Live and learn... (Or not!)

Someone on the FPL forums last week was interested in whether a player could play twice in the same gameweek for different clubs - effectively getting a unique, one-person double gameweek by virtue of having completed a transfer mid-gameweek and immediately turning out for his new club in their later fixture within the same batch of games. 

Now, I can't ever recall such a thing happening in the 33 previous seasons of the English Premier League; but it does seem as if it should be theoretically possible.

In practice, though, it seems as if it would be extraordinarily unlikely. These days, clubs typically drop a player - even from training, let alone competitive matches - once they're the subject of a transfer negotiation. This is because, if they've accepted that they're almost certainly going to lose the player, they're now more focused on what they can do with the money they can make from selling him, and will be reluctant to jeopardise a move through the risk of a last-minute injury. There may, of course, also often be doubts about a player's level of motivation or general focus on his game if he's determined to move on. And the buying club may reasonably expect, if not insist that the player is not risked in a match while the transfer deal is being finalised.

So, it's very, very, very rare for a player to play for his old club shortly before signing for a new one. But.... it just happened with Antoine Semenyo - who scored an injury-time winner for Bournemouth against Spurs last Wednesday evening, and was then announced as a Manchester City player barely 12 hours later on Thursday morning.

Ah, but it's also very, very, very rare for a player to play immediately for his new club, particularly within a matter of a day or two; there hasn't been time to get up to speed with the new team's tactics, or to build any rapport with teammates; they might only have been able to participate in one or two full training sessions - just not enough time to bed them in. And you might think that this would be especially the case at a club like City, where Pep sometimes takes weeks inculcating 'his way' of playing in a new signing before he'll consider giving him a regular start.

But again, Antoine Semenyo just played immediately for City, only two days after his transfer to them was confirmed. Of course, that wasn't a League game. But this instance again suggests that playing for two teams in the same gameweek could conceivably occur... once in a blue moon.

However, I believe players have to be registered with the League by noon on the day before their first eligible match for a new club - which adds a further layer of impracticality. Moreover, the League's offices don't usually 'work' on the weekends (this is why this year's transfer window is extended to Monday 2nd February), making it even more difficult to 'complete' a transfer and have a player eligible to play for a new club within the tight timeline of a single gameweek - although we do occasionally get a gameweek with a game scheduled on a Tuesday, after a roster of games mostly played over the preceding weekend, so it could still be possible. 

Of course, we also have occasional double gameweeks where some clubs are playing twice within a few days; this would extend the narrow window of opportunity for a player to complete a mid-gameweek transfer - well, except that such double gameweeks never occur during the early-season or mid-season transfer windows!

Not many regular gameweeks are spread over more than 3 or 4 days (although we did have one last season stretched over nearly 2 weeks due to a winter 'mini-break'). But, in this recent case, if Bournemouth's match had been on the Tuesday evening, and City's on the Thursday, Semenyo's registration could have been completed in time for him to play for both clubs.

It seems like this is the only way that this eventuality could come about: a slightly extended and/or midweek gameweek, at least one weekday between the two different clubs' fixtures in that gameweek, and a player confirming a transfer and getting it registered with the League the morning after the first of those two games. That is a very unlikely combination of circumstances, and I rather doubt if it will ever happen.

But.... if it should, there doesn't seem to be any logical reason why FPL would refuse to acknowledge a transfer that the League has accepted as valid, and refuse to record the points the player scores in his first game for the new club.

And yet, I have seen it suggested by a couple of people on those forums that there is supposedly an obscure 'rule' denying a player the right to score points for different clubs in a single gameweek. 

I say 'obscure' because I have never even come across a reference to or discussion of this supposed rule; and it certainly isn't included in the main 'Rules' of the game displayed on the FPL website, which I've screenshotted above. (Although these rules are excessively concise, and in some respects just very badly written - unclear, potentially ambiguous on a few points. And I wouldn't be surprised if there is an 'expanded version' of the rules hidden away online somewhere...)  [An aside: Why, oh why is something as important as the Rules of the Game hidden under the 'Help' tab rather than being given a tab of its own??]

And of course, these two bods on the forums, having no idea of how sourcing accurate information from the Internet actually works, omitted to provide a URL link to where they had found this information (one of them at least screenshotted the article in question; but with no indication of where it had come from, and it appeared to be only a paraphrase/illustrative example rather than a direct citation of the original text of the supposed rule).

I've had a bit of a rummage around online myself, but still haven't been able to come up with any definitive answer to this conundrum. It would seem curmudgeonly, unreasonable, nonsensical of FPL to craft a special rule to deal with such a wildly unlikely circumstance - but some folks out there are convinced that they have done so. I will try to investigate the issue further.