The Great FPL Paradox: the 'best player' is not always the 'best pick'

 

This is perhaps the hardest idea for most Fantasy Football managers to wrap their heads around. 

It seems obvious, surely, that the best players are going to produce the most points; and the players who produce the most points are the ones you want - right??

Well, NO - not necessarily.

1)  The objectively 'best' all-around players may not always have their excellence fully reflected in their Fantasy points returns.

This has generally been particularly true of defenders and defensive midfielders; and that under-rewarding in the FPL points system has only been slightly ameliorated by the introduction of new points for 'defensive contributions' (the number of points available is quite small, the threshold for earning them is too high, and the tallying of the eligible contributions is too obscure and unreliable for them to have all that much impact, or to improve the overall 'fairness' of the scoring system in the game). But it's also true of more creative midfielders who may be great playmakers, but don't produce all that many attacking contributions (the only things that get any direct recognition in the game; pre-assists and pre-pre-assists are often far more skillful and more valuable than the final credited 'assist', but gain no merit). There are some very, very good players who just aren't really worth considering for an FPL squad. If you allow yourself to be swayed by your appreciation of football, by your recognition of a player's talents - rather than his points potential - you will make some misguided selections.

2)  The players who got the most FPL points last year will not necessarily produce the same returns this year.

Ah, people may object, but we're not interested in the unregarded midfield dynamos or tough-as-nails central defenders who hold their teams together without often earning many Fantasy points; we just look at last year's points tallies and pick the guys with the biggest numbers. But, unfortunately, that tends to be a flawed approach too. There can be all sorts of reasons - known (change of club, change of manager, change of tactics, change of surrounding personnel, improvements by key rivals, injury, aging...) or unknown (the 'headspace', form suddenly falls off a cliff for no obvious reason...) - why a player's performance in one season can be much better or worse than it was the season before. Last year's data is a very useful guideline - but it's not definitive or infallible.

3)  And this is the kicker: the players who will get the most points this year... are still not invariably the 'best picks' for the game.

Naive FPL managers often imagine that if they had a time-machine that would allow them to view the year-end player points totals at the start of the season, they could just pick that 'perfect squad' of all the highest points-scorers, and they'd win the global title. But they wouldn't; they probably wouldn't even come all that close. To attain the topmost reaches of the global rankings, you really have to milk more points from every slot in your starting eleven than almost any individual player will earn in the season.

Many of the highest points-scorers, alas, are very patchy, very streaky in their returns: they'll have a few spells of super-hot form but long runs of blanks in between. And it's simply not worth hanging on to those players for extended periods, hoping to catch one of their hot spells - when you could have tried out three or four other players in the meantime, none of whom would have done any worse during the blanking period, and at least one or two of whom (if you correctly recognised when they were coming into good form) could have done substantially better.

Season totals don't necessarily matter: you have to try to maximise your returns for each starting slot by frequently rotating through the players in the hottest form. A player who returns very high season totals and is very consistent in their returns across the season may be worth regarding as a long-term hold; but they are very, very rare (in fact, even Salah or Haaland in their best seasons were not usually worth hanging on to for the entire season).

Moreover, you have to make your picks in the context of the overall selection landscape: you have to weigh up each squad choice in terms of its likely differential advantage over an alternate selection - i.e., how much of a points-lift can you get from this player compared to the next best candidate in his position, or another candidate at a similar price-point across all the positions, or to the other players you might choose from his club?

David Raya is now pretty unarguably the best goalkeeper in the Premier League. But he isn't the best pick for FPL, because he probably won't do that much better than the next best, he's too expensive this year, and you can usually wring more points from a good rotation pair than a single goalkeeper pick (and there are other possible picks from Arsenal that will probably give you more of a points-advantage than him).

Similarly with Gabriel: he is an absolutely awesome defender, probably the best in the league. But for FPL... he's again too expensive this year, and not likely to outscore his cheaper Arsenal teammates this time (his attacking returns will probably be much lower this year; and Calafiori, in particular, offers much more attacking threat, and seems to have a more secure start this year; I'd bet that Timber will too, once he's fit again).

And so too with Bruno Fernandes: he's looking in fabulous form again, he is probably the best all-around midfielder in the league at the moment - and he might well again be the highest-scoring FPL midfielder for the season. But when he's priced at 12 million pounds, the 'opportunity cost' of all the other players you have to do without in order to afford him is probably too much.

The same argument can be made about Erling Haaland; but, although his price-tag is enormous, I feel that his unique differential advantage might yet justify it. He does seem likely to massively outscore any other forward, and if things really go well for him, he might be the one current player with the potential for a 300-point season. However, if it appears that Alex Isak or Joao Pedro could run him close for points returns in the forward category, then he too might become expendable.

NB: All of these players I just name-checked are likely to be the highest points-scorers in their position categories in FPL this year; that doesn't matter. What matters is their relative value to your squad in terms of their advantage over their next-best alternatives, and how much benefit you could reap from spending their fees across the rest of your squad instead.