Endgame

 

Gosh, there are only just over 200 hours left before the 2024-25 Premier League season is all wrapped up! The Fat Lady is doing her warm-ups....

Overwhelmed as we've often felt by fatigue and frustration (and a frequent raging sense of injustice....) during the course of this season, we'll miss it when it's finally over....

We see a lot of people on the FPL forums at the moment frantically worrying what they can do to 'improve' their ranking over the last two gameweeks, clinch a mini-league or cup victory....  The answer, alas, is NOTHING. Just keep playing your game, and hope for the best!  People who go desperately 'chasing' points by taking wild gambles usually just shoot themselves in the foot.

If you're already in an impressive rank position - top 100,000, or top 50,000 or top 10,000, or whatever; or near the top of some of your leagues - that's about as good as you can ever hope to get (realistically, it's probably far better than you ever expected at the start of the season; and, very probably, rather better than you've deserved...); so you should be happy with that.... and not still feverishly chasing rainbows.

People who get hung up on hoping for further improvement, when they're already at Icarus altitudes, are probably just setting themselves up for huge disappointment. The upper end of the rankings tend to get pretty strung out; and there probably aren't going to be too many people who achieve significant further rises in rank in those strata over Gameweeks 37 and 38; a good number, in fact probably the majority, will slip back slightly; a good 10% or 20% (mostly the ones who were chasing too hard...) may fall back disastrously, allowing a few late entries into the upper ranks.

Croatia's Lovro Budišin and his team 'Aina Krafth Bree' (is that a pun that only works in Croatian??) are a staggering 43 points clear at the top of the global rankings, so it's pretty unlikely that anyone is now going to displace him as this year's Champion. (He's already been in the No. 1 spot for 6 weeks,... and in the Top Ten for 16 weeks!! That is a freakishly good run of form, even for the Global Champ...)

Top of the leader board -  after GW36

But only 6 other managers are within 20 points of second-place Max Littleproud, so.... there might not be too much movement at the top of the table at all over the coming week.

Only 53 managers have reached 2,600 points for the season so far; another 544 have a score from 2,550 to 2,599. And nearly 4,700 more have reached 2,500 points (an improbably large number, in fact, are currently on exactly 2,500,... and 2,499....).

98,248 managers have already reached 2,400 points - which would, in fact, be an extremely good total for season's end. And this in a season where we've had a lot of unusually low-scoring gameweeks, and a lot of surprises and upsets (City being shit for most of the season, Arsenal being much weaker than last season, Liverpool winning the title at a canter, despite being much less convincing than they were in the Klopp heyday a few years ago...); by rights, you'd expect this to be a below-average scoring season, yet all these folks have still managed to amass absolutely ridiculous points. (There's no accounting for LUCK....)

526,229 managers have reached 2,300 points or better - which I would regard as a very good total with two games left; if on 2,300 now, you should be able to reach 2,400 by the end of the season; and if you still have a bonus chip to play, or can somehow otherwise manage at least one very good gameweek from the last two (and actually, GW38 looks like it could be pretty good for everyone, with a very kind cluster of final fixtures!), you could maybe still get above 2,450. 

2,400+ points - that's pretty AWESOME: that is, in fact, about the best you can achieve on merit alone - anything more than that requires an awful lot of LUCK as well. And there is no point in hoping to be LUCKY.