Nobody's team is ever PERFECT

 

We all want to feel good about ourselves. And we all want to feel good about our FPL team: we want it to be as good as it can be. And - much of the time - we persuade ourselves that it is.

But... as good as it can be is not perfect. And if you delude yourself into believing that it is, that can lead into a dangerous complacency.

How often, really, does any of us get to roll a transfer? Usually no more than a handful of times a season. And even then, we're usually saving them up for 'tactical' reasons, not because we really don't feel our team could use any changes at all; we'd like to use a transfer straight away, but we have judged that being able to make multiple transfers a week or two further on may be even more valuable to us.

Almost always we have a few players who seem to have lost a bit of form, or are stuck in teams whose form has suddenly - and often quite mysteriously - deserted them, or who face a few unpromising fixtures in the coming run of games. And almost always there are other players who've caught our eye with a one or two big performances (though we're probably not yet quite sure if this is really emerging form or just a flash-in-the-pan), players we are starting to covet as possibly better alternatives to some of our current selections. 

And, if we played the game like FPL's dim (probably AI??) 'pundit' The Scout, blithely making unlimited transfers every week, we'd 'fix' all of those potential problems, chase all of those dreams. But that is not the game. We play the game properly: we know that transfers have a 'cost', and that it is very difficult to make back that cost by switching out a decent player who still has a regular start - certainly not within a single gameweek. We use our transfers cautiously, parsimoniously: and almost all of them have to be used to deal with injuries.

And because of that,... not only do we almost invariably have at least a few players, sometimes even four or five or six, who are looking slightly sub-par, players that in an ideal world we'd probably swap out; some of those players might have been clogging up our team for weeks - because we've always had more urgent changes to make with our limited transfers.

So, in practice, because of the harsh realities of this Fantasy game of ours, it is extremely unlikely that any of us will truly get to enjoy the satisfaction of having our team just the way we want it. (Even when we play a Wildcard, we usually get one or two players who immediately suffer an injury or a crash in form. That always seems to happen to me, anyway...)

But even when that rare combination of circumstances does align for us, those happy few times each season when we do seem to have our team just the way we want it,.... that's never going to be 'perfect', is it? 'Perfection' is an impossible ideal. You can drive yourself crazy chasing that phantom. Make do with as good as it can be.