When will it end....?

 

For some weeks already, many of the FPL hordes online have been griping and fretting about how long the summer break between our seasons drags on; they are becoming painfully frustrated by the seemingly endless wait for the next session of Fantasy Premier League to be launched....

Patience, patience - if will be here soon enough. Far too soon, really!

The new launch date migrates around the month of July quite a bit (perhaps occasionally delayed by upgrades to the site in progress - we can but hope!!); but in general, it's round about now. 

They probably don't want to launch while a major tournament is under way: that would seem impolite,... and it probably wouldn't work in their own favour either, as people's attention might be mostly elsewhere on the date of launch. In the past, though, they've often started trailing new player pricings during the last week or so of the big summer tournament, and that hasn't happened yet this time - so, maybe something is holding things up a bit?

Most of the Premier League clubs have been reassembling their squads this week, to begin their pre-season preparations. And - amazingly! - a few actually have a first warm-up game scheduled this coming weekend. I would usually have expected the Big Announcement of the FPL relaunch to happen early next week,.... but they do love their pre-season teasers so much: I can't see them doing it until at least a week after they've done their first information-drop about the new pricings. So,.... maybe the very end of next week, or early the week after?

We shouldn't be too bothered about this anyway!  The only relevance of the new launch date is the somewhat unfair (but to me, ultimately unimportant) rules wrinkle that date of registration is used as an additional tiebreaker for rankings, after number of transfers made.

I say I find that little detail unimportant and irrelevant because rank is an irrelevance anyway, no true measure of merit; and if you gain a few ranking places simply by virttue of having rushed to sign up for the game early, can you really take any pride in that?? This tiebreak rule can have a huge impact early on, but its significance diminishes as the season progresses. By the end of the year, it's very unlikely to have much bearing on the positions at the very top of the table, as they tend to be extremely spread out on points alone - certainly, the global No. 1 is almost invariably way out on their own. And it makes absolutely no difference to me if I finish in 41,000th or 42,000th spot, or 150,000th or 155,000th: these numbers are meaningless.

But if you are intent on gaining such a trivial and unjust advantage over your peers, what you should do is: Watch for word of the relaunch over the coming days, log back into your account as soon as you see this (they seem to demand that you change your password every bloody year, which is a royal pain-in-the-behind...), use the Auto-Select option to generate a preliminary squad and 'submit' that.

Then.... LOG OUT, and DON'T LOOK at the site again until after the Community Shield on August 10th.

Really. As I said in one of my earliest pieces on this blog, it is actively harmful to spend time going through endless draft squads weeks before the season even kicks off. You will only just be starting to form a picture of tactics, lineups, and possible form and confidence for the various teams on the basis of their later pre-season games in early August. And there will still be some big transfer news - and, alas, probably also some big injury news - in that final week before the Big Kick-Off on August 15th. [Full schedule for next season's fixtures.]

So, you will not have adequate information for making any Initial Squad selections until.... Friday 15th August. Beginning to make decisions before that is utterly pointless. It is worse than pointless, it is positively detrimental - because once you've made a decision, it is very difficult to unmake it: the human brain just doesn't like doing that (even with decisions that you're trying to regard as tentative, provisional, contingent, or whatever....). 

What you're doing when you start making 'preliminary decisions' about your squad way before the new season starts... is just hard-wiring prejudices into your thinking which will, more often than not, work against you. DON'T DO IT!!