicker and an even better dribbler, and has eclipsed his impact on the international stage in only a decade (with maybe a decade or at least another 4 or 5 years of top-flight football still in him); Kane is a much more versatile player, able to drop into midfield and open up play with a superb range of passing; Benzema and Lewandoski are at least as good as him in their finishing. So... even amongst the leading goalscorers of his own day, I don't see Cristiano as being clearly the No. 1.

And for Portugal, well, it takes some cojones to suggest that Cristiano is better than Eusebio, who was a dominant force in European and world football in the 1960s, and whose name is still spoken reverently even by people who never saw him play. Oh, the cult members have probably never heard of Eusebio! But they ought to have heard, surely, of Rui Costa and Luis Figo, giants of the Portuguese side within the last 30 years. And there were others of that sort of period, a 'golden generation' for the Portuguese, who ought to get some consideration too: Fernando Couto, Sérgio Conceição, and a little later, Beto. And in the current team, of course, the marvellous Bruno Fernandes. All of these are arguably better players than Cristiano, just for the greater range of impact they are able to have for the team, the greater range of skills and creative vision they are able to demonstrate. (It is, for me, very difficult to accommodate mere goalscorers amongst the very highest ranks of the world's greatest players; I venerate players who have a wider impact on shaping the game around them.) So, again, even among great Portuguese players, Cristiano is not obviously No. 1 - and probably not even really among the Top 5.

Then, if you delve back further into history, and focus just on the other great forwards, is Cristiano clearly better than Gabriel Bastituta, Ronaldo (the 'proper' one, the great Brazilian forward of the late '90s and early '00s), Marco van Basten, Patrick Kluivert, Dennis Bergkamp, Thierry Henry, Christian Vieri, Didier Drogba, Jurgen Klinsmann, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, Hristo Stoichkov, Bebeto, Romario, Hans Krankl, Paolo Rossi, Leopoldo Luque, Allan Simonsen, Johnny Rep, Gerd Muller, Just Fontaine, Sándor Kocsis, Alfredo di Stefano?? I don't think so. I'm really not sure he's any better than any of these; he's certainly not better than all of them.

But, as I said, the great creative players are always going to dominate these conversations for me: the likes of Ferenc Puskás (there's a reason the 'outrageous goals' award is named after him!), or Denis Law and George Best from the great Manchester United team of the late '60s, or Cruyff and Neeskens from the beautiful Dutch side of the 1970s, Michel Platini, Ruud Gullit, Lothar Matthäus, Gheorghe Hagi, Robert Prosinečki, Bernd Schuster, Roberto Baggio, Gianfranco Zola, Zvonimir Boban, Pavel Nedved, Francesco Totti, Andrea Pirlo, Kaka, Xavi, Luka Modrić, David Silva, Philippe Coutinho, Kevin DeBruyne. And of course from England we have many top contenders too, such as Bobby Charlton, Kevin Keegan, Bryan Robson, Glenn Hoddle, Trevor Francis, Paul Gascoigne, Darren Anderton, David Beckham, Paul Scholes, Steven Gerrard, Wayne Rooney, and now, Jude Bellingham. Indeed, there are an extraordinary number of wonderful English players who somehow never got a proper chance with the national side: Frank Worthington, Eric Gates, Brian Little, Vince Hilaire, Matt Le Tissier, and many, many others.

And that's without getting into all the wonderful defenders and goalkeepers from the annals of the game. And, indeed, without beginning to do justice to the Brazilians: there are probably at least some dozens of players from that country alone who have been better than Cristiano - virtually the whole of their '70, '82, and '98 World Cup squads, for a start!

But really, there are only three players who are head-and-shoulders above the rest, who credibly have some claim to being recognised as the Greatest of All-Time.

They are, of course, Pelé, Maradona, and Messi. For me, Maradona is disqualified by his obnoxious personality. His athleticism, his ball-control, and his goalscoring ability were indeed super-human, probably better than Messi's and at least close to Pelé's; but, unfortunately, he was also a drug-fiend, a psycho, a thug, and a cheat. While he was generally acknowledged as the greatest player in the world throughout the 1980s, and on into the beginning of the 1990s, he also managed to be the world's least liked player (when the Spanish hard-man defender Andoni Goikoetxea broke his ankle with a hideous, and probably entirely deliberate, challenge from behind in 1983, he was widely cheered - or at least forgiven - by most of the football-watching world). Even worse, while Pelé and Messi were both able to communicate their devotion to the game with a joyful passion which made them uplifting to watch, Maradona always seemed to play with a scowl on his face, emanating a bitter anger - as if football were his revenge on an unfair world.

So, I feel that there can only be one answer to this question: it's Pelé. Messi might have come very, very close. Maradona might have come very, very, very close; but nobody wants to emulate, or even remember him. It's always going to be Pelé.

So, if you really want to have a proper in-depth discussion about who might be the greatest football player of all time,... I'm sorry, Cristiano Ronaldo is just not in that conversation, not even close: not even potentially on the fringes of the Top 5 or the Top 10 or the Top 20. For me, I really don't think he'd make it into the Top 50!!

And part of the reason, I have to say, is that he comes across as a bit of a dick. Leo Messi always seems deeply integrated into every team that he's played in. One of the reasons Argentina have so over-performed with him during the last decade or so is that the rest of the squad clearly love him to pieces and would absolutely lay down their lives for him on the field. Particularly in these latter years, and particularly with Portugal, Cristiano's relationship with his teammates has always seemed cooler, more distant, more awkward; but really, throughout his entire career, I can't recall teammates ever talking about him with the kind of spontaneous warmth and admiration that you find when players discuss playing alongside Messi or DeBruyne or Henry or.... any of the greats.  When teammates talk of Cristiano, you see admiration for his ability, gratitude for what he can bring to the team - but no warmth, no intimacy; profound respect, but no love.

He comes across as a raging egomaniac who is excessively preoccupied with his public image - or rather, with his appearance - and with chasing records. And one can't help thinking that this passionate fanbase he has acquired are mostly drawn by that larger-than-life persona rather than his footballing skills per se. They seem to be besotted with his chiselled 'good looks' (although many of us find something rather offputtingly un-human, 'Uncanny Valley'-like about his weirdly adrogynous features) and his gym-toned bod; for many, there seems to be more homo-erotic fetishization than football appreciation going on behind their idolatry.

As he has extended his career beyond all reasonable limits, purely, it seems, to try to chase even more meaningless 'lifetime achievement' records', I fear there is a danger that this public persona may degenerate into self-parody, and that in a few years' time he will be remembered more for shilling personal grooming products than for his performances on the pitch.

I hope that doesn't happen to him. But he does seem likely to bring it on himself. It would be a great pity if... he were to limp on for several more years, continuing to take the tainted Saudi money to play in that ridiculous exhibition league, and forcing himself on the unfortunate Portugal team for another Euros or another World Cup, thereby making himself a complete laughing-stock. He undoubtedly used to be a truly great player, one of the greatest... maybe among the top 100 or so ever to play the game.

But Cristiano Ronaldo has stuck around far too long already. He should hang up his boots now.

A 'Team of the Tournament' - World Cup 2026

 

Everybody has to do one, right? So,... that's mine.

Many selectors in choosing such teams simply go for all their favourite players, and/or concentrate on the ultimately most successful teams. I try to achieve more balance and variety - by avoiding taking too many players from one nation, by trying to give recognition to some of the outstanding teams who were eliminated before the semi-finals or quarter-finals, and by attempting to create a well-structured team that could conceivably function together in reality (players who really can play on that side, in that position; a good mix of profiles; a solid central defensive midfielder to hold everything together). So many of these 'teams of the tournament' just stuff in 6 goalscorers/midfield creatives - who might be terrifying if they ever got the ball, but would in all likelihood be completely steamrollered by any half-decent side.

I suppose the potentially 'contentious' omissions in my line-up are Mbappé (brilliant, sure - but perhaps let France down somewhat when the chips were really down in that lame semi-final exit against Spain; for me, he never quite had that 'aura' of invincibility, of single-minded determination that he was going to turn games on his own - Vini had that: for the first four games, anyway, he looked absolutely unplayable), and Yamal (I really don't buy the common verdict that he had a 'disappointing' tournament: he was unlucky not to pick up more goals/assists [had a lot of near-misses, a couple of very good goals ruled out for narrow offsides; and the rest of the team weren't getting into the box enough for him to be able to create a lot of chances, that wasn't his fault - for such a dominant team, Spain's chance creation and chance conversion numbers were really poor...!], absolutely tore opponents apart down that right flank, and by drawing so many defenders to him, was regularly helping to create space for teammates in the middle; but... he wasn't quite Messi) or Manzambi (pity he got injured, but certainly a contender); and maybe Rodri (I said yesterday, I just don't think he had that great a tournament overall - was slow to grow into it, and actually quite poor in the first couple of games; Koné - and perhaps also our own Elliot Anderson - was, for me, much better) or Kane (as usual, faded after a bright start; and eclipsed in his own team by Bellingham).

Michael Olise might also have got in for many people, but I felt he never looked completely comfortable in that 'No. 10' role Deschamps forced on him; and he was another of the conspicuous misfires for France in those last two games, when it really mattered.

A lot of people like Pedro Porro at right-back too; but I felt he had one outstanding game, and was just OK in the others; and hadn't even started in the first couple of games. I'm not completely sold on my selection of Hakimi, but I wanted to give more recognition to Morocco, who were one of the standout teams of the tournament for me; as a Fantasy selection, he disappointed me rather - he was solid, rather than outstanding. But he was always a commanding figure on the pitch, an excellent captain. I was really tempted to give that slot to Norway's outstanding Julian Ryerson, though; he just missed out in my final cut as a result of his performances being hampered by injury in their last two games.

I also mentioned yesterday that, while I have nothing against Unai Simon in goal, Spain's control of games was usually so overwhelming that he didn't really have that much to do; his most impressive contributions were a few superbly-timed 'sweeper keeper' interventions, charging out of his box to intercept long balls over the top. Saves? Not many. Vozinha clocked nearly twice as many, in half the number of games! There were a number of other keepers who put in a strong claim for consideration too, especially Morocco's Bounou. And I was tempted to give the position to D.R. Congo's Lionel Mpasi, just for his extraordinary defiance of England in the 'Round of 32'; Iran's Alireza Beiranvand was in similar "You shall NOT pass!" mode against Belgium, and Curacao's Eloy Room clocked a remarkable 15 saves in one game against Ecuador. But the great fairytale of this World Cup was Cabo Verde's triumphant emergence from obscurity; they were, I think, only very narrowly behind Morocco as the best African team, and comfortably among the 'Top Ten' in the whole tournament. And their consistently solid veteran goalkeeper, Vozinha, was one of the key foundations of their success (and there's an additional appeal in his being still at the top of his game at 40 years of age!).

I'm disappointed I couldn't find room for any Colombian or Mexican players; they were also among my favourite teams of the tournament. (Julián Quiñones very nearly got in ahead of Haaland for me!)

Finally, Morocco's exciting young attacking midfielder Ismael Saibari was the breakout star of this tournament, for me (I'd never heard of him before, anyway; fans of the Eredivisie will no doubt have been aware - he was the Dutch 'Player of the Season' last year for PSV); Morocco's challenge faded after he got injured, but I think he still did enough to earn inclusion in a final 'Team of the Tournament' (and Bayern Munich seem to agree with me!).

So, that's it - that's my 'Team of the Tournament' for the 2026 World Cup. Feel free to disagree; but please do it politely...