The allure of the 'LONG Wildcard' again

Some folks like to play their Wildcard when there's an interruption in the regular Premier League schedule - such as now, when we're getting an especially long 'international break', nearly 3 weeks with no Premier League football. [This is a very slightly adapted re-post of a piece I first wrote for the international break we had this February.]

There are four possible reasons for this preference (though two, no, three of them are pretty frivolous):

1)  You can take advantage of a 'best of both worlds' situation, being able to make transfers early (as soon as the deadline for the current gameweek has passed!) to avoid possible adverse price changes on players you're interested in - while having the security of being able to swap them out again, if they get injured before the next gameweek deadline. 

2) Since these long gaps between deadlines increase the risk of being hit by multiple injuries (there are invariably other games - European ties, domestic cups, or internationals - going on in the interval between regular league matches; and training seems to be becoming more hazardous than playing, in the modern game!), some may find it reassuring to have a Wildcard in play so that they can easily address any such developing crisis - even if they weren't hankering to make any active, improving changes to their squad.

3)  Some enjoy having the leisure to contemplate a major squad rebuild over a longer period of time. Some, indeed, find it difficult to visualise what different combinations of players would look like (and what they'd collectively cost...), and so actually use the 'Transfers' page for trying out multiple 'drafts' of possible new squads. And they can't get enough of this pleasant diversion: they want to drag it out over days and days.

4)  And some pursue 'trading for profit', focusing on trying to build their squad value rather than necessarily improving the total points-potential of their selection. Because there is more time for transfers to happen, and maybe more transfers needing to happen because of the longer period of time elapsed leading to a larger accumulation of injury problems, and because of the probability that more people than usual are using their Wildcards in a gameweek like this,... a long gameweek will tend to have a higher volume of transfer traffic, and this will result in a greater number of price changes. There are various FPL resource sites online that attempt to predict when price changes are imminent (and this year, the FPL website has added one of its own; but there's no 'rocket science' about that - it's fairly easy to anticipate which players are likely to be suddenly popular or unpopular, and you can check in on their recent transfers numbers regularly to see just how big a swing in ownership they are experiencing. 

Transfer trading for profit like this has become more difficult in recent years, as FPL has tweaked its 'algorithm' in a way that makes it rather less easy to trigger a price-change (in either direction), and so we now very rarely see multiple changes in the same gameweek. And of course, you need a player to go up in price twice in order to be able to make a profit on them, because the dreaded 'transfer tax' limits you to half the value of any increase in price since you bought him (rounded down!) when you sell a player on again; hence, you don't earn anything on a first increase in price, nor any extra on a third increase; and you can't reach a fourth increase during such a period of Wildcard trading, as the number of price changes within one gameweek is capped at three. However, where there is an extended gameweek, there is an increased chance that a player's price may rise twice (or twice more, if you were unlucky enough to miss out on his first price rise at the start of the gameweek; although the threshold for each successive price rise within the same gameweek is set far higher, so it is almost unheard-of to see three price rises in one gameweek), thus enabling you to take a quick 100k profit by selling him on immediately. 

In practice, these days it is very difficult to realise a rise in squad value of more than a few hundred thousand through this exercise. And it does take a lot of effort, in scrutinising the transfer numbers every day, and perhaps making dozens of speculative transfers over the course of the gameweek (most of which will return no profit).

You might also be able to take advantage of selling-and-buying-back a player who's falling in price to boost your squad value, by buying him back cheaper than you sold him. That is a little easier to achieve than chasing price rises on new purchases, but.... you rarely want to be buying players who are falling in value!

[I only discovered recently that there is a widespread concern in FPL-land that Wildcard transfers supposedly don't count towards price-changes; and many people use this as a reason for following the risky strategem of initially paying for their mutliple 'long gameweek' transfers (to try to make sure that they will count towards official, potentially price-influencing transfer numbers), and only playing their Wildcard shortly before the deadline (to cancel the huge points spend on all the transfers they've accumulated). This, of course, is a very hazardous procedure, because the FPL website might crash close to the deadline (it often has in the past!), or you might lose your phone, or your Internet connection,... or you might simply forget... and be left with a huge 'bill' of points needlessly spent on futile speculations in the transfer market.

Since FPL Towers are extremely secretive about the 'rules' on price changes, we have no way of knowing for sure whether this notion is true or not; though I believe it to be mistaken, unfounded.  I think it would be impactical of implementation, and would serve no useful purpose. And it does not accord with my own observations of frequent transfer trading over international breaks. Ultimately, though, as I argue in that extended post on the issue that I just linked at the start of this parenthesis, it just doesn't matter. We look at how prices are actually shifting, and predicted to shift, based on the announced numbers of 'eligible' transfers, whatever they are. As with all things FPL, we are at the mercy of whatever figures FPL Towers chooses to give us, and we just have to work with that!]

So, really, only the first of those reasons is potentially a good one for considering a 'long' gameweek to be a tempting opportunity to trigger your use of the Wildcard.

But even that is a weak reason. And it is, almost always, going to be outweighed by the fact that, as I explained here a little while back, any interruption of the regular league schedule disrupts a club's usual training and preparation routines, and thus makes their form upon the resumption of league games more uncertain; and...  you don't want uncertainty when you're planning a major rebuild of your squad for a long run of games (or, for the 2nd Wildcard, for the whole remainder of the season).

I rather feel that - in an 'ideal world', anyway - it's still too early to be contempating using the 1st Wildcard. We haven't had time yet to evaluate the possible impact of changes made in the recent transfer window. And there are no major 'turns' in fixture difficulty for a few weeks yet. It's always better to hang on to a Wildcard for as long as you can - unless there's a pressing need to use it.

Better to hold off a while longer, if you can; but I can see how it's getting mighty tempting at the moment. (I might even succumb to the impulse myself....)

The key argument for waiting a bit longer this year is the unprecedented length of this first international break: the Premier League schedule being suspended for three full weeks. Not only does this increase the possibility of us being hit by multiple injuries before Gameweek 6 (some of which might perhaps not become apparent until after the gameweek deadline!), I fear the risk also of 'stored up' injuries: players returning from international duty with undisclosed minor injury niggles, or simply being caught out by the sudden resumption of much more intense club training, and breaking down ahead of Gameweek 7 or Gameweek 8; that could well be more of a problem than immediate injuries going into Gameweek 6. And then there's the perennial problem that players who've had particularly long flights back - all of the South Americans, usually! and Chris Wood!! - are often unavailable for the first weekend back because of fatigue/jet-lag; so, an optimal Wildcard squad for the next several gameweeks might find itself being short of a full starting eleven, or at least short of a full bench, in Gameweek 6.

Perhaps even more importantly, the long interruption in regular club training is going to be hugely disruptive of everyone's form (that's likely to be a particularly big issue for teams like Liverpool, Chelsea, and Manchester United, who are already struggling for consistency and need a lot of intensive coaching to fix their problems). We just don't know how anyone's going to be playing when we kick off again in October, the season is essentially re-setting and starting again from scratch. And on top of that, we have a number of possibly significant 'turns' in relative fixture-difficulty looking likely over the next few gameweeks after the resumption. 

So, it is very much looking as if the 'ideal' time to play the first Wildcard this year would be in late October or early November. And it would almost certainly have been worth hoarding up a few Free Transfers in case you need them to fix problems going into Gameweek 6.