The momentous impact of the two major changes that happened in FPL two years ago - the scheduling change that means we no longer have the FA Cup Quarter-Finals producing really BIG Blank and Double Gameweeks at the end of the season, and the rule-change that allows us to roll Free Transfers for multiple weeks, amassing up to 5 at one time (tough to manage, but effectively creating the theoretical possibility of carrying out multiple additional 'mini-Wildcard' rebuilds throughout the season) - are still widely unappreciated by FPL managers, and a lengthy period of adjustment seems likely to be necessary before their implications are fully understood by everyone. Hence, it's especially unfortunate that the FPL Gnomes were again distracting us with a blizzard of novelty changes to the game rules again at the start of this season: 2 sets of chips this year, an otiose gift of 5 extra transfers ahead of the African Cup of Nations (effectively a third Wildcard),... and the hurried, ill thought-out introduction of the dread new 'defensive points'.
Many folks on the FPL online forums like to say that 'defensive points' have made a huge difference this season. But I think they just mean that they're grateful they've seen their own totals boosted by the extra points from this. I'll have some more to say about this in a separate post, but as far as I can see, the 'defensive points' - this season - actually made no difference at all: the players who did best from them were players you would have had anyway (the most consistent defenders, who don't concede often, pick up a decent number of clean sheets, quite often get among the bonus points, even chip in the odd goal more often than most of their defensive teammates; and the same applies to the best-returning defensive midfielders this season - the 'defensive points' were nice to have, but they were a pure bonus, not the reason you should have been selecting those players). It's laborious to attempt a proper study of this - since, bizarrely, FPL has omitted to include the 'defensive points' awards in any of its stats roundups, so you have to scroll down the column of 'defensive contributions' figures to see how many times each player met the necessary threshold to earn the points in a game. However, I have attempted to tally up the 'defensive points' earned by the 5 excellent managers I try to gauge my progress against (it took quite a few hours!): and there really was nothing to choose between us - we all seem to have got between 160 and 180 additional points for the season.
Despite this huge gift of 'free points' (probably pretty much everyone earned something around 140 'defensive points' for the season, and a few lucky people may have got up close to 200), it was a painfully low-scoring season. Global champion Erik Ibsen's winning total of 2,582 points was the lowest in 8 years; and if you subtract the 'defensive points' windfall, it would probably have been the lowest since 2011 (the early years of the game tended to be much lower-scoring - partly because the 'bonus chips' hadn't yet been introduced).
We'd seen a big drop-off in points from our creative and goalscoring midfielders in the previous season (with a few notable exceptions, like Salah's record-smashing run of form, Saka's white-hot start, and Palmer's brilliance in the first half of the season), but things really tanked this year. Two of the long-time greats, DeBruyne and Son, both left the league in the summer; Diogo Jota was tragically killed on the eve of the new season; Jarrod Bowen was reclassified as a forward (and then spent most of the season playing on the wing - probably ensuring that he'd be a 'midfielder' again next year, if he transfers back into the league from relegated West Ham); Maddison was wiped out for the season with an ACL injury; Palmer missed the whole first half of the season with a succession of injuries; Justin Kluivert, prolific the previous year, also missed most of the season; Odegaard and Saka were both missing for long periods, and rather subdued in their contributions even when they did appear, as Arteta's emphasis on 'control' sucked the life out of Arsenal's attacking play; Mbeumo and Cunha struggled to settle in with a Manchester United team who were still a chaotic mess under Ruben Amorim; the much fancied Florian Wirtz struggled to adapt to the intensity of the Premier League and made very little impact in his first few months with struggling Liverpool; and several other players who'd made big contributions in the season or two prior now struggled with injuries or loss of form or poor team form - Foden, Mitoma, Ndiaye, Minteh, Gordon, Hudson-Odoi etc. all disappointed this time. (It was this absence of regular attacking contributions from any of the 'usual suspects' that made the 'defensive points monsters' - Anderson, Rice, Garner, Casemiro, Enzo Fernandez - attractive picks this season; and then only for the fact that they were, in spells, also contributing quite a few goals and/or assists - not for the defensive points alone.)
Bruno Fernandes was the standout player of the season - setting a new Premier League record for assists, and being only narrowly pipped by Erling Haaland as overall highest FPL points producer. I've always been sceptical about his FPL value, at least as a long-term hold, because in most previous seasons he has tended to blow very hot-and-cold, a few periods of intense productivity separated by painfully long sequences of games with no significant returns. And things didn't look promising for him at the start of the year, with United still floundering under Amorim, and the expensive new arrivals - Mbeumo, Cunha, and Sesko - looking likely to to take some of the creative focus away from Bruno; indeed, with Ugarte having proved to be one of the worst signings in Premier League history, it seemed that Bruno was now going to have to play deeper in midfield, in a pivot role alongside Casemiro. However, the inspirational Portuguese still found ways to break forward and help with the attack even when nominally starting this deep, yet also surprised us with his tenacity and effectiveness in the defensive aspects of this role - often earning the new defensive points (something which no-one would have bet on before the season!). In those difficult early months of the season, he was putting in superhuman efforts every week, trying to carry the team by himself, and some sort of burnout seemed likely; but the mid-season switch of manager revitalised the team, and gave Bruno the opportunity to have an even greater impact through the second half of the year.
This year, Bruno Fernandes was possibly the one player that, if you'd had him in your initial squad, you could safely hang on to him all season. However, in one of those cruel paradoxes of FPL, he was rarely out-performing any of the other leading midfield prospects over any short run of games; he just happened to be much more consistent than anyone else across the entire season; and that kind of consistency was something he'd conspicuously lacked in the preceding seasons, so, with all the turmoil around Old Trafford, it might have been reasonable to assume that Bruno's hot run of form would fizzle out.... and hold off buying him, if you hadn't had him from the outset. For much of the season his ownership hovered at a relatvely modest level of between 1.5 million and 2.5 million; it was only in Gameweek 24 that his ownership numbers began to soar, eventually reaching 6 million (still slightly less than half of the total manager accounts registered by the end of the season; but probably near 100% of the 'active' accounts!). I confess, I was one of those who remained a sceptic about him too long, and missed out on some valuable returns from him in the opening part of the season.
The only other midfielder to crack 200 points this season (just barely) was Antoine Semenyo. He's another player who, like Bruno, has regularly shown enormous potential, but - especially in FPL terms - a worrisome lack of consistency over the past few seasons. And we saw something of the same again this year. He started strong, with a long hot streak over the opening 7 games; but then the attacking contributions suddenly dried up, and many FPL managers deserted him over an 8-game drought. His returns started picking up again in November; but then transfer rumours started swirling around him, and that uncertainty on his future (would he leave the league altogether? would he move to a top Premier League side, where he might not be a regular starter?) made people hesitate to bring him back in, or offload him in anticipation, despite his return to form. As it turned out, he went to City, was immediately integrated there and - rather surprisingly, given how rarely this happens with any attacking player under Pep! - became pretty much an ever-present. And again, he started his second half of the season at the new club pretty strongly, but faded again in the last couple of months, with a six-game blank streak from from Gameweeks 30-35. Although his form has held much steadier this season, I'm still concerned that he's a player who thrives on being the centre of attention, the main creative focus of a team; and he tends to lapse into anonymity when team-mates are on a hot streak of form: last season, he was often pushed into the background by Kluivert, Tavernier, and Ouattara; this time, I think, it was the explosive late-season form of Doku and Cherki that took the wind out of his sails. Semenyo was a player who was good to have, even 'essential', for two or three spells, but not a season-long hold. If you'd happened to pick him in your initial squad, you got a very valuable boost to the start of your season.
Morgan Rogers had another season much like the previous one: a handful of big games (including back-to-back 15-pointers in Gameweeks 16 and 17: it would have been nice if you could have been on him for those!!), but long runs of blanks in between. Although he ended up as the 6th best midfield points producer (in this very lean season), he never really put together any extended run of form that would have recommended him as an FPL prospect. Morgan Gibbs-White had a rather subdued start to the season, but finished strongly: you probably wanted to acquire him round about Gameweek 28 or 30 (83 points across 10 games in that closing run - missing the Newcastle game in GW36 because of a facial injury). Bruno Guimaraes was having a fantastic season for Newcastle, returning 101 points across 15 games from Gameweeks 7 to 21; alas, a hamstring injury wiped him out for most of the last third of the season, or he would likely have finished among the year's Top 5 Midfielders. Harry Wilson had an insane run of form in the middle of the season, and for a while really became an 'essential': he had a slow start to the year, and his returns dried up again at the end, but he produced 9 goals and 7 assists for 129 points in 22 games between Gameweek 10 and Gameweek 31. And Dominik Szoboszlai was the one bright spot in a miserable season for Liverpool: consistently their best player, he produced 6 goals and 7 assists across the season for a final total of 160 points - and you wonder if it might have been even more, if he hadn't been forced to deputise at right-back so often. His new teammate, Florian Wirtz, finally hit some promising form during the middle of the season, with 73 points from Gameweeks 14 to 24 - but then his momentum was unfortunately derailed by an injury.
Rayan Cherki and Jeremy Doku were also very productive - in short spells: Cherki returned 66 points from Gameweeks 10 to 20, and 34 points from Gameweeks 29 to 35, but was best avoided the rest of the time; and Doku hit a 43-point streak from Gameweeks 32 to 36. While their team-mate Phil Foden, of course, produced the streak of all streaks, with 55 points in just 4 games, all played within a fortnight at the start of December! Nice if you could have been on any of those: but impossible to predict when they would occur - especially amid the constant 'Pep Roulette' threat of not even starting regularly.
Burnley's Jaidon Anthony looked like he might be one of the breakout stars of the season, notching 4 goals and an assist in the opening 8 games; unfortunately, Burnley really struggled after that bright start, and Anthony's attacking returns dried up for most of the remainder of the season. There was a similar initial rush of excitement about Jack Grealish, who appeared to be loving his football again on his loan to Everton, and snagged 4 assists in the opening 3 games. Alas, his impact gradually dwindled after that, and when he got injured at the end of January, he wasn't really much missed. Harvey Barnes usually impresses whenever he gets on the pitch; but, for some reason, Eddie Howe never seems to fancy him as a regular first-choice: he only started half the games this season (despite Gordon's awful form), but notched 7 goals and an assist in less than 2,000 minutes. Now that Gordon's moving on, perhaps we'll see more of him next year.
A few others showed promise in small doses, but never really put together a long run of good returns: Summerville at West Ham, Schade and Ouattara at Brentford, Ampadu and Aaronson and Okafor at Leeds, Tavernier and Rayan at Bournemouth, Buendia and McGinn at Villa, Gomez and Wieffer and Gross at Brighton. More even than in most seasons, the lack of any reliable returns from anyone, especially the usual big producers, meant that we had to be constantly rotating - to try to get on the players who were enjoying brief flashes of form.
With these somewhat streaky and unreliable returns from our most creative players, the midfield rankings this season were largely dominated by the dependable and hardworking holding players: Rice, Anderson, Garner, Casemiro, Caicedo, Enzo Fernandez. Frequent extra points for their 'defensive contributions' certainly helped their numbers. But the reason why they ended up ranking so highly was that they were also - at least in spells - producing a fair number of attacking contributions. Declan Rice, the frontrunner in this group, claimed 4 goals and 9 assists (though the great majority of them in the first half of the season; there was a dramatic drop-off in his returns after January); Elliot Anderson got 4 goals (I thought there had been more - that included some absolute belters!) and 5 assists; Casemiro bagged 9 goals, mostly headers (including 4 in the space of 6 games, from Gameweeks 29-34), and 4 assists; James Garner got 2 goals and 7 assists; Enzo Fernandez, in his best season so far, notched an astonishing 10 goals and 5 assists; even Moises Caicedo claimed 3 - very untypical - goals, bangers from distance, across the opening 7 weeks of the season (my mate Adam Clery discussed this early-season phenomenon of many deeper midfielders scoring goals from outside the box, the product of a transient defect in marking systems which was soon rectified). All of these, it should be noted, except Garner and Caicedo, got far more points from attacking contributions than defensive ones: without the goals, they would not have been worth owning for their defensive points alone.
It was the same story with the defenders: all the ones who consistently delivered well on the 'defensive contributions' metric - Tarkowski and Keane, Lacroix and Richards, Senesi and Hill and Truffert, Van Dijk, Alderete and Mukiele - were players you would have considered anyway, for general defensive soundness (not too many goals conceded, a good chance of a clean sheet against a weaker opponent) and perhaps also their aerial threat at set-pieces (almost all of them picked up at least 2 or 3 goals over the season, while Senesi and Truffert each claimed an impressive 6 assists, and Mukiele, despite some injury absences, 5 - mainly from his extraordinary long throw-ins).
Arsenal were so far ahead of everyone else defensively this season that there was often a temptation to double or even treble up on their defenders (and/or keeper); unfortunately, they were rarely able to keep a settled line-up at the back, because of injuries, and Arteta's selections could be erratic and unpredictable even when most of his players were available. Timber, in particular, who started the season exceptionally well, might have beaten Gabriel to the top spot in the defender rankings if he hadn't ended up missing so many games; and Calafiori and Hincapie also showed a lot of promise in their intermittent runs of starts. However, as with Raya getting very few 'saves' points [see below], the strength of Arsenal's defence actually counted against them under the new ' defensive points' rule: Gabriel - despite being by common consent the best defender in the league this year - only recorded 272 'defensive contributions' and a relatively modest 22 defensive points. He was the top defender for his clean sheets and his headed goals - NOT his 'defcons'.
Nico O'Reilly stole the attention among the defenders, becoming almost ever-present after Gameweek 4, regularly slotting into midfield from his starting position at left full-back, and often crashing the opposition box to nick a crucial goal (only 5 in the league? it felt like more, didn't it?!); however, his colleague on the other flank, Matheus Nunes, ran him neck and neck, amassing a very enviable 8 assists. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, Palace and Bournemouth had the next most impressive defences, and their keepers and defenders offered attractive FPL options for most of the season. Van Dijk and Guehi were the big surprises of the year, both coming up with far more attacking impact than they ever had before. Van Dijk was credited with 6 goals (more than in the previous 2 seasons combined!) and an assist - although I think at least 3 of these were very dubiously, probably wrongly, attributed to him, so that quirk of fortune gave a huge and undeserved lift to his points tally (and again, that attacking haul dwarfed his return of 32 defensive points). Guehi produced 3 goals and 5 assists; admittedly he'd started to show an upturn in attacking threat last season too, ending with 3 goals and 2 assists - that was as many as he'd managed in the whole of the 3 seasons prior; this again eclipsed his relatively modest 22 defensive points for the season. Van Dijk was the particularly weird, FPL-distorting case, though. Liverpool were having a dreadful season defensively; and a lot of that was his fault, he was clearly losing sharpness, getting slower, starting to make some bad decisions - his level had clearly dropped off massively this season. Common defensive metrics all back up the 'eye test' on this: he ranks among the bottom few defenders for goals conceded and xGC, and I think he's dead last on his 'delta' for that (how many more goals he conceded than his xGC projection). And yet he winds up in 4th place in the defender rankings because the Opta gnomes decided to award him 2 or 3 extra goals that clearly deflected in off someone else....?? There really was no sound rationale for picking Van Dijk on real-world form this season, certainly not at the premium price of 6 million pounds. But many people who did - purely out of loyalty, sentiment - ended up doing quite nicely out of it, thanks to all those improbable goals.
Malick Thiaw was one of the brightest of the new defenders in the league this year, although he had a hard time with struggling Newcastle. And Patrick Dorgu was an absolute revelation when he was tried out as a wide attacker by Amorim in his last days; Carrick continued that experiment and improved upon it, and for a few blissful weeks we thought we were going to again experience that 'perfect moment' in Fantasy where a defender is being played as an advanced midfielder or a forward, and is playing really well, and is giving us the prospect of an attacking contribution every other week or so (I think it last happened with Stuart Dallas at Leeds, and that's a few years ago now...; O'Reilly and Gvardiol have been 'inverting into midfield', not starting there). Alas, he soon got injured, and missed most of the rest of the season, so that dream was shattered. Maybe next year....?
David Raya ended up comfortably on top of the goalkeeping table (despite not having played the last game of the season!), a sudden surge of 5 successive clean sheets at the end of the season lifting him clear of the pack - after he'd spent most of the season neck-and-neck with the likes of Roefs, Pickford, Henderson, Kelleher, Donnarumma, and Verbruggen. This is a very rare case where a goalkeeper has prevailed on clean-sheet supremacy alone (he barely made the Top 20 on number of saves!!). This might seem to invalidate my frequent admonition that Raya is a bad goalkeeper pick for FPL; and it certainly undermines it to quite an extent (I hadn't anticipated that his clean-sheet advantage would end up being that huge) - if you'd been on Raya as your No. 1 all season, you wouldn't be unhappy about that. But the point is that he's a risky bet (clean sheets, even for a side as defensively dominant as Arsenal, are extremely uncertain: they can evaporate in a moment with one unlucky late goal or harsh refereeing decision against you), he's an expensive bet (several rival keepers who cost a half a million or a million, or even a million-and-a-half pounds less still finished within 20-30 points of him - despite his huge late surge; and you could almost certainly have wrung more points-value out of that money by spending it elsewhere in your squad; indeed you could probably have got more points by finding a really good rotation pair to fill the goalkeeping slot), and he's arguably a bit of a wasteful bet, since, in the context of the club quota, you'd expect that there might often be at least 3 other Arsenal players who would give you a stronger points advantage in their position category (Gabriel for most of the season, Rice for most of the first half of the season, at least, and one of the other defenders, or Saka or Trossard, in spells). The fact that a bet appears to have paid off, doesn't necessarily mean that it has paid off. And even if it has paid off, that still doesn't mean that it was the right bet to make - earlier on in the season, when you didn't have the benefit of hindsight.
There were a number of exceptional circumstances which contributed to Raya attaining such a dominant position in the final goalkeeper ranking - and meaning that he was perhaps an optimal pick in hindsight. There was rarely any pressure on the club quota from Arsenal, because the defensive roster (apart from Gabriel) kept getting injured and no-one really enjoyed a long run of consecutive starts (after Timber at the opening of the season), and none of the attacking prospects - Saka, Odegaard, Eze, Trossard, Gyokeres - came good for any extended period either; and his rival goalkeepers were hampered by inconsistent club form, and ended up with slightly more disappointing points totals than we might reasonably have expected. So, Raya did massively better than his predicted points outcome, while everybody else did slightly worse; and few of his outfield colleagues enjoyed a long enough run of form to fill out the club quota limit on Arsenal players. And yet.... it's still a toss-up as to whether he was the optimal goalkeeper choice for the year. I still think a good rotation pair (or a number of keepers rotated over the season) could probably have pipped him; and that might have left you with a little extra cash in the kitty for other players too.
Jordan Pickford once again had the most inspirational season - dominating all the Youtube highlights reels of 'best saves'. Dean Henderson and Caoimhin Kelleher also had good seasons, though perhaps not quite as good as we'd been hoping for; and Bart Verbruggen grew stronger in the second half of the year. But the limelight in this position was really stolen by the young Dutchman Robin Roefs, who played a major role in lifting promoted Sunderland to Europa League qualification ("The Roefs, the Roefs, the Roefs is on fire!" my favourite chant of the year!).
Much like last year, Erling Haaland started hot, but then ran into a barren spell: he clocked 19 goals and 4 assists in the opening 17 matches, but then managed only 3 goals and 3 assists across the next 15 matches - before warming up again somewhat over the closing stretch. Many managers abandoned him over his dry period; though not as many as you'd expect - after peaking at an ownership of 9.5 million for the Manchester derby at Old Trafford in Gameweek 22, he shed just over a million owners over subsequent weeks. I partly understand that reluctance to part with him: with so many other big players out injured (and few premium options in the game anyway this year, and Palmer and Salah no longer compelling picks), there was absolutely no pressure on budget; and with few other forwards showing convincing form either,... we found ourselves in the extraordinary situation where we could carry Haaland on the bench, keep him as an unused third forward for a few weeks more, until he rediscovered his scoring touch. There weren't any other forwards obviously more worth betting on; and we didn't need the money tied up in him for anything else. That is a rare, rare circumstance indeed.
Joao Pedro was another popular option who tested his owners' patience, and was ultimately seen as a 'disappointment' by many, despite a pretty respectable final points total. After his sensational debut performances for Chelsea in last summer's Club World Cup, many had been hoping that the Brazilian would light the Premier League on fire - but that never quite happened. His performances were very patchy in the opening months of the season, and he only finally started to hit a bit of a run of consistent form during the brief 'Rosenior Revival', bagging 8 goals and 6 assists in a sequence of 5 wins in 8 games from the beginning of February. Alas, that all soon fell apart again, and he only managed 1 more goal in the remaining 9 games of the season.
Hugo Ekitike had looked very promising, until he got injured in the closing months of the season. Ollie Watkins finished the year strongly, after being a stranger to the goal for much of the season. Jarrod Bowen had worked tirelessly to try to save the Hammers from relegation, although, being mostly played wide on the right this year, his opportunities to get into goalscoring positions were limited, and he was outshone in the closing phase of the season by his new strike partner, Taty Castellanos. Somewhat surprisingly, Bowen snuck into second place in the forward ranking, right at the death - thanks to an astonishing haul of 13 assists across the season. Veteran Danny Welbeck had one of his best seasons ever, but, unsurprisingly, was rarely able to play as many as 5 games in succession, and so only started in two-thirds of the matches. Raul Jimenez also impressed on occasion, though Fulham's goalscoring - such as it was - came to be dominated by their midfielders.
The big absence this season, for Nottingham Forest and for Fantasy fans, was that of talismanic striker Chris Wood: he had been one of the standout assets of last season, overperforming his xG by a ridiculous amount; but this time he missed almost the entire year because of injuries. It also caused much discombobulation in Fantasy-land that the much admired Alexander Isak could never get himself fully fit or in-form to make his mark at Liverpool, and ended up missing most of the season with injuries. Alongside those two voids in the forward roster, newcomers Sesko and Gyokeres both struggled to make a big impact; both, I thought, were working hard for their teams and playing pretty well; but Sesko wasn't trusted with regular starts, and Gyokeres was taking an unselfish role, working more to create space for others than to find chances for himself; both found a bit more of a goal-touch towards the end of the season, and I fancy we might see much more productivity from them next year.
This lack of impact from the premium forward options, along with the lack of returns from midfield (Salah having a wretched farewell season in a ragged Liverpool side, Palmer repeatedly injured through the first half of the season, and then mostly still subdued and out-of-sorts when he did return), meant that we all had money to burn this year: none of the most expensive players (apart from Bruno Fernandes and Haaland) were fit or playing well enough to be worth having. So, we could afford absolutely anyone else we wanted, and still have money left over. For possibly the first time in FPL history, many managers were ending the season with up to 10 million quid unused in the kitty!
And that budget surplus could be expanded even further by the fact there was quite a lot of tempting talent in the lower price strata among the forwards: at times, Beto and Barry of Everton, Isidor and Brobbey of Sunderland, Mané at Wolves, Flemming at Burnley, Woltemade at Newcastle for a while, and Castellanos at West Ham in the latter stages all looked worth gambling on. Unfortunately, of course, these were all at lower-half teams, or indeed relegation teams, teams whose consistency of form could not be relied upon; moreover, they were often alternate picks at the same club, rotating starts with each other. So,... you might have got lucky if you went for one of these guys for a few weeks at just the right time; but in general, these were probably bets that mostly didn't pay off. Well, except for Will Osula with Newcastle, who had an absolutely banging end to the season with 5 goals in the last 7 games!!
The big breakthroughs of the season among strikers, though, were Igor Thiago at Brentford, Dominic Calvert-Lewin at Leeds, and Eli Kroupi at Bournemouth. Thiago was remarkably consistent all year (apart from a 6-game dry spell in November and December, which caused some to have doubts about him), and really looked a complete forward - better even than Mbeumo, who he'd replaced. (I'm hoping he'll get the start for Brazil in the World Cup.) Calvert-Lewin managed to remain just about injury-free (not suffering any long absences, anyway) all season for the first time in his career, and made a big contribution to his club's Premier League survival (although his 14-goal return, many of them penalties, was really a bit too sparsely strung out to make him a compelling FPL pick). And Bournemouth's dynamic French teenager seems poised to take a big step up next year; he became a regular starter in the second half of this season, and bagged 7 goals from 16 starts in the last 18 games (again, not quite prolific enough to recommend him for FPL selection - unless times are very lean - but extremely promising for the future).
Arsenal came out as worthy but dull winners. For me, it's not the over-reliance on mauling at set-pieces (or the undue tolerance referees have been showing them in regard to this), or the irritating fact that in general the officiating breaks seem to have been almost all going their way this year, but the general style of play, the Arteta philosophy that bothers me - the excessive prioritization of 'control' which seems to stifle individual creativity. Odegaard - when he has played - has increasingly been getting stick from his own fans for passing the ball sideways too often and not producing as many attacking contributions as in the past; but that's obviously how he's been told to play. Saka has suffered the same sort of drop-off in his attacking output; and when he, or Trossard or Eze or Martinelli, do occasionally cut inside and have a pop at goal from around the edge of the box,.... you sense that they're impulsively 'going off script', and that Mikel doesn't really like it,... even if it's saved him the game. Arsenal's organization, commitment, and workrate this season have been admirable. It is impressive how they've so often managed to grind out a result even in games where they didn't play particularly well. But they have rarely been fun to watch. (I actually have a big soft spot for Arsenal - mainly because of the absolutely beautiful football they so often managed to play under Wenger. They have entirely lost that 'magic' at the moment, alas; and I felt unable to root for their success this year, in the Premier League or the Champions League.)
It is alarming to me, too, that the Champions tend to set the zeitgeist that will mould the rest of the league's attitudes in coming seasons. In a year in which defences have mostly been decisively on top, and attacking returns constrained (it didn't help that so many of the best creative talents were missing for most of the season), every club has moved more towards prioritizing set-piece routines as the likeliest source of goals; and, with PGMOL being so lax about curbing the amount of wrestling that this leads to in and around the six-yard box, most of them have lapsed into this sort of cheating and thuggery on occasion too. All this isn't entirely Arsenal's fault; but it is to a significant extent - they have set the tone, set the example, and they've now proven that it can be the key to success. This has rather tarnished their title victory. I hope that these issues can be sorted out next season. We need a few more players like Cherki (and Palmer and Wirtz... and Eze!) to prove that defence-defence-defence is not the way forward, to open our game up again to more end-to-end attacking play.
Most of the other teams this year were gallingly inconsistent. Even City blew hot and cold rather, and were never quite able to ratchet up their late charge to try to catch Arsenal in the title race. Liverpool suffered a spectacular fall from their title-winning pomp of the previous season - but still had enough quality in the side not to slip too far down the league table. Chelsea, though, were probably the biggest disappointment of the season (to me, anyway: I'd fancied them as possible title winners - not out of any affection for the club, but because I'd been blown away by how well they'd played in the Club World Cup); their form in the closing months was practically relegation-worthy - for a club of that stature to collapse from being in touch with the title race to out of European competition altogether is abominable. Manchester United, in one of the season's few positive stories, flip-flopped the other way: they began still floundering in mid-table mediocrity under headless chicken Amorim, but as soon as old boy Michael Carrick took charge after Christmas they began to look like they could charge all the way back up the table into title contention. I think they did in fact have the best points return from the second half of the season; and they finished a very creditable third. (It's probably asking too much for them to challenge properly for the title next year, but at least they've got themselves credibly back in the conversation - for the first time since Sir Alex retired.)
The mid-table pack were all incredibly close this year, with only around 10 points or less separating 6th and 16th place through most of the run-in. Unfortunately, that meant we saw some particularly inconsistent performances from these teams, and you couldn't really back players from the likes of Fulham or Brentford or Everton for a long run in your Fantasy side.
The big shock of the season for Spurs fans was that their team managed to do even worse than last year, and they were fortunate not to get relegated. For anyone who's taken note of the club's terrible recruitment of players and managers, and the obvious problems in the dressing-room culture there over the last several years, this was not that much of a surprise at all. No, for the rest of us, the biggest shock of the season was the catastrophic decline of Nottingham Forest, after the wonderful form they'd shown last season. Many FPL managers were hoping to rely again on Chris Wood, Morgan Gibbs-White, Matz Sels, or one of their formidable back-line - but they all had fairly horrible seasons this year, as the club found itself battling relegation again. (Though Neco Williams was the best of their defenders for FPL this year, and looked a promising pick in the later part of the season. Gibbs-White also rediscovered his goal-touch over the closing run of games.)
The other feelgood story of the year was the impressive solidity of Sunderland, the strongest promoted side we've seen in several years. But for those who like their feelgood stories to contain an element of 'redemption', I suppose the Leeds arc might be even more appealing: they had looked fairly certain to go back down early in the season, but a major tactical reset by Daniel Farke around the beginning of December transformed their fortunes, and they were soon scrabbling their way to safety. As is the way of the world, these two happinesses could only be bought with the misery of relegation for West Ham and Wolves; but frankly, they haven't looked like they deserved to stay in the Premier League for the last few seasons anyway, so I don't think anyone other than their own fans was really very sorry to see them go.
Not a great year, all told. A shortage of goals, a shortage of pretty football, most of our top creative talents sidelined or out-of-sorts, a purposefully dull Arsenal side winning the title by default because all of their usual rivals had badly sub-par years, and a staggeringly low average points tally in Fantasy Premier League.
Let us hope for better next year!
