Signs an FPL manager doesn't know what they're doing

I pointed out last week that it is misguided - morally reprensible, and usually unhelpful anyway! - to copy selection ideas from the teams of FPL managers who appear to be doing well. Even a genuinely smart manager rarely has his squad exactly the way he'd like it. And a squad that's been successful in recent weeks, or even for the whole season thus far,... really has no more chance (or not very much more) of doing well in the upcoming gameweeks than a randomly chosen selection. Things change constantly in FPL; and no-one can foresee the future. So - looking at what other people have done in the past is really of very little help.   Don't do it!

In fact, you can probably derive more benefit from critiquing the teams/squads of recently successful managers (because, as I said in that post last week, just about nobody's squad is ever 'perfect'). You may even find it consoling when you start to recognise that most of the people doing really well (particularly in the global league; but really, in any of the very big leagues, for clubs, countries, broadcasters, etc.) aren't really all that insightful, after all; they've just been very lucky with a lot of their picks;... but they're also usually making an awful lot of basic errors, which might eventually cost them their present eminence in the rankings (though, in a league of hundreds of thousands or of millions, there will inevitably be quite large numbers of people who manage to continue to be unreasonably lucky for most of the season...).

Here, then, are my....

Top Ten 'Red Flags' that show an FPL Manager isn't really much good

1)  Having David Raya in goal

This isn't a criticism of David Raya; he just happens to be the most conspicuous recent example of a more general phenomenon (Raya is, for the second season running, the most popular keeper in FPL - despite not actually being the highest points-scoring one...). People want the 'security' of going for a very consistent keeper with a high-performing club who'll keep a lot of clean sheets. But there are all sorts of reasons why this is almost never a good idea (I went into the David Raya example in much more detail here). It's not just Raya: it's any keeper from a top club - there's no good reason for choosing Alisson or Donnarumma either. Goalkeepers at top clubs tend to be expensive; but there isn't that much of a spread of points returns across keepers, so even the very best of them won't usually give you many more points than the second or third or fourth best - and one of those is likely to be much cheaper. Keepers at the best defensive sides rarely end up being amongst the top-returning FPL keepers anyway, because you earn better returns from saves and bonus points than from clean sheets. [OK, Raya is actually in first place at the moment; but mainly because he's played at least one more game than everyone else. There are a number of others who are running him pretty close ovreall, and have done better than him over runs of games.] Even if a keeper like Raya (or Donnarumma, etc.) does end up being the top returning keeper by some margin, you could almost certainly still have got even more points from a pair of cheaper keepers with good fixture-difficulty rotation. But the most powerful argument of all is that of 'club differential' advantage: in a club with a lot of good players, the keeper isn't likely to give you as much of a points-lift over his near rivals (even if he is the No. 1 overall) as some of his defenders or attacking players will. This season, Gabriel, Timber and Rice have all been much more valuable picks from Arsenal than Raya.

2)  Not having a decent back-up keeper

Even Raya (or Alisson or Donnarumma, etc.) won't be a good bet for a clean sheet against every opponent. And every keeper may pick up a knock for a week or two, or suffer a token rotation once or twice at the latter end of the season. You really need a decent second keeper that you can utilise as necessary. And, as I just explained above, in most years you're much better off going with two decent mid-priced keepers who enjoy convenitent rotation around the most challenging opponents.

3)  Carrying 'dead wood' on the bench

Even at the start of the season, when budget is tight,... it is a dangerous false economy to have non-players on your bench; they'll quickly land you in hot water if you get a few injuries/suspensions, and no longer have any extra men spare to bring in to cover an unexpected rotation. And they tend to deplete your squad value, rather than grow it. Having a full and strong bench becomes even more important as the season goes on - particularly in the bleak midwinter months when we're often hit by multiple last-minute injuries and surprise rotations almost every week, and often need to call on automatic substitutions to fill out our starting eleven. There are occasions when you may wish to - or have to - carry a player on the bench for a week, maybe even a few weeks (a top player, a player who's increased a lot in value since you first acquired him, may simply lose you too much squad value through the dreaded 'transfer tax'; if you sell him, you might not be able to afford to buy him back); but in general, an injured player (or a player who's no longer getting regular starts, or is clearly in very poor form) is a liability - and you need to get them out of your squad straight away. FPL managers who frequently have an injured player (or two, or three!) on their bench, often a player who's been out for a week or two already, and isn't expected back any time soon,.... don't know what they're doing.

4)  Being too 'template'

Now, I dislike the notion of the 'template'; I think that, like many of FPL's irksome buzzwords, it is ill-defined and over-used. People seem to develop the exaggerated notion that there is, at any given time, a single 'best eleven' - that almost everybody owns. In fact, of course, selection decisions are never that clearcut: there's usually a pool of at least 30 or 40 most popular players who form the bulk - but almost never quite all - of most people's squads. And the thing is, popularity does not equate perfectly to quality; with many picks, there's a kind of collective hysteria, a mass stupidity behind them (the 'sheep pick' phenomenon I so often criticise on here). Many of the 'most popular' players are actually quite misguided selections, poor picks. And emerging talents, less well-known players who are just starting to hit useful form, will, at first, generally only be recognised by relatively small numbers of more astute football-watchers. Any FPL manager whose squad consists entirely of the obviously most popular players of the moment... is probably not really all that good.

5)  Having too many long-term holds

The essence of the game is that you have to rotate constantly, to try to find the players in the very best form for a short run of games at a time. Getting a player like Salah last year or Palmer the year before, who'll return high points again and again with remarkable consistency across the entire season,... is a freakishly rare event. There are rarely more than two or three players a year who come anywhere near to justifying long-term inclusion; in many seasons, there will be none. Any team/squad that's had a large number of its players unchanged for a long period.... probably isn't much good.

6)  Having a weak midfield

The midfield is where most of the points come from. Midfielders get more points for a goal than forwards, can more easily earn the new 'defensive points' than either defenders or forwards (although fairly few are actually the right profile of player to do so regularly), get a free extra point for a team 'clean sheet', and tend to be more likely to register assists and pick up bonus points as well. And a good many of them are really 'forwards' generously misclassified by the game as 'midfielders' (Semenyo, Mbeumo, Cunha, Trossard, Saka, Gordon), or at least fairly free-scoring advanced midfielders who might be expected to score nearly as often as a good centre-forward. Even in this untypically low-scoring season, this awful, awful season in which so many of the usual big producers in midfield have disappointed,.... 12 out of the top 24 FPL points-returners are midfielders. There is no excuse for going light in the mdfield, even - especially! - in the 'fifth seat'. The fourth and fifth midfield slots, in fact, are potentially the most valuable in the entire squad, and the ones you should be concentrating on rotating the most often - to get the most points from them.

7)  Having too many (any) safe-and-steady picks

With few attacking midfielders producing really well this year, while many defensive midfielders have had their points returns buoyed by the new 'defensive points' (but also by their scoring rather more goals than usual this season...), there has been a temptation for a lot of FPL managers to go for more seemingly 'dependable' options - like Declan Rice, Elliot Anderson, or James Garner. And indeed, players like these (and Enzo Fernandez and Casemiro and Ryan Gravenberch too) are in the Top 20 midfield points-producers at the moment. But.... only Rice is in the Top 5. And while there is something very reassuring about a player like this who'll give you a fairly steady drip-drip-drip of points, rather than many big gameweek hauls,... you really need to be chasing those big hauls! You really need to be looking to earn a minimum of around 6 points per game from every member of your starting eleven; and since it's almost impossible to get that from your keeper and defenders, even with hyper-efficient rotation, and since (as just mentioned in the previous point in this post) midfield is where most of the points come from, you really ought to be aspiring to more like 7 points per game from all 5 of your midfield slots; almost no single player ever achieves those sorts of numbers over a season - you have to rotate through the most in-form players. Those central defensive midfielders are only yielding 4.0-4.5 points per game; even the oustanding Rice is only producing about 5.5 points per game; that's just not enough to justify having even one of them in the squad as a season-long hold. Yet this year, many managers can be found with two or three of them; they don't know what they're doing. Almost every week you have one of these players in your squad, you're losing 1 or 2 or 3 points to someone who's making better use of rotations in these positions. [It doesn't only happen with more defensive midfielders; they just happen to be the obvious example this season. Last year many people were impressed with Morgan Rogers's excellent debut season with Villa; they bought him at the start of the year, because he was cheap, and held on to him all the way through, because he was mostly delivering decent points with a fair amount of consistency. But he only managed a season total of about 160 points: not anywhere near enough for a season-long hold!!]

8)  Too often starting four or five defenders

Related to the two points above about the paramountcy of optimising points returns from the midfield, a further sign of weakness in this area is the number of FPL managers who are regularly starting four or even five defenders. Yes, defenders have got a very useful little lift to their returns this year from the new 'defensive points'; and midfielders and forwards have, on the whole, been slightly disappointing. But still, we only see 2 defenders (both from Arsenal, of course) in the current Top 10 FPL points producers - and only another 7 in the next 20. And it's actually even worse than this; because defenders tend to start nearly every game (as long as they're fit); and, as I just observed in the previous point about defensive midfielders, they tend to be relatively slow and steady in their returns. They might constitute one-in-three of the best points-returners over the season, but they probably quite rarely manage to be one-in-four or one-in-five of the top points producers over any short run of games. There will certainly be occasions when especially favourable fixtures for your defenders and/or form or injury issues affecting some of your more advanced players may make it a smart choice to start four, or sometimes even five defenders. But such occasions will be fairly rare - the exception rather than the rule. FPL managers who are doing it every week (even this season, when the usual massive differential between defenders and more advanced players has been considerably eroded) are just pissing away points.

9)  Having too many double-ups and treble-ups

Taking too many players from the same club fails to spread risk: it leaves you dangerously over-exposed to negative impacts from an unexpectedly bad performance from that club - or to that club having a blank gameweek. And, frankly, there aren't usually many clubs who are good enough all around to justify taking three players from them. If your squad isn't drawn from at least 7 clubs, ideally 8 or 9 or 10, you're probably storing up trouble for yourself.

10)  Having obviously 'sentimental' picks

Being swayed by one's emotions and personal preferences is one of the greatest dangers in the game of FPL. Whenever you see a manager who has three players from a club who aren't in very good form at the moment (looking at you, Liverpool), you can be fairly confident that this manager is a fan of the club - and is making selections with his heart, not his brain. Such emotional biases can relate to individual players, and/or to previous experience in FPL, as well as to real-world club loyalties. People who have Salah in their squads this year are obviously idolaters who can't get over their admiration and gratitude for all the points he's delivered over the last several years. Sometimes, too, these emotional influences can work in a purely negative way: anyone who doesn't have any Arsenal defenders in their squad, despite their massive dominance this year, is obviously prejudiced against the club - and that prejudice is harming their FPL choices.

And  a couple more quick 'bonus' ones to finish with....  

You usually have to go digging around in a manager's history a bit to discover this (unless they happen to have played a chip in the current week you're looking at), but how they've used their chips can be very instructive. If they've played a Bench Boost in a week when some of their players had quite tough fixtures, and one or two were even doubtful starters, then they're not very good. If they often use their Wildcards quite early in the window, and sometimes to make only three or four changes with them, then they're not very good.

And of course,.... it's A VERY BAD SIGN if you find that a manager obviously hasn't thought ahead about a major hazard in the game. At the moment, for instance, top sides Arsenal and Manchester City have a Blank Gameweek this weekend, because they're playing each other in the League Cup Final (and their scheduled league opponents, Wolves and Crystal Palace, are also missing a fixture). This has been known for some weeks now; but many FPL managers are behaving as though they are completely blindsided by it. There is no very good reason for being trebled-up on either Arsenal or City at the moment (though many, it seems, are trebled-up on both); and even less reason to have any Palace or Wolves players (though a few might still have Dean Henderson, or one of his defenders, from the period earlier in the season when they were returning good points; and perhaps some might still have one or two Wolves players that they brought in for their Double Gameweek a few weeks back). But if you had high exposure to this Blank, you should have been moving out surplus players already, or at leat saving up transfers, so that you could move out as many players as necessary this week (and, hopefully, bring them back, if you want to, as soon as possible thereafter). People who are being panicked into using their Free Hit this week (which will surely be far more needful for most people in the bigger Blank Gameweek caused by the FA Cup Semi-Finals in Gameweek 34), or find themselves having to burn lots of 'hits' in order to put out a full starting eleven,.... just didn't think ahead. And that's BAD FPL management.

All of these points should be pretty clearcut and uncontentious. Yet, somehow, many FPL managers seem to ignore them, or even to be in stubborn denial about them - even the supposedly 'good' managers.

Go on, take a careful look at the teams of any of the online FPL 'gurus' or 'experts'; or at those of any of the top 5,000 or 10,000 or whatever in the current global rankings. I guarantee you that almost every one of them will betray some of these telltales of fundamental incompetence in the game.