The biggest PROBLEM with the 'Assistant Manager' chip

 

I've already explained why I so dislike this vile novelty chip the FPL powers-that-be are foisting on us this year - briefly here, and in elaborate detail here.

There are a number of irksome obstacles to deploying the damn thing at all (which may perhaps be enough to dissuade some people from bothering to use it). 

Many on the online forums have been bitching most about the 'transfer charge' for your selected manager for the chip, complaining that it overstrains an already inadequate player budget. I think that's a greatly overstated complaint: the sums are relatively trivial, and shouldn't have much of an impact on your squad strength. But the initial purchase of your manager is likely to necessitate you having to sell at least 1,... maybe 2 or 3, or even 4 players in order to free up the necessary cash; and that is a substantial irritation.

A rather greater irritation, to my mind, is the restriction of your per-club player quota - meaning that you will be denied the opportunity to bring in a third player from the same club as your selected manager.

However, both of these annoyances pale into insignificance beside the three-week duration of the chip - coupled with the prohibition of using more than one chip at a time (it was not originally specified that the new chip would be bound by this old rule; but that point has now been clarified - to everyone's disadvantage). Being blocked from the possibility of using any other chip for three whole gameweeks is a HUGE handicap - one that should perhaps make all of us question whether we want to use this chip at all. Its potential rewards are indeed enormous (game-distorting, unfair), but the risks attendant upon it could also prove to be quite disastrous.

There are TWO 'blank gameweeks' in the latter part of the season (when some teams will miss their scheduled league fixtures because of the League Cup Final or the FA Cup Semi-Finals), followed by a pair of Double Gameweeks, in which the clubs who had games postponed will make them up by playing twice in a few days, within the same gameweek. There will now be an additional Double Gameweek, just for Liverpool and Everton (replacing the fixture cancelled a couple of weeks ago because of Storm Darragh). There may yet be others added to the schedule, because of more severe weather or other unexpected events.

Blank Gameweeks can affect multiple teams, and can easily wipe out half or more of your squad. And so, you really want to try to keep your Free Hit available to help protect you from the potentially devastating consequences of a big - and perhaps quite unexpected - Blank Gameweek.

Double Gameweeks are prized as particularly good occasions to try to take advantage of the game's regular bonus chips, the Triple Captain and Bench Boost. And it is often desirable to 'set up' for the Bench Boost by playing the second Wildcard a week or so before the target Double Gameweek, to optimise the squad (getting in as many players with double-fixtures as possible, and as many players as possible with the best fixtures) and to try to ensure that you will have a full bench for that week (which is the first essential for a successful Bench Boost).

Rescheduled fixtures typically only have their dates confirmed a fairly short time ahead. At the moment, there is still no date fixed for the postponed Everton v Liverpool match. It seems likeliest that it can be slotted into Gameweek 25 or Gameweek 28, or perhaps even as late as Gameweek 33.  But it is very possible that we still won't know when it is to be played when the 'Assistant Manager' chip first becomes available (after the deadline of Gameweek 23). Since almost everyone who hasn't yet used their Triple Captain chip is now hoping to play it on Mo Salah in that unique Double Gameweek for Liverpool, those people will probably feel precluded from trying to use the new chip until a new date for that missed Merseyside derby is announced.

Having the Free Hit available to help negotiate the Blank Gameweeks in GW29 (League Cup Final) or GW34 (FA  Cup Semi-Finals) is probably even more valuable - if not essential. 

And the 'BIG' Double Gameweek following the postponements for the FA Semis (probably in GW36 or 37, but possibly earlier; GW33 also looks like an 'available slot') is the prime opportunity this season - the only obviously good one - to use the Bench Boost chip.

Because we don't know exactly when these Double Gameweeks will be - and we might not know for sure until just a week or two beforehand! - it's pretty much impossible to plan how to use the 'Assistant Manager' chip..... either to take advantage of them with that chip, or to avoid them so that we can use other chips instead. The bloated three-week duration of the chip makes it completely unmanageable.

So, many managers would probably have preferred to use a multi-week chip straight away in January. After that, there are few if any convenient gaps in the schedule that would allow you to play it without messing up your plans for your other chips. But the churlish FPL gnomes have strangely decided to delay the launch of the new 'Assistant Manager' chip until the beginning of February - so, it is now really difficult to identify good opportunities to use it without compromising, or completely abandoning, your original chip strategy. Most of us are looking at trying fit 7 weeks of chip play into just 15 gameweeks - and that's a huge headache.

Now, as I mentioned the other day, the 'Assistant Manager' chip is going to be worth far more than either of the two existing bonus chips - and probably far more than both of them combined - so it might be worth sacrificing your previous plans for these other chips in order to try to maximise your return from the new chip. Some folks have conjectured that it could be worth more to play the 'Assistant Manager' chip in a Double Gameweek (although I think it would probably not yield as much as a good Bench Boost return from a DGW; and perhaps not even quite as much as a really good Triple Captain return, unless you manage to successfully exploit the bonus for a result against a much higher-placed team in at least one of the two fixtures).

But this all becomes insanely complex to try to calculate. Because.... there are very limited opportunities to get a good return from any of the bonus chips; and so, where it seems that the 'best' week for two (or now, all three) of them might be the same, you have to try to estimate whether 'Chip A in Best Week' + 'Chip B in Second Best Week' is likely to be worth more or less than 'Chip B in Best Week' + 'Chip A in Second Best Week'. That's plenty hard enough with just two bonus chips that both benefit from Double Gameweeks; adding in a third - which has a longer duration, and might conceivably wipe out two opportunities (two Double Gameweek opportunities!) to play the other chips - makes it close-to-uncomputable.

Moreover, it can be really valuable to stay flexible - and opportunistic - in your approach to the bonus chips. It may be that at a certain point in the season, you find yourself with an unexpectedly strong bench, and suddenly - for the first time in ages -  everyone appears to be fit and likely to start.... in a week (though only a regular Single Gameweek) where almost everyone has a really good fixture. When circumstances come together for you like that, it's probably going to be your best chance to use the Bench Boost chip - much better than gambling on getting good fixtures in a Double Gameweek (because you don't know for sure who's going to be playing who until very shortly beforehand) and that you're going to have everyone still be fit for it (even if you 'set up' with a Wildcard in the week before, you can still be hit by a rash of last-minute injuries); this is particularly so when, this year, there's seemingly only going to be ONE 'big' Double Gameweek, and it doesn't fall until the very end of the season.

Something similar might happen with a Triple Captain opportunity. Although it's obviously much more difficult to get 15 fit players in your squad in a week when nearly all of them have good fixtures than it is to ensure that one of your handful of star players is fit to play in one of his most promising fixtures, and there are thus usually several tempting opportunities to risk the TC chip in a season,.... nevertheless, unexpected shifts in team form can suddenly make it appear that your best player's best chance of a big haul is in a different game to any of the ones most anticipated in the early part of the season.... perhaps it may even be in the next game.

Thus, I would argue, ruling yourself out of being able to play either of your bonus chips for three weeks at a time may have an enormous - and perhaps quite unforeseen - opportunity cost.

But ruling yourself out of being able to play the Free Hit could be.... absolutely catastrophic. More widespread and serious 'extreme weather' events than Storm Darragh could very conceivably wipe out most or a weekend's fixtures (or, occasionally, even all of them; but at least that's the same for everyone; and we'll all later enjoy an extra - HUGE - Double Gameweek!). So could other forms of disruption, such as a major terrorist incident or widespread industrial action or another pandemic scare, or.... well, King Charles is 76 years old, and hasn't been in the best of health; as we saw with his mother's death two years ago, the passing of a monarch could lead to major fixture rearrangements over two or three gameweeks across a season. 

Such eventualities might be relatively remote, but they're extremely possible. And if such a thing were to occur in a gameweek where someone has their 'Assistant Manager' chip in play..... they are terminally screwed. Small though the risk may appear to be, it's not one I'm sure I'd be willing to take.

But I really don't want to spend any time even attempting to address these endless conundrums. For me, the 'Assistant Manager' chip is a game-ruining abomination - and, in order to make sure that FPL does not try to make it (or, god help us, perhaps some other innovation that's even worse...) a recurring feature of the game, we really need to protest against the idea as strongly as possible, in as many different ways as possible.

I like the idea of simply refusing to use the chip. But I fear it will not be an emphatic enough gesture to have much impact on the FPL hierarchy. (Many FPL managers might simply forget to use the chip, or be too daunted by its complexity; and more and more managers get disillusioned with their progress and drop out of the game during the later stages of the season. So - a mass refusal to use the chip would not become apparent until the last opportunity to deploy it [GW36] has passed; and it might be largely masked by all these other reasons why the chip might have gone unused by many people.)

No, if we are to make the FPL 'bosses' take notice, I think we need to encourage as many people as possible to drop out of the game at the moment that this horrendously gimmicky new chip comes into force - immediately after Gameweek 23. [I did so, quitting after GW23 in hopes of setting an example for others.]

#QuitFPLinGW23         #DownWithTheNewChip