The Fantasy Premier League official website (and accompanying Facebook page) started getting active again even while EURO 2024 was still in progress, gradually teasing selected new player pricings during the last few days of the tournament... and then relaunching the game for the new season only two or three days after Spain's triumph in the Final.
And immediately the FPL forums were flooded with people anxiously obsessing over every little snippet of leaked information... AND sharing endless variations of DRAFT SQUADS. More than FOUR WEEKS before the season kicks off!!! [The opening game this year is an evening kick-off between Manchester United and Fulham on Friday 16th August; the main programme gets under way on Saturday 17th.]
I know I'm not exactly modelling the best example here, with the amount of time I've spent writing for this blog over the last week, but.... there is such a thing as an FPL/Life Balance, people! And spending hours and hours fretting about the game in pre-season is not conducive to maintaining that.
So much might yet happen before the Big Kick-Off - valuable hints about form and tactics and likely team selections (not many, perhaps, but some...) emerging in the pre-season friendlies, players arriving or leaving in the summer transfer window, and, unfortunately, INJURIES. There really is no point in trying to select a squad - even provisionally - when we really have no idea who's going to be playing (and for which team!) on the GW1 weekend in mid-August. There is no point in even thinking about it.
It's not just a WASTE OF TIME - it's positively a BAD IDEA, something that will almost certainly lead to you making WORSE DECISONS about your selections.
Because of the way the human brain works... if you start looking at the player options, and allowing yourself to think, even vaguely, about possible squads, you will inevitably start making some decisions about your likely squad: decisions based on inadequate, incomplete, soon-to-be-outdated information; hence, in many cases at least, WRONG decisions. You probably won't be very self-aware about this; well, if you're even a little aware of it at the time, you'll almost certainly forget about it very quickly. But these proto-decisions - not always outright selections, but foundatioinal preferences and prejudices and assumuptions that will have a massive influence on selections - are mostly forming deep in your subconscious; and once they're there, they're very difficult to displace. The deep-rooted cognitive bias in favour of self-consistency means that once you've made a choice like this, it's very, very difficult for you to change your mind about it (especially if you don't realise you've made that choice, and/or don't know why you've made it!). There's a similar, very dangerous phenomenon called the 'anchoring bias' - which means you're very likely to make decisions based on the first one or two pieces of information you look at.
Anyone who's picked a squad two or three or four weeks out from the start of the season is VERY unlikely to have picked a good one. And they're also much less likely to be able to pick a good one later on... than someone who only starts pondering the options after the Community Shield. [This year, the season's traditional curtain-raiser is being played between Manchester City and Manchester United on Saturday 10th August.]
I know I put out a BIG POST about 'How to pick the initial squad' just a few days ago... I'm SORRY: I just wanted to get it out there in plenty of time before the start of the season, to give people a chance to discover it. I did not mean to encourage anyone to start trying to pick their squad straight away. (Bookmark that link, and come back to it in a week or two!)
The best time - the ONLY sensible time - to pick a squad for the new FPL season is.... on the afternoon of Friday 16th August.
Really, that is absolutely a TOP TIP!! Try it next year.
