Drafting may be 'a game in itself' - but it is of no help to the REAL GAME

 

For the past couple of weeks, the online FPL forums have been full of people sharing endless preliminary drafts of their squads - many of them joking about how many dozens of attempts they've had already, and how many more they're likely to get through... (Or, even more alarmingly, a good number of them bizarrely claim that they're done, finished, that they have their 'final' lineup sorted.... still 10 or 15 days out from the start of the season, with new transfer rumours flying around every day...??!!)

We're still a little shy of 4 million enrolments for the game this year; and we'll presumably hit at least twice that number by the end of next week, and maybe three or more times that many by a few weeks into the season. And the daily volume of transfer activity would appear to indicate that perhaps only 20-30% of managers are indulging in these endless revisions, while the majority - as I recommended a couple of weeks ago - are contenting themselves for now with a placeholder team, created in a few seconds with the game's 'Auto-pick' facility.

Now, I don't like to be a killjoy.... If these folks are treating this endless obsessive re-drafting as a bit of 'harmless fun' - well, good luck to them!

I imagine that the appeal is as a sort of 'playing the real game in imagination', trying to picture what might happen with each of the chosen squads. And this without the downer of getting immediate negative feedback in your points returns when you make actual changes to your squad during the season!! Perhaps it is nice to be able to endlessly tweak your team like this without feeling that pain.

And later on, I suspect, some of these multi-drafters may seek solace in the idea that one of their discarded 'early versions' (perhaps in a slightly misremembered, idealised form...) might actually have done really well - so much better than the final squad they actually landed on!

Quite a few seem to be leaning on AI gizmos to 'rate' their early efforts, creating a new side-game where they struggle to get ever closer to the illusory validation of their squad being deemed 100% 'perfect'!! Alas, none of these AI tools have any real understanding or discrimination, and are doing little more than spitting out random numbers - so, it's very doubtful if this will be at all helpful (probably the reverse) in developing a stronger selection.

Where I take issue with this pastime is with the widespread underlying delusion that it is actually worthwhile, that it is doing some good in honing the final selection. It most emphatically is not: it is nothing but harmful.

First of all, of course, it is a colossal waste of time.

Second, and the way in which it is most actively deleterious to your Fantasy management efforts for the season (as I discussed in detail when I first launched this blog), it will tend to lead to worse decisions on deadline day, because of the human cognitive biases that tether us to our earliest preliminary decisions on an issue. It is never a good idea to start making judgements about things before you have all the necessary information available with which to make those judgements - which, with Fantasy Premier League, doesn't happen until a few hours before the first kick-off of the season.

And third, a more general and longer-term harm, I think, is that this practice builds up a dependence on being able to see different lineups on your 'Pick Team' display before you can imagine how they might work together and how they fit within your budget cap. Just as with chess, you never get very good if you always have to physically make moves on the board to picture how a simple endgame might play out, so too in Fantasy football, I think it helps to develop the ability to picture mentally what different combinations of players you can afford within the limitations of the budget. If you really have no idea what a 'No-Haaland' squad might look like without actually building it in the app,.... I think you have a problem. And you're making that problem worse.

Trust me on this: refraining from early drafting is good for you.