What's LUCK got to do with it?? (1)

 Well, unfortunately,..... pretty much EVERYTHING!!!

You're choosing a squad of 15 players, from amongst more than 700 possible selections at the start of the season - about the majority of whom, you know absolutely nothing. Every week, you're having to try to think about whether to use transfers - or a 'chip' - to change any of those players. And you're having to try to identify your strongest 11 to start each game (and determine a 'bench order' for the rest, in case you're going to need any of them too - which you very often do!); and nominate one of them to receive a double-points bonus as your 'captain' for the week....

That amounts to many hundreds of possible decisions at the start of the season, and dozens or hundreds more every single week of the season. And sure, making the most promising possible choices for each of those dilemmas is a matter of skill. But, alas, making the most promising/most probable/most likely choices doesn't actually decide how many points you get.  However objectively 'good' all of your predictive decisions may have been.... they can still turn out well or badly; or very well.... or very, very badly: THAT'S all a matter of pure luck.

So, how does 'LUCK' manifest itself in our game of Fantasy Premier League, and what sort of impacts does it have?

Well,.... it's impossible to quantify with any precision (and people are going to differ in their definitions and interpretations of what constitutes 'luck). But I have explored this topic quite extensively over the last 4 or 5 years, and I have some key observations on the issue I'd like to share here.

The sources of luck

How does luck most forcefully express itself in the game? Any time there is a significant swing of points for a not-entirely-predicted reason...  These are the most obvious ways:

i)     Exceptional performances by an individual player

Even freakishly good players like Salah and Haaland, who do score hattricks almost every season, and often 2 or 3 (or very occasionally, perhaps, even more) in a season, cannot be guaranteed to do so - not even over a whole season, and certainly not in any individual game. And when they do, even if it's when they're on a hot run of form and facing a promoted side, it cannot be said to be entirely expected; you still have to acknowledge that there's at least a small element of luck involved in a great player fulfilling an optimistic expectation; even if it did seem like a very strong bet, it was still a bet.

If those players get a huge haul when they or their team have apparently been in poor form, and/or they're facing one of their toughest rivals - nobody was expecting that, and you've got to consider it a pretty lucky event.

When a lesser player gets a big attacking haul, and you happen to have him, that's definitely lucky. When it's a defender - or a goalkeeper! (only six have ever scoredl in the EPL) - who gets a goal... or sometimes, a brace of goals... that's very, very lucky.

And of course, a penalty save is a freakish rarity, entirely unpredictable - yet it gives your keeper a very handy points boost.

But other saves can turn the course of a game too. And sometimes these are positively superhuman saves (or goal-line clearances or heroic last-ditch blocks from a defender) by a player who's been having an iffy season up until then. In FPL terms, that's LUCK - good luck if you have that player, and bad luck if you don't.

Also.... player and team performances can often be greatly helped by individual mistakes on the other side (or, sometimes, the whole opposition side somehow just 'not showing up').

NB   FPL's 'Team of the Week' often includes fairly few of the highest-owned players. Very occasionally, it might include none at all. Just about every week there are some really unexpected players who get big hauls. (And some good players who were expected to do quite well.... but did hugely well. If you were on any of them,... you were LUCKY.)

ii)    Unexpected results

Many games are turned, unexpectedly, by individual moments of brilliance - or mistakes, or accidents, or dubious refereeing decisions - but many others are characterised by a surprisingly good performance from one side... and/or a surprisingly poor showing from the other.

Sometimes, the 'form book' just goes out of the window, and a leading team - even City or Arsenal or Liverpool - can get turned over by a side in the lower half of the table. Good teams, seemingly out of nowhere, suddenly have an 'off' day; and terrible teams suddenly play out-of-their-socks and pull off an unlikely upset. These kinds of aberrant events can also cause huge and unpredicted points swings in FPL.

iii)   'Acts of God'

Players missing games, or having to go off early - most commonly because of injury; but it can also be as a result of a virus (Covid still going around!) or some other illness, a personal issue, a social media indiscretion, trouble with the police or the FA, or just a spat with a manager or a teammate - also have a huge influence on points returns.

And then, once in a blue moon, you get a raft of fixtures cancelled at the last minute because of a mass disease outbreak or an extreme weather event or the death of the monarch...

iv)   Injuries

The rate of injuries in the Premier League has been rising alarmingly over the past decade or so - and, it seems, particularly in the last few years - probably driven by the increased pace and intensity of the modern game,  and especially the frequent emphasis on vigorous pressing when out of possession. I haven't found an authoritative tally of this online, but I'm fairly sure last year was the worst ever for injuries in the Premier League's history. (I had to replace 55 significant injuries in my squad during the season - more than 50% more than my previous worst!)

Obviously, when you suddenly lose a key player - particularly on the eve of a game you'd been expecting him to do really well in - that's a major dose of bad luck. And in the world of FPL, absences hit especially hard when news of them only emerges late in the week... often after the Gameweek deadline, leaving you no opportunity to move them out of your side.

v.}   Improbable 'Bonus Points' allocations

The weighting of the BPS ('Bonus Points System'), the rating scale that FPL uses to determine the award of 'bonus points' in the game, is WAY off. Very often a player who was, by common consensus, the 'Man of the Match' will mystifyingly fail to receive the maximum 3 extra points; sometimes, rather too often, he won't even get 1 'bonus point'. The system is notably biased against some players and in favour of others. (Mo Salah, strangely, is not beloved of the BPS; he registers few if any defensive actions, doesn't get much credit for anything except goals, and is rather heavily penalised for 'missing' chances - so, he very rarely picks up all 3 'bonus points' unless he's produced multiple goal contributions in a game. His teammate Trent Alexander-Arnold, on the other hand, with his rare combination of attacking and defending involvements, regularly receives 3 extra points, even when he's apparently had a rather 'quiet' game!)  At least these tendencies of the BPS scoring, though they seem inappropriate and unfair, are reasonably predictable. Sometimes, however, the distribution of the bonus points can be unfathomably eccentric. And this is a big deal: you hope to get something around 300 or so points from bonuses over the season, but the return can easily swing 100 or more points above or below that - and that's pretty much all of most people's season-to-season variance in points total!

vi)    Poor decisions by the officials and VAR

Obviously, yellow and red cards have the most noticeable impact on your weekly points score. And we know that subsequent review on TV analysis shows frequently reveals them to have been highly dubious, if not outright wrong decisions (even when they've been reconsidered via the VAR process - which they're not, most of the time).

But penalty awards (particularly under the now absurdly over-complicated and highly subjective Handball Law) are also a pretty much weekly source of bitter controversy. And free-kicks (and corners too, or sometimes even throw-ins) given or not given, or given the wrong way, can also have a huge impact on the course of a game.

But goals being disallowed for nonsensical reasons (or, more rarely, being allowed when they shouldn't have been) is the major impact for FPL. I have a particular gripe with the modern obsession with trying to decide 'offside' calls to the millimetre. The technology isn't good enough to achieve that - and never will be; it's fatuous even to try. There ought to be a more practical definition of the offence that could be called accurately with the naked eye (most of the time; and then by video review, if necessary, all the time.... and quickly).

And the refereeing really seems to have been getting worse in the last couple of seasons. As with injuries, I think last year was surely the worst yet for VAR screw-ups, with multiple bizarre decisions being scrutinised by the pundits on TV almost every week, and PGMOL several times having to issue a public apology for a particularly egregious error. And they reached a new nadir with the bizarre disallowing of the Luis Diaz goal against Spurs (assisted by Salah; both of whom I had in my squad that week... Not that I'm bitter; well, yes, I am!), where the VAR team apparently got the call right... yet somehow miscommunicated it??!!

vii)    'Quirky' decisions by managers

It can be infuriating when managers suddenly 'rest' a star player for no apparent reason; though I tend to find it even more vexing when they shake-up the entire tactics of the side and/or play your man in a new position - thereby eliminating your prospects of a good haul from him that week in a more fiendishly subtle way. Pep Guardiola is so notorious for this sort of thing that many FPL managers are actually reluctant to use almost any of his players, for fear of how unexpected rotations may damage their points returns. But Pep is by no means the only one; this tweaking-the-tactics just for the fun of it is becoming more and more a feature of our modern game.

Taking players off before an hour has passed (particularly frustrating if it's actually in the 60th minute!) is also a cruel affront to FPL managers, because it robs them of an extra point for a 'full appearance' - and also possibly, if their man was playing well, of adding to a fine attacking haul. Pep again is the most egregious offender - loving to take Haaland off almost as soon as he's completed a hattrick (thus making it very unlikely that the lanky Viking is ever going to score 4 goals in one game in the EPL). But Jurgen Klopp was also quite bad at substituting players just shy of the 60-minute mark; and several others have been guilty of it as well.

Last season was quite possibly The Luckiest Ever (certainly in my time playing FPL): all of the above types of events occurred numerous times - far, far more often than in a typical season; including, for example, a remarkable number of goalkeeper changes (the most I can ever remember). We also saw - though not solely for the reasons above - both the highest scoring week in FPL history and the lowest scoring week (on global average, that is; not the highest individual scores) - in the same season! That was weird. 

We did have some more pleasant - but still results-distorting - surprises like.... Arsenal keeping 18 clean sheets and running City close for the title, or Cole Palmer escaping the City bench to become FPL's Player of the Season, or Jean-Philippe Mateta improbably matching Wayne Rooney's long-standing record of being the only player to score double-digits in both legs of a double gameweek...

So, yes, overall, it was a season with an unusually high number of exceptional - and unpredictable - events in it (injuries, bad refereeing decisions, yo-yo-ing form for some leading clubs and players, yet more injuries...), and that had a very distorting effect on outcomes for FPL managers last year. A lot of people in the top 50,000 or 100,000 were debutants, or people who'd never done that well previously in the game. Even the Global Champion, although he has had a pretty solid record in recent years, hadn't actually averaged any better than me over the previous five seasons, and his winning score was more than 300 points ahead of his previous best!! And most of the people that I've identified over the years as outstanding managers.... had a really bad season last year: many of them finished outside the top million, a few were outside the top 2 or 3 million.

How does that happen? How can we have a year where so many 'average' managers dominate the top of the charts, yet 'good' managers strangely tumble down the ranking?  Well,.... it's LUCK.

I shall have more to say on this in a little while - about how 'luck' and 'skill' interact in outcomes, and how they appear to me to be distributed across the community of FPL managers.

To be continued....    (At the weekend, maybe....)