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 revenue 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 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.

The allure of the 'LONG Wildcard' again

Some folks like to play their Wildcard when there's an interruption in the regular Premier League schedule - such as now, when we're getting an especially long 'international break', nearly 3 weeks with no Premier League football. [This is a very slightly adapted re-post of a piece I first wrote for the international break we had this February.]

There are four possible reasons for this preference (though two, no, three of them are pretty frivolous):

1)  You can take advantage of a 'best of both worlds' situation, being able to make transfers early (as soon as the deadline for the current gameweek has passed!) to avoid possible adverse price changes on players you're interested in - while having the security of being able to swap them out again, if they get injured before the next gameweek deadline. 

2) Since these long gaps between deadlines increase the risk of being hit by multiple injuries (there are invariably other games - European ties, domestic cups, or internationals - going on in the interval between regular league matches; and training seems to be becoming more hazardous than playing, in the modern game!), some may find it reassuring to have a Wildcard in play so that they can easily address any such developing crisis - even if they weren't hankering to make any active, improving changes to their squad.

3)  Some enjoy having the leisure to contemplate a major squad rebuild over a longer period of time. Some, indeed, find it difficult to visualise what different combinations of players would look like (and what they'd collectively cost...), and so actually use the 'Transfers' page for trying out multiple 'drafts' of possible new squads. And they can't get enough of this pleasant diversion: they want to drag it out over days and days.

4)  And some pursue 'trading for profit', focusing on trying to build their squad value rather than necessarily improving the total points-potential of their selection. Because there is more time for transfers to happen, and maybe more transfers needing to happen because of the longer period of time elapsed leading to a larger accumulation of injury problems, and because of the probability that more people than usual are using their Wildcards in a gameweek like this,... a long gameweek will tend to have a higher volume of transfer traffic, and this will result in a greater number of price changes. There are various FPL resource sites online that attempt to predict when price changes are imminent (and this year, the FPL website has added one of its own; but there's no 'rocket science' about that - it's fairly easy to anticipate which players are likely to be suddenly popular or unpopular, and you can check in on their recent transfers numbers regularly to see just how big a swing in ownership they are experiencing. 

Transfer trading for profit like this has become more difficult in recent years, as FPL has tweaked its 'algorithm' in a way that makes it rather less easy to trigger a price-change (in either direction), and so we now very rarely see multiple changes in the same gameweek. And of course, you need a player to go up in price twice in order to be able to make a profit on them, because the dreaded 'transfer tax' limits you to half the value of any increase in price since you bought him (rounded down!) when you sell a player on again; hence, you don't earn anything on a first increase in price, nor any extra on a third increase; and you can't reach a fourth increase during such a period of Wildcard trading, as the number of price changes within one gameweek is capped at three. However, where there is an extended gameweek, there is an increased chance that a player's price may rise twice (or twice more, if you were unlucky enough to miss out on his first price rise at the start of the gameweek; although the threshold for each successive price rise within the same gameweek is set far higher, so it is almost unheard-of to see three price rises in one gameweek), thus enabling you to take a quick 100k profit by selling him on immediately. 

In practice, these days it is very difficult to realise a rise in squad value of more than a few hundred thousand through this exercise. And it does take a lot of effort, in scrutinising the transfer numbers every day, and perhaps making dozens of speculative transfers over the course of the gameweek (most of which will return no profit).

You might also be able to take advantage of selling-and-buying-back a player who's falling in price to boost your squad value, by buying him back cheaper than you sold him. That is a little easier to achieve than chasing price rises on new purchases, but.... you rarely want to be buying players who are falling in value!

[I only discovered recently that there is a widespread concern in FPL-land that Wildcard transfers supposedly don't count towards price-changes; and many people use this as a reason for following the risky strategem of initially paying for their mutliple 'long gameweek' transfers (to try to make sure that they will count towards official, potentially price-influencing transfer numbers), and only playing their Wildcard shortly before the deadline (to cancel the huge points spend on all the transfers they've accumulated). This, of course, is a very hazardous procedure, because the FPL website might crash close to the deadline (it often has in the past!), or you might lose your phone, or your Internet connection,... or you might simply forget... and be left with a huge 'bill' of points needlessly spent on futile speculations in the transfer market.

Since FPL Towers are extremely secretive about the 'rules' on price changes, we have no way of knowing for sure whether this notion is true or not; though I believe it to be mistaken, unfounded.  I think it would be impactical of implementation, and would serve no useful purpose. And it does not accord with my own observations of frequent transfer trading over international breaks. Ultimately, though, as I argue in that extended post on the issue that I just linked at the start of this parenthesis, it just doesn't matter. We look at how prices are actually shifting, and predicted to shift, based on the announced numbers of 'eligible' transfers, whatever they are. As with all things FPL, we are at the mercy of whatever figures FPL Towers chooses to give us, and we just have to work with that!]

So, really, only the first of those reasons is potentially a good one for considering a 'long' gameweek to be a tempting opportunity to trigger your use of the Wildcard.

But even that is a weak reason. And it is, almost always, going to be outweighed by the fact that, as I explained here a little while back, any interruption of the regular league schedule disrupts a club's usual training and preparation routines, and thus makes their form upon the resumption of league games more uncertain; and...  you don't want uncertainty when you're planning a major rebuild of your squad for a long run of games (or, for the 2nd Wildcard, for the whole remainder of the season).

I rather feel that - in an 'ideal world', anyway - it's still too early to be contempating using the 1st Wildcard. We haven't had time yet to evaluate the possible impact of changes made in the recent transfer window. And there are no major 'turns' in fixture difficulty for a few weeks yet. It's always better to hang on to a Wildcard for as long as you can - unless there's a pressing need to use it.

Better to hold off a while longer, if you can; but I can see how it's getting mighty tempting at the moment. (I might even succumb to the impulse myself....)

The key argument for waiting a bit longer this year is the unprecedented length of this first international break: the Premier League schedule being suspended for three full weeks. Not only does this increase the possibility of us being hit by multiple injuries before Gameweek 6 (some of which might perhaps not become apparent until after the gameweek deadline!), I fear the risk also of 'stored up' injuries: players returning from international duty with undisclosed minor injury niggles, or simply being caught out by the sudden resumption of much more intense club training, and breaking down ahead of Gameweek 7 or Gameweek 8; that could well be more of a problem than immediate injuries going into Gameweek 6. And then there's the perennial problem that players who've had particularly long flights back - all of the South Americans, usually! and Chris Wood!! - are often unavailable for the first weekend back because of fatigue/jet-lag; so, an optimal Wildcard squad for the next several gameweeks might find itself being short of a full starting eleven, or at least short of a full bench, in Gameweek 6.

Perhaps even more importantly, the long interruption in regular club training is going to be hugely disruptive of everyone's form (that's likely to be a particularly big issue for teams like Liverpool, Chelsea, and Manchester United, who are already struggling for consistency and need a lot of intensive coaching to fix their problems). We just don't know how anyone's going to be playing when we kick off again in October, the season is essentially re-setting and starting again from scratch. And on top of that, we have a number of possibly significant 'turns' in relative fixture-difficulty looking likely over the next few gameweeks after the resumption. 

So, it is very much looking as if the 'ideal' time to play the first Wildcard this year would be in late October or early November. And it would almost certainly have been worth hoarding up a few Free Transfers in case you need them to fix problems going into Gameweek 6.

Time to chill - Monday Music Break No. 4

 

Now that we have almost three weeks off before our next dose of Premier League action (and Fantasy Premier League vexation....), we should all try to make the best of the unaccustomed downtime.

There is no better soundtrack to studied indolence and carefree loafing than this - So, Relax from the inimitable Leon Redbone. This live rendition from a 1992 concert in Paris is even more deliciously soporific than the original studio recording above.

Let us all enjoy THE SILENCE for a while....

Luck-o-Meter 26-27 - Gameweek 5

I'll try to continue 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 we seem to be suffering a 'Curse of the International Break' Blues, with numerous teams and players oddly lacking in focus and turning in dreadful displays - almost nothing but 'unexpected' results this weekend! It has turned out to be one of the worst FPL gameweeks in recent memory.

Red cards awarded: 

Red cards not awarded:  Declan Rice really should have been sent off for his petulant little kick at Yalcouyé late on; doesn't matter that it "wasn't very hard" - it was not a challenge, the ball was nowhere nearby, it was just a straight-up assault.

It feels, in terms of naural justice, that Elliott Anderson should probably have received a red card for such a blatant and deliberate handball; although since he was not blocking an attempt on goal or 'denying an obvious goalscoring opportunity', perhaps the current rules would only mandate a yellow card.

Penalties awarded: The penalty against Sorba Thomas was incredibly soft, unjust. It looked as though he had been fouled by Miley, and although he was making a meal of it by going down, the contact his arm made on the side of Jacob Murphy's foot was accidental, and utterly trivial - really not enough to unbalance him, let alone bring him down. Justice was done when Wissa's soft, telegraphed penalty was comfortably pushed around the foot of the post by Tzolakis.

Penalties not awarded: Gabriel's lunging block which appeared to catch Kostoulas's ankle and trip him up surely should have been a penalty. Darren England must have been feeling sorry for Arsenal!

Sunderland's fill-in left-back, young Frenchman Dayann Methalie, brought down Ndiaye with a clumsy lunge right on the edge of the penalty area. Fernandez scored direct from the subsequent free-kick anyway, but it did look very much as if the point of contact between the players might have been right above the line of the edge of the box; and VAR apparently didn't check this??

Sunderland were trebly screwed over by referee Rob Jones and his VAR team. They were denied a clearcut penalty when Elliott Anderson swatted the ball with his hand to help him take the ball away from Enzo Le Fée, Anderson might have been sent off for an offence like that, something that would have critically weakened City defensively above and beyond the mere fact of being reduced to 10 men for the final 40 minutes of play - and, to add insult to injury, City immediately broke down the left flank and seized another goal of their own through Semenyo! Apparently, the subsequent official 'explanation' - self-justificatory fudge - was that the ball had hit Le Fée's hand just prior: that was absolute nonsense (only Joe Hart, on 'Match of the Day', a City man to the core, could have even pretended to be convinced by that rationale) - that contact was accidental, had no material effect on the flight of the ball, was completely unavoidable (the ball bounced against him from a matter of inches away), and his arm/hand was in a perfectly natural position (resting on Anderson's chest to try to maintain distance between them): no way in a million years is that ever a 'handball'!! The match - and, possibly, the course of the title race - shifted crucially on that one awful decision.

Tight/dubious offsides: Kevin Schade looked to be very slightly offside at the start of his break for the second goal on Friday night, but was adjudged not to be - although we never saw the SAOT picture to explain that.

It was a tough break for Thierno Barry that his second goal was ruled out for a 'subjective' offside by Brennan Johnson. It's hard to argue that a player isn't potentially distracting a goalkeeper when he's standing that close to him, but also Johnson wasn't actually making any contact, or really blocking Walton's path to the ball - so, it was perhaps a bit of a 50/50.

It was unfortunate for Tyrick Mitchell that his fine goal - and probable match-winner - was ruled out for a very tight offside by assister Anan Khalaili: off by a knee. This was one I felt was just about substantial enough to have been called with the naked eye - but absolutely at the limit of what should be considered a decisive margin. I'd be far happier with a rule that required the whole of the attacker's body, rather than just a body part, to be closer to the goal.

The offside call for Brian Brobbey's second goal must have been very, very tight: as City held their line on the edge of the penalty area, it looked as though Ruben Dias's left heel might have been playing everybody on by an inch or two (Angulo on the near side was just off; but he wasn't interfering with play). It was one of those where you're happy to see the attacking side 'get the benefit of the doubt' (which was how these situations were always decided, on a discretionary basis, in the past anyway); but whichever way the original on-pitch decision had gone on this, I wouldn't have liked to see SAOT overrule it on such a preposterously fine margin.

When Haaland finally got his goal, after 80 minutes, he was denied the chance to celebrate by an offside flag, and a strangely extended VAR deliberation. In fact, his supplier, Gvardiol, had been plainly onside by nearly half a yard - so, it was a terrible initial call by the linesman, and should have taken mere seconds to correct.

Goals wrongly allowed/disallowed: City's 4th goal should plainly have been chalked off for the earlier handball by Anderson.

Surprise omissions/early substitutions/injuries: Joao Pedro was not able to take part after all on Friday night, not even on the bench (although Alonso had earlier suggested that he might); thus, Danny Welbeck got his first league start for Chelsea.

Brighton captain Lewis Dunk was a late injury drop-out, suffering from a 'stiff neck', replaced by Pascal Struijk; and the recently excellent Malick Yalcouyé was dropped in favour of the slightly more defensive-oriented Chema Andrés (presumably thus a 'tactical' change?). Meanwhile Arteta gave a first league start to Bruno Guimaraes instead of Lewis-Skelly in the holding role - which might have been the beginning of Arsenal's problems.

Ipswich manager Gary O'Neill dropped his keeper, Kjell Scherpen, in favour of back-up Christian Walton (though nobody in FPL owns either of them!).

Tino Livramento broke down in training on Friday, so Lewis Miley had to deputise at right-back.

Jair Cunha was fit to start again in the back-three, displacing Ola Aina who had deputised for him for one week.

Doku is apparently now fit for the bench; but the form of Semenyo and Ndiaye might keep him on the sidelines quite a while longer.

Luke Shaw was back from his short-term injury absence, displacing Patrick Dorgu to the bench; and Baleba was finally fit to take part, although he was not put on from the bench this time.

Near misses: Jaidon Anthony looped a strong header onto the crossbar (flagged offside - but wasn't).

Tim Iroegbunam nearly salvaged a point for Hull in the closing minutes when he prodded a close-range volley inches beyond the far top corner.

Dominic Szoboszlai had two decent attempts with long, curling free-kicks, but couldn't quite get either of them on target.

Bruno Fernandes played Cunha's cut-back first time, but the shot flashed across the open goal and rebounded off the inside of the far-post. 

Big misses/big saves: Kelleher made a good early stop from Neto's fierce left-foot volley on Friday night; but a lacklustre Chelsea made few other chances in the rest of the game.

Arsenal's one decent chance of the game came late on when substitute Gyokeres hooked a long ball on first time, releasing Havertz in behind - but he shot straight at Verbruggen.

Bobby Thomas preserved his side's frail lead with a superb overhead clearance off his goal-line.

Thierno Barry got a free header at the far post, but directed his stooping effort the wrong side of the upright. A little later, Leif Davis ghosted in to the edge of the six-yard box, but with an open goal in front of him completely muffed the shot. At the start of the second-half, Pickford made a sharp save at his near-post from an Enciso shot.

Evanilson's deft near-post flick from Tavernier's square-ball demanded a very sharp stop from Alisson, low at his near-post. Barcola's shot from the edge of the box may have taken a slight deflection to throw off Petrovic, but the keeper still managed to clear the effort with his feet. Isak, shortly after his goal, had an even better chance, played in behind by Jacquet - in the middle, 18 yards out, with only the keeper to beat, he pulled his shot wide. The linesman then flagged him offside; but he wasn't, and SAOT would surely have confirmed a goal if he'd been able to hit the target.

Trafford made a very sharp stop at the foot of his post from Pino's wicked free-kick. Brennan Johnson might have claimed the 'Goal of the Day', if not of the month, with an exquisite touch to set up a chance just inside the edge of the box - but he struck his shot inches wide of the post. In the second-half, Palace stand-in keeper Walter Benitez made a fantastic reaction stop from a close-range effort from Calvert-Lewin (although he might have been offside by a shoulder...). Shortly afterwards, Daichi Kamada ghosted in unmarked for a free header at the far post, but he directed right across the face of the goal and well wide.

Near the end of the first-half at The Etihad, Ndiaye, with a shooting chance in the centre of the box, unselfishly squared the ball to Haaland in space to his right. And the big Norwegian, with no pressure and half the goal to aim at, unbelievably slotted his shot wide of the post - probably one of the worst misses we'll see from him all season! Ruben Dias, almost prodding the ball into his own net after Donnarumma had flapped at and missed a long free-kick down the middle from Xhaka in the centre-circle, redeemed himself with a spectacular hooked clearance right on the goal-line. City nearly got a 6th when late subsitutes Doku and O'Reilly combined, the Englishman played in behind by a sublime diagnonal ball from the Belgian, but Roefs spread himself well to block the shot. Moments later, a scramble in the City box ended with Dan Ballard prodding an effort towards goal, but a defender's block deflected it just wide off the outside of the post.

Lisandro Martinez had a swerving 22-yard half-volley well pawed away by Bernd Leno early in the game at Craven Cottage. Marcus Rashford also had a great chance 8 yards out, but the ball came to him unexpectedly, and his improvised side-foot volley ballooned miles over the bar. A firm low shot from just outside the box by Berge was well tipped away by Lammens; his later save with his outstretched leg from King's fierce cross-shot was even better. Cunha's shot from long-range deflected off one of two blocking defenders and looped high in the air over Leno - but grazed the outside of the post. Mbeumo's strong 20-yard curler was perhaps the best of the lot, but superbly tipped away by Leno; the Fulham keeper also made a great stop going down at full stretch to his left to push away a long, low shot from Cunha.

Outstanding goals:  Emi Buendia probably claims the pick of the crop of this weekend's goals with his savage dipper from long-range. We appear to have established a 25-yard minimum requirement for 'Goal of the Month' contenders!

Gross's opener was cleanly struck from just over 20 yards, but not particularly powerful (no back-lift!), and it was perhaps a little fortunate to ping in off both posts (or very nearly so...). And it was remarkably similar to Morgan Rogers's effort a fortnight ago - which also managed to sneak past Raya at his near-post! Kostoulas's strike just before half-time was a little further out, and more crisply struck, but.... again, you wouldn't usually have expected it to beat Raya.

Mohamed-Ali Cho's consolation goal for Hull was extremely well-taken - one of the best finishes inside the box we've seen for a while! Although Jay Da Silva's first goal of Coventry's campaign was perhaps even better, not least for the early ball into the wide channel from goalkeeper Rushworth to play him in.

It was 'only bangers allowed' in the thoroughly entertaining match at The Etihad: Cherki's dazzling bit of close control probably the pick of the crop, but Semenyo also produced two thumping finishes, Fernandez hit home a very sweet free-kick, and Brobbey nabbed a hattrick of perfect centre-forward goals.

Outstanding performances: Cherki, Semenyo, and Ndiaye are all on fire for City at the moment (a pity that that fire may now smoulder and fade over a three-week break in club training - no-one knows). However, I thought the performance of the weekend came from Bernd Leno: he's been a bit disappointing so far this season, but this Sunday he kept his team in the game with  a string of fantastic saves.

Big mistakes: Lukas Hornicek tried some clever footwork on his byline just outside the goal and was nearly dispossessed by the lurking Belloumi. He did well to seize the ball back - but that was nearly the most embarrassing moment of the weekend.

Enzo Fernandez's cheeky free-kick from the right corner of the box was sweetly struck - but it really shouldn't have caught Robin Roefs out like that.

Calvin Bassey's slightly deflected shot rebounded awkwardly off Lammen's knee and Martinez's hurried attempt at a 'clearance' ended up looking more like a side-foot shot into the corner; though Lammens might still have been able to save it if he'd decided to dive for it with his hands rather than trying to kick it away - an unfortunate comedy of errors.

Bad luck/good luck: Semenyo's second goal was slightly fortuitous as Cherki's slotted through-ball was sort of cut out by a sliding Sunderland defender, but landed right at Semenyo's feet anyway. (I thought 'deflections' like this no longer invalidated an 'assist' - but Cherki doesn't seem to have been given this one??)

Florian Wirtz was lucky to be credited with an 'assist' for Isak's goal: it was possibly a wildly mishit shot or simply an entirely accidental deflection which made little material difference to the path of the ball; all of the work to set the chance up was done by Cody Gakpo. (If the inconsequential deflection had come off a defender, it would still be Gakpo's assist!)

Fulham defender David Affengruber was unfortunate that his attempted block on the edge of the box caused a huge deflection to wrong-foot Leno, helping Cunha to claim a barely-deserved equaliser for Manchester United in the closing moments of regular time.

FPL weirdness: Denying Cherki the assist for Semenyo's second goal seems harsh - and inconsistent. Over the past season, we've usually seen quite large deflections/interventions from a defender disregarded, even if they did materially affect the flight of the ball towards the eventual goalscorer. Here, although there was a very big deflection, it was not a controlled attempt by the defender to play the ball in any particular direction; and although it looped up in the air, the direction of the ball barely changed at all. Cherki was plainly looking to find Semenyo, and did so - how is this not an assist? [Maybe this will be revisited 'overnight' before FPL Towers finally confirms the points and rankings on Monday morning.... Um, NOPE. Oh well, we can't complain too much, because this goal should not have been allowed to stand anyway.]

Bernd Leno, frustratingly, just missed out on a second 'saves' point, only being credited with 5 stops in the game (I thought there had been way more; and it is a pity that there is no qualitative element in rewarding keepers' work - at least 3 of these saves were absolute worldies!!). And, as last week with Bart Verbruggen, although he was clearly the 'Player of the Match' (and possibly of the entire weekend), because of the chronic under-recognition given to goalkeepers in the BPS, he didn't get close to earning a bonus point.

Matheus Cunha was fortunate to be credited with United's winner: it looked as though his effort was bound just wide of the near-post until it took a massive deflection off Affengruber's outstretched boot; that touch was certainly 'decisive' in wrongfooting Leno, but it did also look as if might have turned the effort on target.

Unexpected results:  Almost all of them! Chelsea continue to be all-over-the-place at the back (and you wonder if Robert Sanchez might be about to reclaim his place from Martinez), but without Joao Pedro to lead the line were also toothless going forward; nobody should have expected an evening game away at Brentford to be an easy assignment, but it turned out to be a cakewalk for the home side. While many were fancying lively Brighton to perhaps give Arsenal a bit of a game, no-one can have had any reason to expect that the champions and league leaders would so completely fail to show up for this game - an absolutely abysmal performance that made them look more like relegation candidates (the home fans' taunting chants of 'Are you Tottenham in disguise?' were all too apt!).  Newcastle are usually a bit of a handful at home, but few were probably expecting them to bounce back so strongly from their humiliating demolition by Leeds on Monday night; and even so, they were a bit fortunate to plunder 2 goals in the opening six-and-a-half minutes,... and then to hang on, just, as Hull increasingly dominated the second-half and repeatedly threatened an equaliser. Coventry made a huge step forward to achieve a deserved win against a lacklustre Forest.

It was a bit of a surprise that Bournemouth were so flat this week; at home, against an uneven Liverpool, they had been fancied to have a chance of causing a minor upset.

It was also a little surprising that Crystal Palace, who've been struggling so far, managed to look much the better side away at Leeds, and ended up being rather unlucky not to nick a win.

With United's wobbly form so far, perhaps a struggle - even against a bottom-of-the-table club like Fulham - was not so unexpected. What no-one probably expected, though, was that it would be such a ding-dong of a game: it might have finished with a bigger scoreline than City v Sunderland, but the goalkeeping was better and the finishing not quite as good.

With Chelsea and Arsenal having absolute horror-shows (many of the more naive FPL managers have recently chosen to treble-up on one or both of these!!), and recently fancied Hull and Forest also going down to slightly unexpected defeats, there is much lamentation in FPL-land this week. The 'Team of the Week', contained none of the star names by the end of Saturday; among its members, probably only Tarkowski and Gross have an ownership even above 1%, let alone 10%! Only Semenyo managed to add himself to its ranks on Sunday. The global average was an utterly abysmal 18 points after Saturday, but eventually climbed to a barely respectable 44 points after a livelier Sunday. (CORRECTION: the final global average was 48 points. This new FPL timeline where they don't 'finalise' the gameweek results until 8 or 10 hours later than we were used to is.... really doing my head in!)  With so many inexplicably bad performances from leading teams, an extraordinary number of exceptional goals (and near-misses!), and some very dubious points attributions, this is certainly one of the weirdest gameweeks of the season so far; it was only saved from being one of the worst FPL gameweeks ever by an unusually entertaining and free-scoring Sunday! On top of Darren England's rather generously letting Arsenal off a penalty and a sending-off on Friday night, and that one slightly questionable offside in Brentford's favour, we also saw that absolutely horrendous ignoring of a penalty handball by Elliott Anderson, which may have changed the course of the match. At least there weren't too many dodgy bits of officiating in the other matches, but that's quite enough to make this another 9 out of 10 on the 'Luck-o-Meter'.