Moving deadlines - needed or not?

 

In the wake of this weekend's late postponement of the first scheduled kick-off of the Gameweek, a few managers on the online forums were advocating for the FPL deadline to have been moved.... ostensibly to allow people a little more time to panic (sorry, I meant 'think'....) about how to address this unforeseen calamity.

Would this actually have been a reasonable or useful (or practical) idea?  Or a fair one?

I think not. Probably not reasonable or practical because - unless the FPL website has been set up with a straightforward back-end interface that allows fairly un-techie staff to easily implement a deadline change (which I doubt) - that kind of thing could involve quite a bit of programming... which probably wouldn't be easy to get done safely and accurately within just an hour or two, especially on a weekend (when I imagine only a skeleton staff are on duty at FPL Towers...?).

Probably not even that useful to anyone, since, as I've noted previously in the last few days, there's really not much that you can do about an 'Act of God' disaster like this; making multiple short-term transfers, or throwing your Free Hit at the problem, is only going to be counter-productive. If you happened to be on top of the weather news (and the likelihood of a postponement was heavily predicted over the preceding 24 hours), you had ample time to take whatever panicky and inappropriate 'remedial' action you fancied before the original deadline anyway; and if you weren't, a few extra hours of potential faffing time probably wouldn't have made much difference to you.

And a change certainly would not have been FAIR, I don't think - for two reasons:

1) Such a modification of the rules could only have been implemented for a postponement of the first match of the gameweek, not for any of the later ones. (And with a major storm like that slowly rolling across the country, and some gameweeks being extended over three or four days, it is quite possible that some matches may get postponed only after the gameweek deadline has passed; it happened a number of times during the Covid pandemic. Such an eventuality is really rough on any FPL managers with a lot of players affected by the post-deadline postponement; managers adversely affected by a postponement of the opening game already enjoy a slight advantage in that respect - why should it be made any greater?

2)  Far more importantly, in my view, the gameweek deadlines are set and advertised weeks in advance, and should remain fixed, for the sake of clarity and straightforwardness in the application of the game rules: everyone expects the deadlines to come into force at the originally advertised times, no matter what. 

Some people choose to finalise their teams for the week some way ahead of the deadline, and indeed may not conveniently be able to leave it until just a few hours beforehand. (When the first kick-off is at Saturday lunchtime, the deadline is in the middle of the night for managers in the Americas and Oceania!) Unexpected, last-minute changes to the gameweek deadline would disadvantage those in adverse timezones, and those with spotty Internet access who are not readily able to keep abreast of EPL news - or UK news more generally, or any news - hour by hour. And that accounts for a very substantial proportion of those playing the game (including myself): the USA, Malaysia, Australia, and Indonesia are some of the countries where the game is most popular, outside of the UK. It is unfair to FPL managers in countries like those to implement rule changes (which is what moving the deadline would be) at times when they can't readily be aware of and respond to them.  [The same argument would apply to another rule change often argued for on the forums, allowing manual substitutions to be made throughout the gameweek - as is usually the case with international tournament versions of the game, where the 'game days' for each round of matches are usually spread over two or three or four days. I find it a clunky and unnecessary over-refinement of the gameplay.... and very, very difficult to make use of from a timezone 8 or 10 or 12 hours distant from where the matches are being played.]

Moving a deadline unexpectedly - particularly 'late in the day', quite shortly before the original deadline - would unfairly disadvantage anyone who'd already made their squad changes for the week (perhaps shortly before the deadline change is announced, or as it's being announced... or even after its announcement, but still before the original deadline, because many people will have remained unaware of the change). We all plan for when the deadline is originally advertised to be; and if we choose to finalise our teams before that, we shouldn't be retroactively penalised for that decision by a late 'rule change'.

Perhaps a stronger case could be made for such a late change to the deadline, if - and only if - there were clearly defined circumstances for implementing such a change automatically (not just leaving it to the discretion of whoever's on the FPL Crisis Desk at the weekend.... and blindly trusting to the tech team to be able to put it into effect at short notice); and this provision is well-publicised to all participants. But even then, I think it's unnecessary (not actually that helpful to anyone), and unfair (it confers a privilege - albeit one that is probably not actually very valuable - on managers in or close to the UK, who are constantly on their phones....).  And at the moment, this is not the case: there is no established provision or precedent for automatically shifting a gameweek deadline in circumstances like this.

Therefore, I contend, the deadline should be treated as sacrosanct, and not moved for anything.