Roll your transfers until after the international break

Rolling cheese, rolling people 

Rolling transfers is usually a good thing - especially since the rules tweak a couple of years ago that now allows us to bank up to 5 Free Transfers. Being able to make multiple transfers at a time can be hugely valuable, for the far greater flexibility it gives us to conduct mini-rebuilds of our squads.

Making purely elective transfers - 'chasing points' with impulsive changes when you have a full first eleven of players who are fit, guaranteed to start, and playing decently well - is usually a bad thing.

Making elective transfers is particularly a bad thing this early in the season, when form hasn't settled down yet, and so we really can't often have any sort of confidence about who might be a better pick than the players we have already.

And it's a particularly, particularly bad thing when we're soon likely to have special reasons for possibly needing to make a lot of changes at once. At the moment, we're about to enter an international break; and not just any old international break, but an unprecedented three-week monster of a break!

Now, I tend to think that the risk of incurring lots of injuries in international breaks is greatly overstated. The rate of injuries in international football is much, much lower than in club football (I can't actually remember ever having lost one of my Fantasy players to an international break injury....). However, the risk is there; and it must be heightened by the unusual length and number of matches of the upcoming break. 

But even more concerning is the disruptive effect that this must inevitably have on club training over the next few weeks. Any form we thought we had seen emerging in the opening few games is likely to evaporate: we're basically all starting our FPL season again from scratch on October 10th! (This is why, in an ideal world, you'd save your first Wildcard until at least the end of October.)  Moreover, there are a few potential 'turns' in fixture difficulty around then, which may prompt you to want to make a few changes to your squad as well.

We are all likely to need to use 1 or 2 transfers (maybe more) straight after the international break to replace injuries that emerge over the next three weeks. We are also very likely to want to use quite a few more transfers in the immediately following gameweeks, because of likely swings in form and fixture-difficulty emerging after this disruptive hiatus in the Premier League schedule. Thus, it is essential to have a few transfers in hand after the break. (Playing your Wildcard over the upcoming break would ameliorate this problem, but not erase it completely, because we're also likely to need to make quite a few changes in the following gameweeks as well.) 

And yet, and yet.... the FPL forums are again full of people asking, "What transfer should I make this week?"  Why are you making any??  Why are you even thinking about it??  It makes no sense.

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.

Be content with 'good enough'

It's impossible not to indulge in a little thrill of schadenfreude, not to gloat just a little bit over the (slightly more than) 1.6 million FPL managers who hazarded their Triple Captain chip on Erling Haaland against Coventry this weekend.

They were, no doubt, hoping for a high double-digit return; and he yielded only a solitary goal (though, in a low-scoring match, that was sufficient to net him all 3 bonus points as well: we must take our consolations where we may). It was particularly frustrating that City had such an off game all around, and that Coventry were suddenly so much better than they'd looked in their two previous outings; and that Haaland actually had some more decent chances, but failed to convert them - he was twice played in by immaculate through-balls from Cherki, but both times slammed his shot too close to the keeper, Carl Rushworth.

It's important to try to keep a sense of perspective in situations like this.

Almost no-one ever manages to average 5.5-6.0 points-per-game over the whole season, and very few players ever exceed a 7.5-8.0 ppg average over any extended run of games, even when they're in blistering form. Even Haaland gets a lot less than 9 points in at least two games out of every three. 

So, that haul was really pretty respectable, well above average. And it was a 'good' return for the Triple Captain chip (75% of the time, it returns little or nothing!!).

People are only disappointed, dissatisfied with this outcome because Bruno Fernandes just got a once-in-a-blue-moon 23-point haul in the previous gameweek (and a lot of people had been fortunate enough to play their Triple Captain on that). Their hopes and expectations were unreasonably inflated by that reminder of what is - very occasionally - possible with the chip; and they felt under pressure to try to make up that ground lost to so many rivals in Gameweek 2.

But you can't allow yourself to think like that. You have to be happy with whatever you get from the 'bonus chips'. Around half the time, your Triple Captain blanks! Not infrequently, he may even return a score of just 1 point or 0 points; cases have been known of a Triple Captain missing a penalty, getting sent off, etc, and actually returning triple negative points. So, you have to be grateful for any return at all; 4 or 5 points is a pretty fair return ('better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick'), and 8 or 9 points is actually quite good. Double-digit returns are a rare freak, and you should be happily surprised if you ever benefit from one; not greedily expecting it to happen.

The 'disappointment' of the Haaland TC-ers this week, though, does give some encouragement to those of us who held off playing that chip. There is a reasonable hope for us of getting a similar or better haul from our TC play, and so making up the ground that those 1.6-million gained on us this week. With Bruno's monster return last week,... we really just had to write that off as unrepeatable, uncatchable; we'll have to try to claw most of that deficit back through our ordinary weekly hauls. It can be done, but it will be a long hard road.

Even a very good player... may not be worth AN EARLY-SEASON TRANSFER

At the start of the season, with no reliable information to go on about who's likely to be in the best form in the opening games, we're all betting blind on our initial squads. Hence, Gameweek 1 usually goes badly - sometimes very, very badly! - for the majority of FPL managers.

And that... tends to make many of them very impatient. They see the players who had a good Gameweek 1, and they want to buy them immediately. 

Now, quite apart from the fact that one game is no guide to anyone's form (well, hardly anyone's...) and so you really don't know who's worth transferring in this early in the season, it's a good idea anyway to hoard transfers like gold dust at the start of the year.

It's always been very valuable to 'roll' Free Transfers on to a later week, so that you could have the option to use 2 at once (for a long time, 2 was all you could hold at one time). Since they changed the rule a couple of years ago (a rare, perhaps unique example of a good rule change in the game) to allow us to hold up to 5 Free Transfers, we can now in theory build up to a mini-Wildcard every 5 gameweeks. In practice, that's very difficult - nearly impossible (and often self-harming even to attempt) - to achieve; but to have the ability to use even 3 or 4 Free Transfers at once, rather than 1 or 2, as in the past, is enormously valuable: it gives you so much more flexibility to reallocate budget - exchanging for a cheaper player in one position so that you can get a more expensive one in another (rather than just being stuck with like-for-like transfers at a similar price-point, if you're only using 1 transfer at a time).

So, even if you are confident of a player's outstanding form after only one or two games of the new season,... you should probably still hold off acquiring him for a further week or two - not only to confirm your judgement of his points-potential, but also to give you the facility to make other complementary changes and perhaps rejig the distribution of your squad budget across the position categories.

Also, of course, while the transfer window is still open, new arrivals - or departures - can have a tremendous knock-on effect on how well teams and individual players perform. So, it's best to defer any FPL purchase decisions until all the real-world transfer business is resolved.

Sometimes, it's better to wait a little for the things you covet....

A Bench Boost is best played OPPORTUNISTICALLY

I discussed last week how all the arguments commonly put forward in favour of chancing the first Bench Boost chip in Gameweek 1 of the season were utterly misguided.

I think that, in general, having too rigid a plan on when to use any of your chips is a bad idea - but perhaps particularly so with the bonus chips (and even more particularly so in the first-half of the season, when there are no 'special circumstances' like Blank or Double Gameweeks to skew our calculations of risk/reward for the chips).

Team (and individual) form can shift drastically in a short space of time: so, you just don't know much in advance when all of your 15 squad members are going to be looking particularly sharp, or when all - or most - of them are going to be facing especially appealing fixtures.

In general, for the Bench Boost, it is much better to wait until at least a few - ideally, in fact, probably several - weeks into the season, when teams have settled into some consistent form, as they've got used to changes in player and coaching personnel and new tactics. The first few gameweeks of the season are always erratic, wildly unpredictable; almost no-one shows much consistency, and few if any teams are yet anywhere near their peak performance.

Now, you can sometimes 'set up' ideally for a particularly promising set of fixtures by using the Wildcard shortly beforehand (ideally, in the gameweek immediately prior). But, if you're having to make that many changes from your normal squad, the chances are that this is not going to be an ideal set of players going forward; you're probably sacrificing some points in subsequent weeks, just to try to slightly improve your yield from the Bench Boost; and that's almost certainly not going to be worth it.

And there are so many 'moving parts' in  a successful Bench Boost - needing all 15 players to start, and nearly all of them to haul - that it hardly ever pays off that well; you almost always have something go wrong: one or two last-minute drop-outs, or one of the teams you have the strongest representation from having an unexpectedly awful game, etc.

Therefore, you almost certainly have a much better chance of achieving some success with a Bench Boost, if you keep a strong squad - with a strong bench - throughout the season,... so that you are able to consider playing the Bench Boost in almost any gameweek that suddenly seems opportune, with the way everyone's team and individual form is looking for the next set of fixtures.  [A really good set of fixtures, with everyone in your squad fit and in form, in a regular Single Gameweek is usually a better prospect than a Double Gameweek. The notion that you have to play Bench Boost - or Triple Captain - in a Double Gameweek in the second-half of the season is an entrenched FPL fallacy. Few double-fixtures are actually 'good' double-fixtures; and it's almost always a mistake to load up entirely on doubling players in such a gameweek.]

This is another of the reasons why you need your bench, and why it is foolhardy to go light on your substitute selections. Even at the start of the season, trying to conserve budget by choosing weak players, or non-starting players, for the bench positions is a self-harming false economy.

[Much the same applies to the Triple Captain chip. There are only a handful of players that are usually candidates for this, and only a handful of 'most likely' fixtures for its use. But still, there may be some surprising shifts in form that change those expectations, or add some additional options at short notice. It is unwise to decide at the very beginning of the season what Haaland's or Palmer's or Fernandes's 'best' fixture is going to be; you don't usually know until a week or two beforehand!]

Remember - Gameweek 1 is ALWAYS shite!

 

Well, of course that is a bit of an exaggeration...  There's always somebody who manages to do well for themselves in FPL, even in the most horrible gameweeks. But Gameweek 1 is pretty regularly - almost always - utterly shite for a majority of managers in the game.

The ways in which it can be shite can very a little. Sometimes it can be quite a high-scoring gameweek, but all the big returners are completely unexpected randoms that almost nobody owns. Occasionally there are just a handful of big returners, but they're all the highest-owned players, so there's very little differentiation. (Though woe betide you if you gambled on trying to do without one of the 'big names'! Some years ago, I judged that Mo Salah and Bruno Fernandes were ridiculously overpriced, and thought they had some unpromising early fixtures, so took the chance on building an initial squad without them. I was kind of vindicated over the season as a whole, but they both nabbed hattricks on the opening weekend, so it took me nearly 6 months to make up the ground I'd lost...!!!)  More often than not, it's a frustratingly low-scoring gameweek, with most of the big teams and big players failing to produce very much.

But the main thing that makes it such a shite gameweek year after year is its sheer unpredictability.

1)  The transfer window is only half over, rumours are swirling around several players: some may get dropped - or 'refuse to play' - in anticipation of an imminent move. Others may be unsettled by the prospect of an imminent arrival challenging for their place, or leading to a radical change in the team's style of play. Ongoing transfer activity and speculation can be deeply unsettling to a team's or individual's performance in all sorts of ways. (Would Villa have taken such a battering from Brighton on Sunday if Ollie Watkins had been willing to lead the line for them? Perhaps not.)

2)  Many clubs are under new managers. And most existing managers try to shake up their tactics for the new season. None of these new ideas have had enough time to fully bed in over a short pre-season, so tactical implementation in the early weeks of the season - especially Gameweek 1 - is often pretty shakey.

3)  Many players are carrying slight injury concerns, or still suffering from fatigue after the World Cup (or the Euros, or some other summer tournament). And many have been given extended breaks, missing some - perhaps even all - of their club's pre-season training. (This year, Erling Haaland only returned to training with City 10 or 11 days ahead of their opening league game. He was able to play the full 90 minutes, but looked some way short of his best.)

4)  The promoted clubs are a major unknown quantity. Championship form just doesn't translate to the Premier League, so teams that looked great last year might be terrible this year,... but a team that barely limped through the play-offs might turn out to be much stronger than expected. They're usually undergoing major rebuilds as the new season approaches, so their personnel and approach might be radically different in the new season anyway. These days, fairly few Championship sides manage to survive even one year in the top flight; but they do often put up some spunky performances in the opening few weeks - until the big boys 'figure them out',... and they start getting demoralised by regular heavy defeats. Later in the season, it's usually fair to regard the promoted clubs as gimme opponents; but early in the season, not so much. Just ask Manchester United and Sunderland, who were humiliated by unfancied Hull and Ipswich on the opening weekend this year. (This is not an unusual occurrence: most years we get at least one 'big club' given a really hard time by one of the league's new teams.)

5)  Pre-season games don't count for much: it's good for an attacker's confidence if he can notch a good few goals - but most of these games are played at half-speed, with unlimited substitutions, and often only a few of the regular starters, so.... they're really not at all a reliable guide to how things are going to go in the first competitive match of the new season.

6)  'Form' is the great unknown: unfortunately, players don't just immediately pick up from where they were at the end of last season. Or even from how they played in a recent pre-season game; or in the big summer tournament; or even in the Community Shield, which is only one week prior and is, these days, usually treated seriously as a competitive game. As for the individual players, so for the clubs: at the start of the season, you just don't know who's going to be playing well. Some top players take a while to find their feet again, some top clubs stumble out of the blocks and may sometimes take several weeks to find their rhythm and confidence; while others - often quite unfancied, lower table sides - may surprise everyone by starting hot.

7)  Injuries tend to be much more common early in the year (players perhaps 'pushing too hard' when they're still a bit fatigued and/or out of shape). We've been pretty lucky so far this year; usually, we get quite a few players going down with problems in training in the last few days before the opening weekend.

8)  Because of transfer issues, new tactical approaches, and - often undisclosed - injury or fitness concerns, there are also usually a lot of unexpected selections on the opening weekend. Not only do you not know with any confidence who's going to play well, you don't know who's going to play at all. The main reason it's bonkers to think of playing your Bench Boost in Gameweek 1 is that you very seldom end up with 15 starters!!

I said it last year, and I'll probably say it again next year... almost everybody has a terrible opening gameweek. 

I suggest that you should actually take some consolation in this. The circumstances of the opening gameweek are so exceptional - so much more random and unpredictable than every other gameweek in the season that follows! - that the few managers who do well in it probably, in fact, don't have such great squads; they must have made a lot of dodgy picks that they just happened to get very lucky with - and, in most cases, those lucky returns will be one-offs, and those players will disappoint them badly over the coming weeks. But there's a danger that their initial 'success' will go to their heads - make them arrogant and complacent, make them suppose they don't need to consider any changes. The folks who are top in the first few weeks of the season mostly tumble out of the top million fairly quickly. 

So, don't be discouraged by a bad opening Gameweek. And certainly don't think of reaching for your Wildcard. However 'bad' you think your team is, however bad it actually is,... it will be at least a few more weeks yet before you have any idea who are the best players to bring in as replacements. Stay calm and patient. (And smile pityingly at people who brag about how well they did in Gameweek 1!)

TOP TIPS for picking the initial FPL squad

 

Now that the Community Shield game is out of the way (I managed to find a suitably grungy little dive bar, The Shamrock, to enjoy it in), it is reasonable to start thinking about the coming season of Fantasy Premier League for the first time.... Although I still wouldn't actually draft a squad until this Friday afternoon!

In a day or two, I'll try to start putting out a few posts with discussions of the main selection dilemmas of the year. (I've already done one on the key conundrum of the new season: which, if any, of this year's three 'super-premium' players might still be unavoidable picks, despite being so horribly over-priced.)

I am here compiling a summary of some of the key advice I've given on choosing the Initial Squad in this game, with links embedded to my original longer posts on each topic, if you want to look into any of them in a bit more detail.

How to choose the INITIAL SQUAD

This is my comprehensive guide on the main principles to keep in mind. Obviously, a lot of the specific player examples are now out of date, but the basic advice should still be clear enough. [I also have a potentially useful - or encouraging - follow-up post on how to assess if you've done a good job with your squad selection.]

You should also try to avoid falling in thrall to the myth of the 'differential', the misguided belief that players can be worth having just because they are low-owned. This is obvious nonsense; you need to focus on points-potential (within the reference-frames of what else you're doing with your squad, and how much money you've got left), not ownership level. [See What a 'differential' is not... and The true meaning of 'differential' for a fuller discussion on this.]

You might also find it useful to keep in mind these rough scales or tiers of points returns and pricing.

And here are a selection of more specific tips...

Don't take a chance on uncertain starters (or new arrivals)

Players new to the league, players who've had injury problems over the summer, players who might still be a bit fatigued after the World Cup, players facing a lot of possible competition for a regular starting slot:... these all have to be avoided in the initial squad. Early in the season, we have enough problems with unexpected dropouts among players we thought we could rely on as nailed starters, without taking any unnecessary extra risks like this.

And likewise,  Beware of double-ups and treble-ups

In general, you want to avoid over-exposing yourself to any one club, even the strongest of them; but especially at the start of the season - when you just don't know (however 'well' they may have appeared to do in pre-season) what their, or anyone else's, form is going to be like in the opening few games.

Stack the midfield  and  The fifth midfield slot is where the value lies

It is amazing how wilfully blind so many FPL managers are about this most obvious and fundamental element of the game: midfielders earn more points than the other positions, and usually dominate the overall player rankings at the end of the season (typically at least 6 or 7 of the Top 10, often as many as 15 of the Top 20). This simple fact dictates that you should be trying to play all 5 midfielders as often as possible - and that that 5th midfielder is likely to be the squad slot that gives you the biggest differential advantage over your rivals!

 

A good rotation pair can beat a premium keeper

A very basic point about goalkeeper selection - but many people seem to fail to grasp it!

Two mid-price picks beat a premium and a dud

While this point is not as invariably and incontrovertibly true with other positions as it is with goalkeepers,.... it is very nearly so.

How to fill the 'bargain' - 'budget enabler' - spots

At the start of the season, when budget is a bit tight, you can't usually afford to spend much on your 4th and 5th defenders or your 3rd forward, and you might be skimping a bit on your back-up keeper and your 4th/5th midfielders too. But you really need to guard against making false economies - especially in midfield.

Defensive premiums aren't usually worth it

You have to think very, very carefully about spending more than 6.0 million on a defender - because, 9 times out of 10, they just won't be that much, if at all better than several of the cheaper rival picks.

And... The super-premiums aren't usually worth it

The most expensive players each year, in any position, are never 'worth it' in pure value-for-money, points-per-pound terms. But I suggest some other criteria by which to evaluate if it may be worth paying a super-high price for a player.

Attacking returns will still (usually) beat 'defensive points'

'Defensive points' are a novelty in the game, only introduced last year (the 25-26 season), so we're still struggling to assess just what impact they are having. I made this prediction last year that, while the new points would be very nice to have, they probably wouldn't on their own make anyone a preferable pick over someone who offered high attacking returns. Many people are not yet convinced of this because... we happened to have a horrible year last year (the lowest-scoring FPL season ever in midfield!). However, the top performers on these new points, in both midfield and defence, also happened to produce quite a good number of attacking contributions as well: they wouldn't have finished so strongly in the overall rankings if they hadn't done well under both headings; and they still wouldn't have been nearly so high up in the final table in any normal year!!

 

NO-ONE is a 'set-and-forget'

FPL managers often naively assume that all they have to do is guess which players are going to end the season with the most points, pick them all, and then.... hang on to them until they get injured. Um, no - it just doesn't work like that. There are very, very few players - not even the season's top points-producers - who are actually worth hanging on to for the entire season.

You NEED your Bench!

Many people ignore and disparage their Bench. But it is super-important, and it is foolish to 'go light' on it - even at the start of the season.

'Dead men' earn NO POINTS; and they LOSE VALUE

In particular, you cannot afford to leave empty seats on your Bench - with injured or non-starting players.

These three broader overviews of 'how the game works' might also be of interest...

What MAKES THE DIFFERENCE in FPL?

This is a quick round-up of the factors that determine whether you finish the season with a high ranking. (Alas and alack, 'player selection' doesn't feature very high!)

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

A fairly recent post itemising the most common mistakes we see - even in the squads of supposedly 'top' managers!!

And...  Are you a 'good' FPL manager?

My definitive checklist for identifying your possible handicaps and shortcomings in the game.

And I regularly recommend that if you're going to seek help or inspiration from online advice,... you should confine yourself to some of these excellent tactical analysis channels on Youtube.

You can find other bits and pieces of advice on specific topics like this in my Adages, In a Nutshell, and Top TIPS! series. [I never figured out how to differentiate these strands, and have ended up tagging a lot of posts with two or even all three of the labels. The only consistent distinction is that the Adages are (mostly) quite a bit shorter, and have the main point usefully summarised in the post title!]

And lastly, of course,... Remember - it's mostly LUCK!

And..... Remember The ONE GREAT TRUTH of the game.

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.

Beware the 'defcon' MIRAGE...!

 

I have a problem with the new 'defensive points', introduced into the Fantasy Premier League game for the first time last year. I went into some detail on this when the change was first announced; but here's a brief recap - and an expansion.

Why chasing 'defcon points' is probably misguided

1)  They're opaque.  

FPL has still provided no definitions or illustrations of how the various eligible actions are identified (and distinguished from each other!). And there are so many different game actions that might fall under one or more of the eligible categories that it is simply impossible to know from watching a game whether a player of ours has reached the necessary threshold of 'defensive contributions' to earn us extra points or not. We have to take it entirely on trust from Opta. [It is often as arbitrary and mystifying as the operation of the widely reviled 'Bonus Points System' in the game.]

2)  They're unreliable.  

Opta is extremely fallible: they do frequently miscount things. And with these 'defensive points' a miscount of one can make the difference between your guy getting 2 extra points (perhaps unjustly) or getting 0 points (perhaps unjustly).

3) They're unduly sensitive to fine margins of difference in performance (and margins of error in the counting!), and hence very unpredictable. 

Because the thresholds for earning the points are set so high, and being deemed to have come up even one contribution short of that mark means you get no additional points (while you cannot earn any further points beyond the basic 2 points, even if you exceed the threshold by 2x or 3x!!), it is impossible to predict whether a player is likely to attain the points in any particular game; much of the time, the best 'defcon' performers are hitting a number around their 'season average' - which is slightly below the required threshold to earn the points.

4)  The extreme sensitivity of the eligibilty threshold referred to above also makes it difficult to infer with any confidence how players' performance on these points will hold up from one year to the next.

It is impossible to rely on how much consistency players will achieve from one season to another in earning 'defensive points': a player might produce a similarly high level of consistent defensive solidity in his performances, and achieve an almost identical total 'defcon' tally for this season as he did for last, yet come up with a vastly lower return of 'defensive points' - simply because he had unluckily come up just short of the threshold in several matches this time around.

5)  They tend not to be earned in combination with points for anything else. 

Players usually only earn 'defensive points' in games where they're being put under a lot of pressure, where their team is generally having the worst of things. In games like that, they're unlikely to be keeping clean sheets, or featuring well in the Bonus Points - or coming up with any attacking contributions. 'Defensive points' can be a very nice consolation in a game in which your player's team take a bit of a battering; but a good 'defcon' number is rarely allied with a really good weekly points return. (And so, since you're usually rotating out your weakest 1 or 2 defenders, and sometimes your weakest midfielder - you probably often won't be playing your 'defcon monster' picks anyway: because the games that give them the best prospect of earning the 'defensive points' are games in which you don't fancy them to pick up more than 4 points, and the rest of your squad really should be able to do better than that.)

6)  'Defensive contributions' don't register very strongly under the BPS.

You get massively more credit under the 'Bonus Points System' for overall game involvement: a defensive player who gets on the ball a lot and registers a high percentage for pass completion will almost always out-rank one who just has a big day on the 'defensive contributions'. The 'defcons' may occasionally have enough of an impact to raise a player into the bonus points (though, usually, just a single one), in a sterile, low-scoing game where nobody achieves much of a BPS score; but that's only going to amount to a handful of extra points a season, at best. 

7)  The impact of the 'defensive points' last season was massively amplified by other - freakish! - factors.

Last season was - if you allow for the 'defensive points' (probably worth 100-150 points for most people) and the new additional chips (perhaps worth an extra 10-50 points together) - one of the lowest-scoring in the history of the game; and the lowest-scoring ever for midfielders: almost all of the usual highest points-producers - Palmer, Saka, Mbeumo, Cunha, Maddison, Wirtz, Gakpo, Maddison, Mitoma, etc., etc. - suffered seasons blighted by patchy, disppointing form and/or repeated or long-term injuries. Thus, the fact that so many central defensive midfielders finished fairly near the top of the midfield rankings last year, largely as a result of their 'defensive points', is unlikely to be repeated. In fact, only Rice and and Anderson crept into the Top Five midfielders (and Casemiro and and Garner were just in the Top Ten), so - that's still not heavy representation in the upper rankings. And in a more 'normal' season, you'd expect that at least 10 or 12 of the more prolific goalscorers and creators in the position category would comfortably outscore all the defensive midfelders. (Moreover, all of those top CDM performers last year had their ranking buoyed by an unusual number of attacking contributions as well; that's also unlikely to be repeated this year. And a key part of their appeal was their overall consistency, a steady drip-drip-drip of points through most of the season. This means that they were almost always being outperformed over shorter runs of games by several midfielders on a short-lived streak of good attacking form, and thus never really deserved a place in the squad - even though their end-season totals were quite impressive.)

So,.... I'm inclined to think that the allure of the 'defensive points' is a dangerous distraction.

The online forums at the moment are full of people asking Who are the best 'defcon' players?? 

As I said above, we can't necessarily have very high confidence that any of last season's best 'defcon' players will get the same return on these points this year, even if their level of performance is identical. (And there are other issues too: Van Dijk and Tarkowski are getting old, Senesi and Lacroix and Anderson have changed clubs, Garner is injured going into the start of the season, and... Crystal Palace and their previously impressive defence might fall apart without Oliver Glasner.)

And there are a few players who return pretty well on the 'defensive contributions' but offer little prospect of regular points for anything else. Some of the most consistent producers of these points are from weaker teams, who are regularly taking a battering; you generally want to stay away from teams that are going to be foundering down in the bottom third of the table.

Is is best to target defensive players from teams who concede fairly few goals. Teams who concede few goals will also pick up a decent number of clean sheets. No-one this season is going to get anywhere near Arsenal's remarkable haul of 19 clean sheets last time (not even Arsenal!!); but even 7 or 8 or 9 over the season is worth having. And for defenders, it's crucial to escape the slow attrition of shedding points as more goals are conceded; you have to try to avoid players who often take a pasting (this is why gambling on defenders from the promoted clubs, just because they're so cheap, very rarely pays off.)

And because they're 'in games' a lot of the time, not constantly being overwhelmed and only fighting rearguard actions, these sorts of teams have better prospects of picking up an above-average number of attacking contributions too (Sunderland's defenders did particularly well on this last season, for example). The best defenders at teams like this will probably be posting good 'defcon' numbers as well - but they'll be picking up plenty of points for other things too. And those other points are likely to be more reliable and more predictable.  So, that's what your main focus should be on.  'Defensive points' are nice to have, but they're a collateral benefit of being an all-around 'good defensive prospect' in FPL - not the main deciding factor for the selection. 'Defcon' potential can break a tie between two players who appear to you to be inseparable on every other metric; but if you choose a player for their 'defcon' record alone, there are almost certainly going to be alternative picks who might fare slightly less well on the 'defcon' numbers but are likely to do much better overall.

Had we but world enough and time.....

 

.... we'd all win FPL one day!

I said last week, in my major post on what actually makes the most difference to your FPL season points total, that smart FPL managers should out-perform not-so-smart ones.... most of the time.

But alas, I'm not convinced that is true: at least, not as often as it should be, not over a single season - not in our unitary existence.

The thing is, with such a huge number of manager accounts in the game every year now, you're inevitably going to get a huge number of them that prosper by sheer dumb luck (even among 'zombie accounts' that are rarely or never active!). And because the impact of luck in our game is far greater than that of skill, that unfortunately means that a very large number of those who do so prosper will prosper so extravagantly that they will outperform a lot of the merely skillful managers in the game who haven't had any out-of-the-ordinary luck, and hence that... not all, but a very great many of the folks in the upper reaches of the rankings most years are likely to be not really very good at all, to have reached that eminence mostly or entirely by luck.

It is my belief that the truly smart FPL managers would only be able to convincingly display their superiority over the masses across a very long timeframe.

You do see some evidence of this, with some of the best long-time managers having now produced fairly consistently decent - though rarely or never outstanding - results over 10 or 15 or 20 years. But even for this to happen, for one's 'true average' level of attainment to emerge, for you to prove your ascendance over the majority of other managers in the game (many of whom will have averages buoyed up by one or two extraordinarily lucky seasons...), it will usually take many, many years - maybe, in some cases, too many years, more than one human lifetime.

And for a really smart manager to win the global crown, or even to crack the top 50k or 100k, it might take him or her hundreds or thousands of lifetimes.

I speculate that if some sort of 'multiverse' hypothesis is indeed the case (that there are many parallel realities, perhaps an infinite number, all subtly different - and that hence, across that infinitude, everything that can happen, will happen somewhere), then smart FPL managers are enjoying their just reward somewhere each year. But within a single reality, it might take centuries or millennia before the dice fall that kindly for us.

For most of us, it will never happen - because life is too short.

'Chasing' is the ultimate DELUSION

A chap on one of the FPL forums recently was asking what tactics he should follow in the last two or three gameweeks of the season.

My reply was this:  You do what you'd do in any other gameweek. You pick the best team you can, and keep your fingers crossed for a good outcome. 

There is no way to 'protect' rank, or to 'chase' rank: you have no knowledge of what anyone else will choose to do, and no control over anyone's outcomes. 

If you delude yourself into thinking that a 'more cautious' selection or a 'more daring' selection is better, you're just distracting yourself from what you ought to be doing - trying to find the BEST selection.

That's all there is to it. 'Chasing rank' (or nervously 'protecting rank') is dangerous nonsense; it only leads to foot-shooting.

Never give up!

 

Last year, I watched a documentary about the early years of the American Space Program which included the following very striking line on the unique mentality they looked for in their astronauts - most of whom were admitted into the selection trials on the basis of their experience as military and/or civilian test pilots. I found the observation rather inspiring. I wish I could remember who said it; no-one very famous, not one of the astronauts, I think, but one of the engineers who'd worked closely with them.

Any ordinary pilot will reach a point where he accepts the situation is hopeless. You know, the plane's 10 seconds from hitting the ground and he'll say, "This is it. We're going down. We're going to die."

A test pilot just thinks to himself, "I still have 10 seconds. What else can I try?"

We should, I believe, seek to apply the same attitude in our approach to playing Fantasy Premier League. However unkind the Fates have been to us this season, however far out of reach our original goals may have slipped,... there are still things we can fight for, new challenges we can seek to overcome week by week.

We might not always 'succeed', but we can always TRY.

It doesn't make (all that) much difference WHO you pick!

 

Now, of course, it makes some difference. But not, perhaps, as much as we might wish. We fondly imagine that Fantasy Premier League is primarily a test of how good a judge of a player we are, but... I am inclined to think that this ability often doesn't make a great deal of difference.

Of course, there are always certain players who show such strong and sustained FPL points-scoring form that they become must-have for everyone: Salah and Haaland every year (until now...), Cole Palmer two years ago, Gabriel and Antoine Semenyo and Bruno Fernandes this year.

But outside that very narrow gilded circle of players whose returns are so far outside the normal range that their value is obvious and incontrovertible to everyone, there is no restrictive 'template' of obviously best picks (that is one of the most bizarre delusions in FPL-land!): there's always a pool of at least 20 or 30, sometimes 40 or 50 or more, plausible, sensible potential picks from whom you'll build the rest of your squad. And, very often, there is little or nothing to choose between these players.

I have tried running a second team a few times - making wildly different picks from my 'main team'; and at season's end, their points totals would be uncannily close. There's usually very little to choose between me and my old college buddy, my main antagonist in the game, although we rarely have many picks in common. Most of the other people I gauge my performance against, in most years, finish within a spread of only 50 or 100 points of each other - and of me. And I rather think that most of that difference can be attributed to other factors than player selection, to other fluctuations of luck.

Raya and Pickford have pulled a little ahead of the field in the goalkeeper rankings at the moment; but there are several others not too far behind - and that chasing pack is separated by just 15 points. (And a lot of the points-spread is accounted for by some keepers having missed matches; apart from Ellborg and Benitez, who've only just come into their sides, the top eleven - including Raya and Pickford -  are separated by less than 0.5 points per game.)       

Gabriel and Timber are well out in front of the other defenders, but the best-of-the-rest, the next eight top returners in that position category, are separated by just 11 points.

Things are even tighter among the midfielders, with only 2 points separating 5th and 10th spot in the rankings. [Things might have changed a bit now. I wrote this before the Gameweek 31 matches had been played.]

You're mostly only getting players in for a run of 5-8 games at a time. And any decent player will usually manage one good haul in that time. If some of your picks do a little better than that, and some do a little worse, it usually balances out over the season as a whole - to a quite remarkable degree.

Now, some FPL managers make a lot of obviously bad picks - they stick with old favourites out of sentiment, they favour the club they support too much, they ignore players from certain other clubs because of personal enmities, or they're just not very sharp at recognising emerging form. But amongst reasonably smart and engaged managers who are making consistently sensible player selections,... it doesn't generally matter that much which particular players they pick alongside the few must-haves. 

There are probably only a few hundred thousand such managers, certainly less than a million. And there would usually be very, very little to choose between them - not much more than 100 points at most, often far,  far less - on their player returns alone. I am convinced that it is luck with all the bonuses in the game - the captaincy selection and the chips - that has a far bigger impact on points totals and rankings. I'll have rather more to say on that shortly; I fear it is too large a topic to fit nicely within this 'Adages' thread.

Do these 'good' managers, the ones who make consistently well-informed and self-aware selections, always prosper in the game, do they regularly fill out the top 1,000,000 places in the global rankings? Alas, NO. Many of them will fall outside the top million; if they've been really unlucky - with multiple injuries, perhaps - they might occasionally drop outside the top 3 or 4 million. Again, it is other factors, factors mostly of 'luck', that determine your rank finish - not your basic sagacity in understanding the game and picking good players.

A 'successful' FPL team is only a window to the past, not the future

 

A lot of desperate FPL managers seek inspiration from checking out the teams of their mini-league rivals or the current global frontrunners, etc..... and copying them.

That is, of course, CHEATING; and is to be discouraged on moral grounds alone.

But also.... it rarely does much good. As I just pointed out the other week, just about no team is ever 'perfect' anyway; however well we're currently doing, there are almost inevitably always a few irksome weak spots in our teams that we just don't have enough transfers to deal with.

However, even a team which looks in really good shape, and is enjoying 'success' currently - high rank position, excellent returns in recent weeks - is merely a team which has done well up to now. There is no guarantee that it will continue to do similarly well from here on....

Some players in that prosperous team you examine so enviously have probably been going off the boil in the past few games - or are just about to. New hot streaks of irresistible form may be just emerging, or just about to emerge, in other players. There is no essential reason why a team that did exceptionally well in the last gameweek - or over the last month, or over the season as a whole so far - should do better than any other team in the coming gameweek. (And indeed, this season we seem to have been seeing even more extreme swings of fortune than usual, with good teams having an outstanding return in one gameweek only to collapse to a horrendous result in the next.)

Just COPYING someone else's selections is never a good thing. If you are going to look at other people's teams, at the currently 'most successful' teams, try to analyse why they've done well, why they've done better than you so far. Then - try to assess how well they're likely to do over the next few gameweeks; and see if you can think of how these teams might be improved.

What you should be trying to do is not simply mimic the selections a successful FPL manager has already made, but to anticipate what picks they might make next.