Players' season totals really DON'T MATTER

I already touched on this point quite extensively a couple of weeks back in this post on the price steps that are applicable for categorising FPL player options in different positions. However, it's such an important topic, I felt I should say a little more on it.

The problem here is that many FPL managers fall in thrall to the silly, dangerous delusion that ALL YOU HAVE TO DO in the game is identify the players who are going to get the highest totals for the season. (With the usual corollary that the players likeliest to do this are those who got the highest totals last season - which is a reasonable but not infallible guide to form.)

It seems paradoxical, unfathomable to many - but this is just NOT TRUE (not generally so, anyway; there will always be some exceptions, which I'll outline below).

The thing is, you really need to be pulling in around 200 points or so from every starting slot in your squad over the season, if you are to have a chance of finishing near the top of the rankings. In fact, since you're bound to come up short of that - perhaps well short - for many of the slots (defenders and goalkeepers just don't produce points at anything like the levels of the best midifelders and forwards), you really need to be aiming for more like 250+ points from at least a few of your highest-returning slots.

[It's very difficult, in practice, to get anything like 'optimal' returns from your captaincy picks throughout a season. But, even if we grant that you can match or slightly better the return from your top squad slot with your armband choices (Note: this might not be - probably won't be - a single player, held in the team all season.), and even if you could get a fairly good lift from all of your 'chips' (although we have double the usual number of chips this season, it's pretty unlikely they'll be collectively worth a lift of anything like an extra 100 points over the season), and even if you can get, say, 4 squad slots returning something close to 250 (whereas 2 or 3 hitting that level would be remarkable...), and even if you could hit that ideal of a 200-point average across the whole of the rest of your starting eleven (which would entail you having a very strong bench as well, since you're going to have to be drawing on those guys fairly often to fill out the main line-up),..... you'd still probably come up 50-100 points short of last year's global champion. That's how big of an ASK it is!!  But that's what we all have to aim for.....]

And 250 points is an enormous season-total for an individual player. Usually, there are only 1 or 2 players who manage that in a season; but quite often, there are none. There are only ever a handful who manage to get over 200 points each year - and usually only a little over that threshold; and again, it's possible that sometimes no-one will even crack that seemingly more modest milestone.

So, you can't usually rely on any player - even your Mo Salah, Thierry Henry, Wayne Rooney, Erling Haaland types - to deliver you the kind of points you need from your best positions in the eleven. Even the very best players don't always reach that level; occasionally, they might come up a long way short.

Even when the top players have a really outstanding season, they are very, very rarely the highest-returning player across every shorter run of games within the season. There was almost always a player who, across 4 or 5 or 6 games, was delivering more points than them once or twice over the season. That was even true of Salah in his record-breaking season last year; his returns tailed off in the latter part of the year, and there were spells when it would have been profitable to drop him for someone else. [Of course, it can seem like an unacceptable risk to swap out one of these top-performing players. As I discussed in this post, their ability to deliver some exceptionally high gameweek hauls, and their overall consistency - with few if any long runs of 'blanks' - often makes them worth holding on to for an extended period of time, and occasionally, perhaps, even the whole season. Furthermore, the fact that they're usually very high-priced players makes it much more difficult to swap them in and out of a squad at will; so, once you have them, you may feel somewhat stuck - obliged to persist with them, come what may. But that will often be a mistake: even the best players almost always hit runs of less impressive form,... while a cheaper rival is suddenly banging in goals every week. You must not let yourself become bewitched by the glamorous reputation of a top performer; if they're not the top performer right now, you need to be ready to let them go.]

You can't expect to be able to hang on to any player for the whole season. You need to be trying to wring more points out of every slot in your line-up than any single player can produce. In order to achieve that, you have to seek to constantly rotate in the best current players over a short run of games.

As I explained in the post I mentioned at the top here, previous season totals are a useful guide to likely performance in the current season. But what you're really interested in is not the actual season total, but the projection of a theoretical season total from recent form - when the player you're looking at has been getting a regular run of starts and has been playing well. You will often find that that number is well over 250 points (if he's been averaging around 7 points per game in his last 3 or 4 starts) Their actual season-total won't be anywhere near that, 99 times out of a hundred; they'll get injured, get dropped, or just suffer a bit of a drought at some point - their run of high returns will come to an end sooner or later. But you need to try to have them in your side when their pro rata returns are up in that golden zone. 

If you become fixated on your Haalands and your Salahs, you risk missing out on a lot of players who could actually give you more points than them - at least for a part of the season.

In addition to this problem that even an exceptional player like Haaland or Salah will rarely guarantee you a big enough points total to make them an attractive season-long hold, there is also the - again, often perversely unacknowledged or stubbornly denied - fact that.... the game is about getting the best returns collectively from your starting eleven (backed up, on occasion, by your bench), not just from a handful of top-performing players.

Even if Haaland and Salah do outscore the next best option in their positions by a massive 50 or 80 points over the season,.... you can almost certainly more than make up that margin by being able to afford substantial upgrades in almost every other starting position with the money you save by not having them.

Players like these can be worth having, at least for certain spells of certain seasons; but they are almost never - only in the most exceptional of circumstances - worth having for the entire season.

If you think you MUST have players like these just because they seem likely to be the season's top-returning picks - you are committing a grave error. There will be certainly be other (cheaper!) players who outscore them in short spells during the season. And there will certainly be a massive opportunity cost in going without so many other top players in order to afford them.  (I may have a little more to say about this in a few days....)