Are you a 'good' FPL manager?

 

How can you judge if you are any good at the game of Fantasy Premier League?

Well, unfortunately, your results do not provide any convincing proof of that, since they are determined at least as much by sheer luck as by 'skill'. If you got a good year-end points total, that might have been more through luck than anything else. And even if you earned that good points total through consistently smart decision-making,.... you are likely to have been outscored by numerous other managers, the majority of whom were merely luckier than you; so, your 'Overall Rank' is really no evidence of anything.

So, I say it's unwise to be too results-focused in this game; instead, you should concentrate on the process of the game - on becoming more self-aware about how you make your decisions, and constantly seeking to improve in that.

Here are the elements that I believe you should look at to determine how good you are at playing Fantasy Premier League:

1)  Do you know the rules?  That might seem very obvious - but it is astonishing how many 'casual' players really don't even know the basics, things like what the 'chips' are, and how transfers work. And really, if you're going to be 'good' at the game, you should know the game rules in detail (not just the key rules, but also the subtler underlying ones like how the bonus points allocations are calculated, and what the ranking tiebreakers are), and you should appreciate their implications (such as that the scoring system is heavily biased in favour of midfield players, and against defenders, and hence 3-5-2 should be the preferred default formation).

2)  Do you know something of the history of the game?  And I mean not just the history of FPL, but the broader history of football, particularly of top-flight English football in the Premier League era. It really does help a lot in understanding what's going on now - and what's likely to happen next - if you have some context for how teams and players have changed and developed over time, what the patterns of form and points-returns over different phases of the season tend to be, and how far exceptional players may out-perform statistical averages. One example I especially like is that, although it's a common superstition in FPL that a Double Gameweek is bound to produce an enormous return for the Triple Captain chip, in fact that only happens occasionally (rather less often than with a well-chosen SGW punt), and a 24-year-old Wayne Rooney is the only player in the entire history of the competition to have achieved a double-digit haul in both games of a double-fixture week (well, until last year, when Jean-Philippe Mateta also managed it - but it is very much a 'Black Swan' Event!).

3)  Do you know the schedule (for the entire footballing year)?  Most people seem to be barely aware of the upcoming fixtures on the next match weekend, and few look at anything more than the next few weeks of match-ups (as listed on FPL's Fixture Difficulty Rating list). But the dates for all rounds of the European and domestic cup competitions are set before the start of the season (and until this year, the Club World Cup had been held in December, and sometimes provided another - small but significant - piece of fixture disruption [in fact, that competition still exists, though now rebranded as the Inter-Continental Cup; so, that could still take away one of our top teams in December, when we've won the Champions League at the end of the preceding season]), and if you look at them alongside the League programme, you can see where fixture logjams will occur, when Blank Gameweeks will happen, and when corresponding Double Gameweeks are likely to happen. Moreover, the African and Asian Cups happen in December/January every two years, removing a lot of top players from EPL competition for a month or so in mid-season; that always seems to catch a lot of FPL managers by surprise - but it really shouldn't.

4)  Do you watch a lot of games?  There really is no substitute for that. You cannot play FPL in isolation, purely as a gambling or statistical analysis exercise (well, many people do; but they rarely do very well...); you should always be basing your Fantasy selections on your own understanding of the game, derived from close observation of matches. Broadly speaking, the more football you watch, the better you will become at FPL. (And it's helpful to watch other games outside the Premier League too; the form and confidence and stamina of players and teams can be greatly affected by how they've performed in other competitions - including international appearances.)

5)  Are you a good judge of a player?  This is the core skill that 'Fantasy' games like ours are intended to test. But even this is not a straightforward, single attribute: it involves being able to assess a player's overall skill-set, their strengths and weaknesses, how they may be likely to develop over the coming season or adapt to changes of personnel around them, how they function in their current team and how well that team suits them; and also, how prone they are to injury, or how resilient and swift to recover from knocks they seem to be; and how variable their form is, and what the key indicators of a positive or negative shift in their form are; and then, of course, understanding how their abilities will translate into likely FPL points returns (many great players, particularly defenders and central midfielders, simply don't offer anything in FPL).

6)  Do you understand tactics?  Tactics have a key impact on game outcomes. And they have become increasingly intricate and subtle in recent years, more highly adaptive in-game or from week-to-week, and more quickly and sometimes radically evolving from season to season (or even within the course of one season - especially at Manchester City!). It is no longer possible to properly evaluate a player's attributes and points-potential (my point 5) above) without a shrewd understanding of how well they thrive with their team's current tactics - and how they might be adversely affected by changes in those tactics,... and how well the tactics are likely to work against the tactical set-ups of upcoming opponents. I do strongly recommend studying up on tactics (viewing some of the excellent tactical analysis channels now appearing on Youtube is an easy way to get started), in order to improve your understanding of the game, and hence improve your FPL performance.

7)  Are you highly numerate?  You don't necessarily have to be a maths prodigy to do well at FPL (though it might help!), but you do have to have a very good general 'number sense' - an easy ability to 'see' proportional relationships between figures, to compute simple sums in your head, and so on. There's no getting away from it - so much of the game revolves around mathematical relationships: weighing the highest absolute points returns against the highest points-per-pound returns in apportioning your squad budget, evaluating 'differential advantage' (which has nothing to do with a player's rate of ownership, but is rather a matter of assessing how much of a relative points lift one particular transfer or selection may give you, in comparison to all other possible alternative picks), projecting likely points returns and so assessing the optimum weeks to play your various 'chips' in, judging when it's worth making a transfer - that's all maths. Moreover, most of the statistics you might want to refer to for help (see further point below) cover the entire season (or a series of seasons), and if you're only interested in a shorter run of games, or you need to adjust for the fact that a player you're considering had a long injury absence, you often have to work out per-game averages or recent form figures for yourself. It really is a big, big help in FPL if you can do these sorts of calculations swiftly and accurately in your head - or, sometimes, if you simply have an instinctive (accurate!) awareness of what these figures are, how they relate to one another, and hence what they mean. That's not an ability that many people have. Some specific mathematical knowledge - especially in the areas of statistics and probability (and also in the understanding of odds: the bookmakers aren't a completely accurate and reliable guide to past form or upcoming results, but they are a very useful resource) - is also a significant advantage.

8)  Do you understand statistics, and how to use them?  Sadly, I think almost no-one in the FPL community does - certainly not the majority of online 'gurus' out there. There is a lot to be said about statistics, and how to use them. For now, I'll just caution that statistics - even if used appropriately - are of limited value, because they just don't capture the fine detail of games, the intricacy of real-time interactions between multiple players; the 'eye test' - so long as you're a shrewd, experienced, and careful observer of the game - is always far more valuable. Statistics can be useful - if you know what you're looking for in them,... and always take them with a grain of salt, staying very conscious of their flaws and limitations. It is important to be able to recognise patterns, to have an awareness of which figures might or might not be statistically significant, and in particular to be alert to how far exceptional players are diverging from the mean level of performance. But most of the time, you just see self-styled 'experts' cherry-picking one or two stats in isolation to support a preconceived opinion - you should always be very wary of that. (I think of it as the "Underlying Numbers" Fallacy.)

9)  Are you fully up-to-date with relevant football news?  It really helps to be pretty thoroughly immersed in what's going on with the English Premier League. And that's a big challenge if you're not actually living in England; it is very difficult to stay on top of breaking team news, transfer gossip, injuries, fallings-out between players and managers, scandals and legal problems, etc., etc. if you're in another country (as I am). You have to do your best with the Internet - but that's a time-consuming and often unreliable resource; it's not really any substitute for being readily able to pick up all the latest tidbits of news several times a day through... free newspapers left on the subway, hourly bulletins on the TV or radio, water-cooler conversations at work, bumping into one of the Arsenal physios at Pret-A-Manger...

10)  Do you spend enough time on the game?  If you're going to do well at FPL, you really do have to put in quite a lot of time on it: watching games, checking fixtures, seeking out team news. And it really helps to have disciplined habits about this - to make sure that you're not occasionally skimping on certain key elements of preparation or overlooking key facts,.... or - horror of horrors! - forgetting a Deadline sometimes...! But equally, 'life balance' is important: you should not be spending too much time on the game either - that easily becomes counter-productive, leading to you becoming mired in 'over-thinking' (stop that, Pep!). There is a 'right' amount of time and effort to devote to this game, a happy medium: try to find that sweet spot.

11)  Are you self-aware?  In this early post on the blog, I outlined the main reasons why people tend to be bad at FPL. We all have cognitive biases, personal prejudices, sentimental impulses, non-rational superstitions, etc. which lead us to be unduly indulgent towards some players and teams, but resistant to recognising the merits of others. We can't ever expect to completely eradicate these natural, inevitable human flaws in our thinking and decision-making, but we can at least strive to be aware of them and to fight against their influence over us. One of the greatest of these universal weaknesses is the reluctance to recognise that we've been wrong. If you can become more open to the fact that you are fallible, to recognising and accepting your mistakes, and trying to learn from them - then, you can get better at FPL,... rather than just making the same kinds of mistakes over and over again (which is, alas, what most people do - in FPL, and in Life...).

12)  Are you relentlessly eager to improve?  This is not the same as competitiveness; in fact, it is somewhat antithetical to that. Competitiveness tends to be externally focused, concerned simply with attaining some arbitrary target - whether that is reaching a points goal or defeating a particular individual. A genuine desire for constant improvement has no end-goal, it is focused internally, it looks at the activity or process itself, rather than its interim outcomes. Such a desire to strive towards an unattainable 'perfection' is intrinsic to a certain personality type, and it is very difficult to cultivate if it is not naturally in you; but it is not impossible, and you can make progress with dedicated effort. And this, I believe, is THE MOST IMPORTANT factor in becoming a 'successful' FPL manager. People who just say, "I want to win my mini-league,... and that's enough for me." or "I want to finish in the top 100,000,.... and that's enough for me." or "I want to reach x points for the season,... and that's enough for me." will never become truly great managers in the game because their motivation is too limited, too weak, the fire does not burn strongly enough in them, the will to excellence is not there.

If you can honestly answer YES to all of these self-directed questions,.... then you are a GOOD FPL Manager - regardless of your current points total or rank.

But it's extremely unlikely that anyone can truthfully tick all of these boxes with absolute assurance (I know I sometimes come up short on a few!!). What this LIST is actually seeking to show you is that you're not 'good' yet - but this is what you need to do to become better.