Nobody's team is ever PERFECT

 

We all want to feel good about ourselves. And we all want to feel good about our FPL team: we want it to be as good as it can be. And - much of the time - we persuade ourselves that it is.

But... as good as it can be is not perfect. And if you delude yourself into believing that it is, that can lead into a dangerous complacency.

How often, really, does any of us get to roll a transfer? Usually no more than a handful of times a season. And even then, we're usually saving them up for 'tactical' reasons, not because we really don't feel our team could use any changes at all; we'd like to use a transfer straight away, but we have judged that being able to make multiple transfers a week or two further on may be even more valuable to us.

Almost always we have a few players who seem to have lost a bit of form, or are stuck in teams whose form has suddenly - and often quite mysteriously - deserted them, or who face a few unpromising fixtures in the coming run of games. And almost always there are other players who've caught our eye with a one or two big performances (though we're probably not yet quite sure if this is really emerging form or just a flash-in-the-pan), players we are starting to covet as possibly better alternatives to some of our current selections. 

And, if we played the game like FPL's dim (probably AI??) 'pundit' The Scout, blithely making unlimited transfers every week, we'd 'fix' all of those potential problems, chase all of those dreams. But that is not the game. We play the game properly: we know that transfers have a 'cost', and that it is very difficult to make back that cost by switching out a decent player who still has a regular start - certainly not within a single gameweek. We use our transfers cautiously, parsimoniously: and almost all of them have to be used to deal with injuries.

And because of that,... not only do we almost invariably have at least a few players, sometimes even four or five or six, who are looking slightly sub-par, players that in an ideal world we'd probably swap out; some of those players might have been clogging up our team for weeks - because we've always had more urgent changes to make with our limited transfers.

So, in practice, because of the harsh realities of this Fantasy game of ours, it is extremely unlikely that any of us will truly get to enjoy the satisfaction of having our team just the way we want it. (Even when we play a Wildcard, we usually get one or two players who immediately suffer an injury or a crash in form. That always seems to happen to me, anyway...)

But even when that rare combination of circumstances does align for us, those happy few times each season when we do seem to have our team just the way we want it,.... that's never going to be 'perfect', is it? 'Perfection' is an impossible ideal. You can drive yourself crazy chasing that phantom. Make do with as good as it can be.

A bad outcome does not mean it was a BAD DECISION

 

FPL managers have an unfortunate tendency to judge their decisions - and everyone else's - only by the points outcomes that follow from them.

But exact points outcomes are unpredictable, very largely a matter of luck: unknowable before the event.

Therefore, they offer no help to you in refining your decision-making process. And only by doing that, can you hope to improve at the game - and gain more satisfaction in it.

If you were careful, thorough, open-minded and self-aware, and above all well-informed in your deliberations about a selection decision - then it was a good decision, the best decision you could have made in the circumstances.... regardless of the outcome. THAT is all that matters.

Some 'good decisions' in FPL don't pay off; some can turn out wretchedly badly. It doesn't mean they were 'bad decisions'. Whereas many selections that are made hastily, impulsively, based on sentiment or superstition, made in disregard of contrary data or more promising alternative options,.... can produce big points returns: that does not retroactively make them 'good' decisions. They were terrible decisions.... that got undeservedly LUCKY.

It is the quality of the decision-making process, not its ultimate outcome, that is important.

Many will object, "But, oh, how can you say the outcomes are not important? The game is all about how many points you get!"  Yes, indeed. But the thing here is that we have to believe there is ultimately some justice in the game (and there is; not as much as we'd like, but some) and that good decision-making will, over the long run, be more rewarded than bad, impulsive, ill-informed decision-making.

So, you should concentrate on the process. If you become more self-aware about how you make your decisions, you start making better decisions. And better decisions, over time, mostly will produce better results.

If you just make wild bets, chase hunches, follow 'sheep' trends, back your favourite player even when their form has tanked, or succumb to believing in daft superstitions like "Haaland always scores on a Tuesday!" or whatever,.... you might do well occasionally; but you'll never get any better.

In fact, letting yourself get over-excited about poor decisions that brought improbably good results can lead you into further bad habits. That is something you need to be very wary of. All superstitions grow out of doing something dumb that worked once. And all superstitions are ultimately BAD.

Feeling THANKFUL?

I've long had a peculiar fondness for the American holiday of Thanksgiving - largely because I've so often been able to celebrate the occasion with American and/or Americophile friends, and a few times even in America.

This year, alas, I shall probably be making do with a turkey sandwich on my own. And maybe I'll make myself a pumpkin cheesecake for a sweet treat tonight...

Anyhow, a Happy Thanksgiving to any American readers who may stumble upon this obscure corner of the Internet (probably looking for content about the Fantasy version of their own gridiron game - the one that rather conspicuously involves very little playing of the ball with the foot....).

[And apologies to any Canadian readers who feel overlooked. But you're probably used to it! I am well aware that your version of this holiday falls much earlier, on the 2nd Monday in October, as I lived in Toronto for a year-and-a-half in my youth. However, that holiday never embedded itself in my psyche, even when I was a resident in the country. You Canucks are not so, um, culturally assertive as your American cousins, I suppose.]

For some reason, Linus's pitiful obsession with The Great Pumpkin - an autumn-themed deity of his own invention - was always one of the things that most resonated with me in the classic 'Peanuts' cartoons. This superstition of his was actually associated with Halloween, but it is Thanksgiving, with its own emphasis on pumpkins, that always recalls it to my mind. 

Linus, of course, was convinced that The Great Pumpkin would appear only to him, if he created a pumpkin-patch that was worthy of the demi-god's attendance; and he'd wait patiently every year, full of expectation - but it never happened.  In much the same way, we FPL managers convince ourselves that, if we only take enough care over our selections, one day The Great Gameweek or The Great Chip Play will manifest itself only for us.  Like I said, pitiful.

Again with the metaphors, Mr Wade?

What is a Triple Captain worth?

 

There are two aspects to that question:  1)  How should you assess the points value of the Triple Captain chip?  and 2)  How many points can you expect to earn from it?

Unfortunately, if your thinking is muddled on the first part of the question (as it often seems to be in FPL-land), that prevents you forming a clear idea of what you ought to be aiming for with the chip.

People very commonly claim that their return from playing the Triple Captain is THREE times the gameweek points-haul for their chosen captain. But this is just empty bragging, or dangerous self-delusion. (People who somehow persuade themselves that the value of the chip is TWUCE their captain's points-haul are even more perversely misguided in their way of looking at this!)  Of course, you should really only be interested in the points lift that the chip gives you over what you would have had without it. And you'd get the basic points haul for that player anyway. In fact, since you surely would have made him your captain anyway, you would have got twice his points-haul for the week if you hadn't played the chip. So, the additional value of the Triple Captain chip is only the basic points-haul total, not some multiple of it.

I have discussed in some detail before the issue of whether the Triple Captain chip invariably pays off better in a Double Gameweek. (Summary; it can - but usually it does not. And it's a very dangerous thing to gamble on, since Double Gameweeks are now few and small, and right at the back end of the season.)

My general advice on both types of Bonus Chip is that you have to be prepared to play them opportunistically. There can be so many swings in player and individual form over a season that you often don't know who the hottest player of the year is going to be until a streak of exceptional returns suddenly emerges,.... and you often don't know what anyone's 'easiest' fixture is going to be until shortly before it happens. You can suss out the likely most promising options some months ahead; but you need to stay flexible, and be prepared for those tentative plans to completely change. (This year, Erling Haaland is still in form, and still the only FPL player regularly producing big points returns. And it has been fairly obvious since the start of the season that his two best fixtures in the first half of the season were likely to be City's home gaines against Leeds and West Ham in Gameweeks 13 and 17. So - for once - the start-of-season provisional plan for most people hasn't changed.... yet. But a lot of people weren't prepared to risk waiting this long, when Haaland was also knocking in braces of goals against better opponents. And now there is a chance that Saka or Mbeumo might be coming into tempting form as possible alternative picks. If Haaland gets injured in the next few weeks, then there'll have to be a late change of plan.... Such things often happen.)

Of course, you hope to successfully target one of your best hauls of the season for a Triple Captain play - but it is not reasonable to expect to land on the best; it's all just too unpredictable. Almost always, in fact, your and everyone else's best haul of the season comes from some complete random that you would never have expected to produce for you - and didn't very often, so wasn't a strong bet for the TC chip. You have to focus on players who can bag very large hauls multiple times a season, and who maintain top form for extended periods. Even if they won't ultimately provide any of your very best scores of the season, they are more reliable bets to provide a good score in a particular gameweek.

You shouldn't use the chip lightly, just throw it away on impulse; you should carefully choose a week in which your best player, when he's in his best form, is facing an opponent against whom he should have an especially high chance of scoring more than one goal.

But even the most exceptional players don't return every week. Usually, in fact, they'll 'blank' at least 1 game in every 3 across the season, probably closer to 1 game in 2. And sometimes even a Mo Salah or an Erling Haaland in their hottest run of form will still manage to 'blank' against a poor side.

You have to steel yourself to accept that a Triple Captain play can return nothing - and very often does. Perhaps 1 time in 3, your Triple Captain will only produce basic 'appearance points', or even less (the annals of FPL abound with horror stories of managers who ventured their TC on a player who got injured inside 10 minutes, or missed a penalty, or received a red card....).  

You have to be grateful for any sort of return at all from the chip; and very, very grateful if your haul from it happens to break into double-digits, even narrowly. It is foolish to expect - or even to hope for - a massive dividend of 15 or 20 or 25 points. That kind of thing happens fairly rarely, and requires a very large dose of LUCK.

[I wrote a follow-up post a day or two later on how to assess the impact of your Bench Boost chip.]

When to use the 'Triple Captain'? (1)

 

One of the most trenchantly beloved myths in FPL is that you can only play your Triple Captain bonus chip in a Double Gameweek.

Now that we have been given two of this chip this year, with the first only available for use until the end of December, that factor is immediately removed from consideration for that first chip - because we're (almost certainly) not getting any Double Gameweeks in the first half of the season.

However, even for the second one, which we now must use in the second half of the season, when the Double Gameweeks traditionally occur (though we'll probably only get two of them this year, and rather small ones...), that policy can be dangerously misguided. It certainly involves quite a big risk.

The myth seems to be founded on the logic that a player must inevitably score more points if he's playing twice. But that is obviously not a necessary truth. Furthermore, I suspect that for most people it is founded on the greedy delusion that a top player can - and will, at least with a beguilingly high degree of probability - secure a double-digit haul in both legs of the DGW, thereby securing a haul for the Triple Captain chip of 20+ points!

In fact, for a long time, Wayne Rooney - in his youthful prime, over a decade-and-a-half ago - was the only player ever to have pulled off that trick of securing double-digits in both games of a double-fixture week. Admittedly, Jean-Philippe Mateta also managed it (out-of-the-blue - completely unexpected by just about everybody) a couple of seasons ago. But this feat has, in the long history of FPL, looked like a once-in-a-decade (at most!) aberration. And that was during a period when we had more and bigger double gameweeks than we do now. So, if that's what you're hoping for in waiting to punt your Triple Captain chip on a Double Gameweek - think again.

But perhaps, the myth-worshippers will object, even if a player can't return a big score in two successive games, he might at least be more likely to produce one really big score if he has two chances to do so?

Well, there might be something in that... Not much, but something. If you look at a list of the biggest gameweek hauls in the game's history, that lad Rooney is indeed at the top of it with 32 points for that double double-digit performance. And most of the following handful of top performers also benefitted from Double Gameweeks - but not all of them: in fact only 6 out of the top 10 gameweek hauls were produced with the help of a double-fixture. And that's because it's very, very difficult to get above 20 points in a Single Gameweek, and just about impossible to get above 25 points. But as soon as you get down to 25 or 26-point weekly totals (and a couple of players have done better than that from a Single Gameweek), the Single Gameweek returners immediately become the great majority. We have in recent seasons seen players like Mo Salah and Cole Palmer (and even Noni Madueke last year - with some Palmer assists!) get some very big scores from Single Gameweeks.

Moreover, a lot of those players who did tremendously well from a Double Gameweek were real randoms: defenders, or midfielders who'd been out injured for a while, or forwards at less fashionable clubs - the kind of players that no-one would have been likely to play their prized TC chip on. 

Realistically, most FPL managers - with good reason (I shall have a little more to say on this tomorrow) - are only likely to play the TC chip on an exceptional player like Salah or Haaland (or maybe Son or DeBruyne or Kane, in the past; and in recent years, Palmer and perhaps, at least occasionally, Saka and Foden have also come into the reckoning): players who, when they're really in form, seem capable of getting a double-digit haul quite regularly, and who can be usually be relied on to produce at least a few really big hauls each season.

And if you look at the record of players like these, their best returns of the season (and, very often, their second and third and fourth best too!) have almost always come in Single Gameweeks, not Doubles.

The things that make a haul more likely are form and ease of opposition, not the mere fact that a player has two games in the gameweek. 

All those players who did manage a really big return from a Double Gameweek had at least one, often two really soft opponents in their pair of fixtures. If a Double Gameweek is against two difficult opponents, or even two average opponents (or indeed it's against two really poor opponents, but your favoured Triple Captain bet is out-of-sorts at the moment....), there is no point playing the chip. The double-fixture is not 'magic' in itself: it's the quality of the fixture ('easy opponent'), not the number of games that matters.

Well, there is still the argument from fear, I suppose. Even appearance points from a second game would be a nice lift to your points total; and if your man should somehow pick up something - anything, no matter how slight - from both the games, despite somewhat unpromising fixtures,.... surely that would be a decent return for the Triple Captain chip??

Alas, NO - not really. The lower-end for your points expectation may be very slightly raised; but you should be thinking about the overall points-range, and the likeliest mid-point you could reasonably expect to achieve. That is almost certainly going to be better in a single fixture where you're absolutely confident of your captain's form, and of the poor quality of the opposition.

[You should never let fear - of your own possible misfortune, or of what your rivals might be plotting - guide your decisions in FPL. You should always focus on what you believe are the best ways to optimise your own points returns. And you should be ambitious for the Triple Captain chip; it can be very valuable - you should be looking to maximise your return from it, not simply securing an OK, least-worst outcome on it.]

And there's a further, VERY BIG problem with waiting for a Double Gameweek to play this chip. The Double Gameweeks happen in the latter part of the season: that is a long time to wait. 

Your favoured captaincy pick for the chip might have picked up a knock or suffered a dip in form by that point. (A lot of people were planning to play the chip on Mo Salah a couple of seasons ago; but he had never fully shaken off a hamstring tweak he suffered while playing for Egypt in AFCON, and had a very muted end to that season.)  Heck, he might even have suffered a season-ending injury, or been poached by the Saudis in the January transfer window.... Shit happens.

Also, in that closing phase of the season, the final stages of the FA Cup and the European competitions are getting pretty intense, and clubs still involved in those will quite often rest some of their players, particularly their top players - in matches that follow closely on one another, and/or are against weaker opponents that the back-up players ought to be able to deal with. Hence, you can't be absolutely confident that your Salahs and your Haalands will even play in both fxitures of a Double Gameweek! 

If they do play in both games, they're very likely to get restricted minutes. And they're almost certainly going to be well below their best because of mounting fatigue.  [This is why I think it's increasingly unlikely that we'll see Rooney's and Mateta's achievement replicated again; or not more than once every two or three decades, anyway! With the insane physical demands of the current game - which have escalated enormously over the last 15 years - you just can't expect players to produce peak performances twice within a few days of each other,... especially at the back end of the season, when mental and physical tiredness and persistent injury niggles are accumulating.]

And dammit, because the Double Gameweeks are determined by progress to the last rounds of the domestic cups, you can never be sure that your favoured Triple Captain pick - one of that gilded handful of players, perhaps just one or two, who do seem to offer you a significant chance of a brace of goals or better, if you give them a soft opponent - will even get a Double Gameweek. And it's impossible to predict exactly when the postponed league games from the weekend of the relevant cup tie (these days, it's only the Final of the League Cup and the Semi-Finals of the FA Cup) will be rearranged to; so, even if you're willing to gamble on your chosen Triple Captain's club getting through to those rounds, you don't know which two fixtures are going to be combined into one gameweek for him - and it might sometimes be a couple of really tough ones rather than a pair of gimmes.

Even if you get a reasonably promising Double Gameweek for your chosen Triple Captain at the tail-end of the season, it's actually fairly unlikely that he'll make more points from it than he did from a few of his best single-fixture weeks earlier in the season. And there is no guarantee that he'll get any sort of Double Gameweek at all!

Hence, it's almost never worth hanging on for a Double Gameweek to play the Triple Captain chip. (It never was, even when rearranged games from the FA Quarter-Finals weekend ususually used to give us a really big Double Gameweek slightly further ahead of the end of the season. [These BIG Double Gameweeks of old gave you an enhanced chance that Salah, Haaland, etc. would actually get a Double Gameweek; but that Double Gameweek was almost always a much more tempting opportunity for the Bench Boost chip rather than the Triple Captain!])

Ah, but never say 'never'. Didn't good ol' Mo get a huge score in a Double Gameweek just last season??  Why, yes, he did. But that was not a regular Double Gameweek; it was a one-off rearrangement of a bad weather postponement. It happened earlier in the season than the usual Double Gameweeks. And the rescheduled date was only confirmed at fairly short notice. We knew that Salah was on fire at that point in the season. And he did indeed have two fairly middling opponents to face; so, of course, this double-fixture became a favourite opportunity to play the chip on him as soon as it was announced. Indeed, back in early December when the Merseyside derby was originally postponed, we knew Salah - who was having the best season in FPL history - would get a double-fixture against Everton + another at some point in late January or early February; and that was worth hanging on for. The utterly uncertain prospect of a Double Gameweek resulting from FA Cup success, to be scheduled in the closing weeks of the seaason, is NOT worth hanging on for.

I shall have a follow-up post soon, focusing more on when it is a good idea to play the Triple Captain chip, rather than when it isn't.

SOMETIMES the Sheep get lucky!!!

Now, I said at the weekend, just ahead of the Gameweek 6 deadline, that I thought all the enthusiasm for risking the Triple Captain chip on Haaland against Burnley was probably misguided....

And look what happened!  Yes, I was very soon proved 'wrong'!!

Except.... I carefully said 'probably'. And I was specifically criticising the reasons given for this pick (exaggeratedly denigrating Burnley's defensive abilities; and that on the basis of a single  - misinterpreted, misrepresented - statistic!), and reviewing some strong counter-arguments for waiting for later, potentially better opportunities to use the chip (on Haaland, or someone else).  In fact, I explicitly acknowledged that this chip play on Haaland might turn out OK!

But still I get pilloried by the online dingbats who insist that I made a foolish, ill-informed and obviously incorrect 'prediction'.  I did not. I just pointed out a few facts they were wilfully overlooking, and they got pissy about it; and when things work out OK for them,.... they then want 'revenge'!!!  Petty people.

Actually, things worked out much better than merely 'OK': a 16-point haul might well prove to be Haaland's best return of the entire season; and there probably won't be too many other scores much better than it. It did, as it happens, turn out to be potentially the best Triple Captain return for the season (or at least for the first half of it, since we now have two of these chips).

But the people who gambled their Triple Captain chip this week didn't know that was going to happen. And most of them are doubly stupid, because they think they did know. Trebly stupid, because they think that a successful outcome proves the 'smartness' of the original decision. It does not: it only proves that they were lucky - very, very lucky.

These people appear to fall prey to the common fallacy that if something happens, it must have had a 100% probability of happening at some point long prior to its happening. That is not so.

No-one ever has quite a 100% probability of even starting a game (because there are so many little last-minute accidents-of-fate that might thwart that - how often have we seen players pull a muscle in the warm-up, for example?). In this case, given that Haaland had missed some training earlier in the week with a back-muscle problem, he can't have been much better than a 95% probability to appear from the beginning, perhaps much less; there was surely a good chance that Pep would prefer to leave him on the bench as a super-sub option, against a team who were not expected to be very difficult to beat.

And the probability of him playing most of the game was perhaps no better than 60% or 70%, given that recent injury concern, and the fact that Pep almost invariably withdraws him as soon as a game looks safely won - especially when there is a European match coming up the following midweek. And the likelihood of him being left on until the final whistle can't have been more than 50%.

While Haaland does produce a fair few assists, it's still a relative rarity: usually only about a 25% chance in any given game. (And last year the assists really dried up for him; so, with this evolving City set-up, we might expect that probability to be even lower at the moment.)

And then, of course, he ended up getiting a brace - right at the end of the game, when he could not reasonably have been expected to be still on the pitch. Even a very poor defensive team (and Burnley are not that....) will rarely make two 'errors leading to goals' in the same game; and the chances of them both occurring in added-on time, and both being converted by the same player are vanishingly small.

Haaland's 16-point return in this game was a completely unpredictable freak event!!

Sure, City were favourites to win, and win fairly comfortably. There was a good chance they might score 2 or 3 goals against them (all of this I acknowledged in my discussions of the prospects for the match). But there was no compelling reason to suppose they would obviously be able to score a lot of goals (and really, Burnley were on top for a lot of this game, nearly took a 2-1 lead early in the second half; they didn't deserve to go down this badly), nor to expect that Haaland would claim more than 1 of any they did score (and he didn't - for nearly 90 full minutes of regulation time, which must have been agony for all those TC punters!!). There is always a range of likely points outcomes for any player in any game; and this result for Haaland was way, way above the median of that range this week.

Those who now smugly proclaim that they predicted "exactly what was going to happen" in this match are lying to themselves and everyone else. 

They made a risky bet, a brave bet - that paid off. Puffing themselves in those terms would be acceptable. But to pretend that it was 'a safe bet' and 'a shrewd decision' and so on is fatuous nonsense. You had no idea how that bet was going to turn out: it could have gone very, very badly instead of very, very well. But it just happened to go very, very, very, very well. Thank your lucky stars - and shut up about it.

And there is still a chance that another TC bet over the next three months will pay out even bigger.....

[And yes, that sheep does appear to have 8 tiny legs!! AI is not ready to take over the world quite yet....]

ONE statistic proves nothing

 

This week, The Sheep's big stampede is towards punting their Triple Captain chip on Erling Haaland.

There are a few reasons why this might not be such a great idea. It's still very early in the season, and - even with this new second Triple Captain chip only available until the end of December, there will be many more, possibly better, opportunities to gamble it on Haaland, or another player. The big lad's been suffering with a back strain and missed a lot of training this week (now expected to start, it seems; but quite likely to get pulled off early, if the game's in the bag [as Pep usually does anyway; but may now go for very early], especially as City have an away trip to Monaco on Wednesday in the Champions League), and he's probably not going to be quite at his best.. And, well, although they're steadily improving, City still haven't yet looked anywhere near their dominant best of a couple of years ago.

Ah, but the primary reason behind this TC choice seems to be that Burnley are supposedly "the worst defence in the league."  And the sole piece of evidence cited for that momentous assertion is that they're currently top of the stats for 'shots conceded'.

A few problems with this:

1)  One statistic in isolation very rarely tells you anything.

2) Statistics this early in the season for anything can't tell you very much, because one 'untypical' game can massively skew the overall figures. And also, nobody's form has really settled down yet, and we've seen some wildly erratic performances and unexpected results so far this year.

3)  The 'shots conceded' number is more a measure of the quality of the opposition you've faced than the quality of your defence in dealing with that threat. And Burnley have had a particularly demanding opening run of fixtures, facing Spurs, Manchester United, Liverpool, and Nottingham Forest so far - all very good attacking teams (damn, yes, even United played quite well against them).

4)  On a range of stats that more accurately reflect 'defensive quality', Burnley actually look quite impressive. One of the most persuasive of all is their xGC 'delta', the gap between their 'expected goals conceded' and the actual number conceded - that's an enormous 2.3 in the right direction. They're keeping more goals out than almost any other team!

So, it's early in the season, and the stats can easily get skewed: Burnley have twice conceded 3 goals in a match, which makes their defensive record look terrible. They've also had 2 penalties awarded against them, which makes their goals conceded total look a bit worse than it really ought to. They looked rocky at the start of the season, when they were easily taken apart by Spurs, but have improved steadily since. Against United, they left themselves open by chasing a game they thought they could win, and were desperately unlucky to concede a late penalty to lose the points. They beat fellow promoted side Sunderland fairly comfortably, and kept a clean sheet. They played well enough to deserve a clean sheet and a point away from home against Liverpool, and were again desperately unlucky to be thwarted by a very late penalty. And they contained Forest very well - after conceding a goal out-of-nowhere barely a minute into the game.

You need to consider a range of relevant statistics, never just one on its own. And you need to put those statistics in context, to consider the story of each individual match that has produced them.

Just saying, "Look how many shots Burnley have faced! They must be rubbish!!" is NONSENSE.

This post isn't really about Burnley. Or Haaland. It's about how people deceive themselves with superficial, lazy readings of statistics.

Burnley are a weak team overall: they can't control the ball enough or create enough threat to stop the stronger teams in the league from dominating them. But their defence is, arguably, in fact one of the best in the league at the moment.

And, realising the hopelessness of their chances against City, they'll probably sit back in a low-block all game and try to tough out a draw. They so nearly made that work against Liverpool - who are, at the moment, a much, much better-looking team than City.

I don't think Burnley will beat City, and even a draw is a very long-shot for them. Heck, I think Haaland can probably pick up a goal, even if he only plays 55 minutes or so.

But Burnley's defence (and keeper!) are actually pretty damn good. They are - thus far, anyway - the most impressive-looking of the promoted sides; and also - so far - way, way better than West Ham,.... or Villa,... or Wolves.

This is not a fixture that looks like a pushover, a guaranteed multi-goal party.

People are only playing that Triple Captain chip now because they're getting impatient. (And impatience in FPL is - usually - a very bad thing.)

I'd rather wait until Haaland has clearly shaken off this injury worry,.... and is facing a genuinely weak defence (he has Villa, Leeds, Sunderland, Fulham, and West Ham coming up between now and Christmas).

Even more, I'd rather wait until one of the goalscoring midfielders (who can give you a better return) like Saka or Salah or Palmer, or maybe Mbeumo or Cunha comes into a hot streak of form. All rushing to drop the Triple Cap on Haaland the first time he plays a promoted side is classic sheep behaviour.

(Now, Erling has been in tremendous form so far this season; and he is really the only player at the moment who regularly looks capable of scoring more than 1 goal per game. And he might pull that off again against Burnley; he might even get a hattrick [very, very unlikely; but he might]. That won't mean that playing the chip on him this week was a smart choice; that would just make it a lucky choice. All the evidence points to there being better opportunities for this chip a bit later on.)

[Ha! As it turns out, Haaland did manage a huge return in this game. Though he had to rely on being gifted 2 goals by bizarre defensive errors at the end of the regulation 90 minutes! As I acknowledge at the end of this piece, there was indeed a reasonable chance that he'd pick up a goal in this game, maybe even two; but there was no very strong reason for supposing that this was much more likely than in many other fixtures he'll face, much less for expecting that he was 'almost certain' to bag a multi-goal haul. The outcome here, while not beyond the bounds of expectation, was very much at the uppermost limit of the range of such expectation - it was very, very LUCKY!]

That SAME OLD QUESTION again....

"Are Haaland and Salah worth it this year?"

Short answer: NO.  (But....)

'Super-premium' players are almost never 'worth it': the opportunity cost of going without so many other better players in almost every position in your squad will massively outweigh any points-advantage they might offer (4 times out of 5, anyway). 

There are certain guideline criteria I suggest in that earlier post on this issue which might justify their inclusion. But I don't think these criteria (the crucial last two of them, at any rate) are clearly going to be met with either of the BIG TWO this season.

Will they rack up an absolutely massive season total??  Probably not - not anywhere near the level of their previous best years, anyway. Liverpool and City are both in a 'rebuilding' phase, which makes their overall team performance much more suspect (City, in fact, were really poor for most of last season - and haven't yet shown any sign of turning that around). Their star men are having to adapt to a lot of new personnel around them, with probably a very radically different playing style arising from that as well; and, more particularly, they will probably face more competition in sharing the club's pool of potential goals than in many previous years, with new players like Ekitike and Wirtz and Frimpong (and maybe Isak...?) very likely to cut into Salah's total, and Marmoush and Cherki probably claiming at least a few chances that might previously have fallen to Haaland. I think both of these superstars will still have very decent seasons - probably breaking 200 points, and maybe even getting up towards 250. But is that enough to justify a price tag of 14.0 or 14.5 million? Probably not!  [And that, I think, is at the optimistic rather than the pessimistic end of the range for projections of their performance this season. Salah, of course, is likely to lose a month or so mid-season due to his participation in the African Cup of Nations, and we should adjust our expectations of his season-total accordingly (although we should always be concerned rather with current form, rather than year-long achievement). And both Liverpool and City are giving signs that they're likely to struggle a little this season, at least against better opposition - and returns from all of their players will probably be slightly restricted by this. There is a good chance that Haaland and Salah - even without a major upset like a significant injury or a prolonged dip in output - will only return something like 170-190 points this season.]

Will they be the top-returner in their position category, by a big margin??  Again, probably not. They might again be the top points-returners, but, as I pointed out a few days ago, that, on its own, doesn't matter; it's the runs of returns over short stretches of the season, and the overall returns from the full starting eleven rather than the best individuals that decide your outcomes in FPL. Palmer, Saka, and Gakpo could run Salah pretty close, maybe even do a little better; and Cunha, Mbeumo, Ndiaye, Kudus, Wirtz, Ndoye, Hudson-Odoi, Elanga, Grealish, Ismaila Sarr, Enzo Fernandez and a few others also look like they could have very big seasons. Haaland has been given stiff competition by Isak and Watkins in the last couple of seasons, and they might prove even better prospects this year (especially if they move to stronger teams?); Joao Pedro and Richarlison have started the season very strongly, with suddenly rejuvenated teams who now look likely to be able to challenge at the top of the table; Wissa and Wood will be hoping to build on their outstanding form of last season; and the new arrivals in the league, Ekitike and Sesko and Gyokeres, look to have a lot of potential too. I'm not saying any of these will beat Haaland; but I don't think he'll open up much of a gap over the best of them.

Despite - probably - failing these key 'rule-of-thumb' tests, Haaland and Salah might still be justifiable picks as long as they're getting somewhere close (they might; though I'm not super-confident in them this time...),... IF the overall budget dynamics this year make them still affordable.

The key factors that determine this 'affordability' are how many other premium players there are (that you might covet as well as, or instead of the BIG TWO), and how much really good value there is to be found at the lower-end of the price spectrum.

On the first point, the situation looks rather promising: there are almost no other premium-priced players this season - the smallest number there has been for many years, I think. With the departures of Son and Luis Diaz in pre-season, we're left with only Palmer and Saka priced above 10 million in midfield, only Bruno Fernandes at 9.0 (who really should not be in contention at all this year, at any price), only Marmoush and Wirtz at 8.5, and only Cunha, Mbeumo, Foden, and Odegaard at 8.0. Among the forwards, only Isak is priced above 10 million (and not by much: I'd expected he'd start this season at least at 11.0 or 11.5!!), and only Watkins and Gyokeres are at 9.0.

But the cheap squad-filler end of the equation isn't nearly so favourable: among the forwards, only Strand Larsen and Thiago look like reasonably viable picks at the bottom end of the price spectrum (if Strand Larsen's rumoured move to Newcastle comes off this week, he could suddenly become one of the most popular picks in FPL!), and only perhaps Beto, Muniz, and Osula possible ultra-cheap bench-fillers (though they'd be low-value, very risky picks, as they don't currently look like being regular starters). Amongst the cheaper midfielders, only Reijnders, Ndoye, and Tavernier have so far stood out - and those might have been flash-in-the-pan performances. So far, we haven't seen many really compelling possibilities even at 6.5 (Rice and Enzo, Ndiaye and Grealish?), let alone much cheaper. Finding a player like Palmer two years ago, someone who might become the top points-producer of the season from a starting price of only 5 or 6 million, is a real 'Black Swan' event.....

Moreover, quite a few of the better budget midfielders, and most of the strongest defenders seem to have been priced 0.5 million higher this year, presumably to reflect their greater overall points-potential because of the newly-introduced 'defensive points'. This has a surprisingly big impact on the overall budget dynamics, and really puts a squeeze on our ability to afford the most expensive players (effectively, it means an extra 1.5-2.5 million of our budget is being spent 'invisibly').

If Haaland or Salah hit a run of form where they seem to be averaging 7 or 8 points a game for a while, they will be worth considering. But actually, for players of their price, even that isn't particularly outstanding - maybe still not quite enough to justify their selection, most of the time. Last year, Salah managed to average 9 points-per-game over the entire season; and both of them have often enjoyed spells of averaging 10 points or more per game. This year, I just don't think they'll do that again. While lots of other players will also probably hit that desirable threshold of bringing in 7 or 8 ppg, at least for a short spell.

But, of course, the dynamics of squad selection are always very fluid, dependent on multiple interacting factors. Salah and Haaland, despite not playing conspicuously well, have both produced pretty good points across the opening two games. While most of their more expensive rivals are currently out of contention: Isak is unavailable for selection while transfer discussions drag on, Watkins may be distracted by thoughts of a move and has looked out-of-sorts, Palmer and Saka and Odegaard just got injured, Eze just moved clubs and might not get an immediate start, Cunha and Mbeumo and Wirtz haven't found their form at their new clubs yet....

As it happens, you probably can afford Salah or Haaland at the moment. But I don't think you should splash the cash for both of them!  And neither of them should be regarded as a long-term hold this season.

For many FPL managers, alas, this question is treated as above rational discussion. These two players have developed a cult-like following of fanatics - who insist that they must always be a must-have pick, regardless of any considerations of form or overall budget. This, of course, is a very damaging delusion.

Players' season totals really DON'T MATTER

I already touched on this point quite extensively a couple of weeks back in this post on the price steps that are applicable for categorising FPL player options in different positions. However, it's such an important topic, I felt I should say a little more on it.

The problem here is that many FPL managers fall in thrall to the silly, dangerous delusion that ALL YOU HAVE TO DO in the game is identify the players who are going to get the highest totals for the season. (With the usual corollary that the players likeliest to do this are those who got the highest totals last season - which is a reasonable but not infallible guide to form.)

It seems paradoxical, unfathomable to many - but this is just NOT TRUE (not generally so, anyway; there will always be some exceptions, which I'll outline below).

The thing is, you really need to be pulling in around 200 points or so from every starting slot in your squad over the season, if you are to have a chance of finishing near the top of the rankings. In fact, since you're bound to come up short of that - perhaps well short - for many of the slots (defenders and goalkeepers just don't produce points at anything like the levels of the best midifelders and forwards), you really need to be aiming for more like 250+ points from at least a few of your highest-returning slots.

[It's very difficult, in practice, to get anything like 'optimal' returns from your captaincy picks throughout a season. But, even if we grant that you can match or slightly better the return from your top squad slot with your armband choices (Note: this might not be - probably won't be - a single player, held in the team all season.), and even if you could get a fairly good lift from all of your 'chips' (although we have double the usual number of chips this season, it's pretty unlikely they'll be collectively worth a lift of anything like an extra 100 points over the season), and even if you can get, say, 4 squad slots returning something close to 250 (whereas 2 or 3 hitting that level would be remarkable...), and even if you could hit that ideal of a 200-point average across the whole of the rest of your starting eleven (which would entail you having a very strong bench as well, since you're going to have to be drawing on those guys fairly often to fill out the main line-up),..... you'd still probably come up 50-100 points short of last year's global champion. That's how big of an ASK it is!!  But that's what we all have to aim for.....]

And 250 points is an enormous season-total for an individual player. Usually, there are only 1 or 2 players who manage that in a season; but quite often, there are none. There are only ever a handful who manage to get over 200 points each year - and usually only a little over that threshold; and again, it's possible that sometimes no-one will even crack that seemingly more modest milestone.

So, you can't usually rely on any player - even your Mo Salah, Thierry Henry, Wayne Rooney, Erling Haaland types - to deliver you the kind of points you need from your best positions in the eleven. Even the very best players don't always reach that level; occasionally, they might come up a long way short.

Even when the top players have a really outstanding season, they are very, very rarely the highest-returning player across every shorter run of games within the season. There was almost always a player who, across 4 or 5 or 6 games, was delivering more points than them once or twice over the season. That was even true of Salah in his record-breaking season last year; his returns tailed off in the latter part of the year, and there were spells when it would have been profitable to drop him for someone else. [Of course, it can seem like an unacceptable risk to swap out one of these top-performing players. As I discussed in this post, their ability to deliver some exceptionally high gameweek hauls, and their overall consistency - with few if any long runs of 'blanks' - often makes them worth holding on to for an extended period of time, and occasionally, perhaps, even the whole season. Furthermore, the fact that they're usually very high-priced players makes it much more difficult to swap them in and out of a squad at will; so, once you have them, you may feel somewhat stuck - obliged to persist with them, come what may. But that will often be a mistake: even the best players almost always hit runs of less impressive form,... while a cheaper rival is suddenly banging in goals every week. You must not let yourself become bewitched by the glamorous reputation of a top performer; if they're not the top performer right now, you need to be ready to let them go.]

You can't expect to be able to hang on to any player for the whole season. You need to be trying to wring more points out of every slot in your line-up than any single player can produce. In order to achieve that, you have to seek to constantly rotate in the best current players over a short run of games.

As I explained in the post I mentioned at the top here, previous season totals are a useful guide to likely performance in the current season. But what you're really interested in is not the actual season total, but the projection of a theoretical season total from recent form - when the player you're looking at has been getting a regular run of starts and has been playing well. You will often find that that number is well over 250 points (if he's been averaging around 7 points per game in his last 3 or 4 starts) Their actual season-total won't be anywhere near that, 99 times out of a hundred; they'll get injured, get dropped, or just suffer a bit of a drought at some point - their run of high returns will come to an end sooner or later. But you need to try to have them in your side when their pro rata returns are up in that golden zone. 

If you become fixated on your Haalands and your Salahs, you risk missing out on a lot of players who could actually give you more points than them - at least for a part of the season.

In addition to this problem that even an exceptional player like Haaland or Salah will rarely guarantee you a big enough points total to make them an attractive season-long hold, there is also the - again, often perversely unacknowledged or stubbornly denied - fact that.... the game is about getting the best returns collectively from your starting eleven (backed up, on occasion, by your bench), not just from a handful of top-performing players.

Even if Haaland and Salah do outscore the next best option in their positions by a massive 50 or 80 points over the season,.... you can almost certainly more than make up that margin by being able to afford substantial upgrades in almost every other starting position with the money you save by not having them.

Players like these can be worth having, at least for certain spells of certain seasons; but they are almost never - only in the most exceptional of circumstances - worth having for the entire season.

If you think you MUST have players like these just because they seem likely to be the season's top-returning picks - you are committing a grave error. There will be certainly be other (cheaper!) players who outscore them in short spells during the season. And there will certainly be a massive opportunity cost in going without so many other top players in order to afford them.  (I may have a little more to say about this in a few days....)

Remember - it's mostly LUCK!

Oh dear, oh dear - the blowhards on the Facebook forums and such always want to try to claim that this FPL divertissement of ours is almost entirely a game of skill, you know - not really any luck in it at all; not very much, anyway. And anyone who suggests otherwise is obviously just bitter at their own lack of success, yadda, yadda, yadda....

Of course, like almost everything they hold true in relation to the game, that is complete bollocks.

Sadly, this viewpoint has a potent appeal for many people; it becomes a kind of perverse Article of Faith for legions of them. Anybody who has one good season wants to believe that it was entirely down to their superior intellectual acumen. Anyone who has a few good seasons back-to-back (though probably they've just had a few modestly good ones in a run of five or six or seven years, and exaggerate that record of success a little - to themselves, and everyone else) easily persuades themself that this uncanny consistency is proof - proof, dammit - that it wasn't just luck. Alas, no. It might not have been entirely down to luck; but luck certainly played a big part - because it always does in this game. And you can be lucky a few times in a row (try flipping a coin for speedy proof of this axiom).

Or take a look at the poker hand above. What skill is involved in getting that? And how much luck? (Yet that is almost as common an occurrence as people scoring above 2,600 in FPL.)

Consider all the possible sources of luck in each gameweek's results. How often do players get injured (sometimes, at the very last minute)? Or, even more gallingly, miss a game for some seemingly much more trivial - and utterly unforeseeable - reason: a stubbed toe or a tickly cough or a silly spat with their manager.... or their girlfriend? Or because of some perverse and unfathomable tactical switcheroo the manager suddenly wants to try out this week? How many times do great and in-form players suddenly unaccountably have a stinker,.... while a player who's been in the doldrums produces a monster haul out of nowhere? How many times do the officials somehow miss pretty clearcut-looking penalties,.... or give really soft ones,.... or send someone off mistakenly, or at least harshly,.... while others of their colleagues somehow turn a blind eye to egregious straight red-card fouls or second yellows? This kind of shit happens almost every week; often, it happens several times in the same week. [I tried to document these sorts of things through every gameweek last season, for the first time; and damn, even I was surprised by how bad it was!]

Consider the further sources of luck outside of the football itself. How often do accidents of Fate keep you from watching a match, or perhaps even make you miss an FPL deadline? How often does that damn glitchy website itself unaccountably lose supposedly 'saved' changes - leaving you without the transfers, or the captaincy selection, or the bonus chip play you thought you'd made for that week? How often have you tried to leave your weekly changes a bit too close to the deadline and found that the FPL app or website is overwhelmed by the volume of traffic and no longer working? These are all varieties of 'ill luck' too (though you should be able to avoid most of them with a little more care and caution!).

Consider your own annual totals in FPL. If you're reasonably serious about the game and you've been playing it for a few years, you probably get a very similar score in most years. You can easily spot your median level, and you don't often stray from that by more than 100 points or so up and down each year - perhaps usually quite a bit less than that. And yet, occasionally, perhaps just once or twice in a run of many years - you've had a score that is way outside that normal range, hundreds of points higher (or, sometimes, lower). Did you suddenly become more skillful that year??  Did you somehow 'forget' that new level of skill you seemed to have attained, when you slumped back to your previous average sort of score again the following year??  NO, it was luck.

Consider the global champions. Most of them are just the same. Most years they score 2,200, 2,300, perhaps once or twice they've managed 2,400: very respectable and consistent, but nothing amazing. Then they suddenly come up with an extra 400 or 500 points to claim the global crown. And the next year, as often as not, they crash out of the top 100,000 again, perhaps even sometimes out of the top million; they fall back to their previous level,... perhaps even have an unusually bad year to follow.....

Once you've reached a good level of knowledge about the game, and are watching a lot of football every week, and taking care over all your decisions - there isn't that much scope for improving your decision-making any further. Of course, there's some. But my guess is that, if you're usually reaching somewhere up around 2,400 points (without being conspicuously lucky in any way!), you're pretty near maxed on the potential of the 'skill' element. [If your 'level' is only 2,300, or 2,200, or 2,100, yes, there are probably still some areas where you can improve. But I'm pretty sure that - in most years (of course, the available points pool changes from year to year; though not usually too drastically, unless there's been a rule change...) - somewhere between 2,400 and 2,500 points (and probably most often at the very lower end of that range) is where luck takes over.

At the upper end of the 'ability range', then, the scope for 'skill' to make a difference is probably not much more than 100 points per year (year after year, my two chief antagonists and I almost invariably finish within a much narrower distance of each other than that). But the scope for 'luck' to make a difference is almost unlimited. The global champ's +500 variance over his norm is unlikely to be the peak lucky score in the year (because, if he's normally getting 2,300+, he's in a relatively small group of consistently good players, no more than a few hundred thousand out of the many millions who now play the game every year). It is very likely that, at least in some years, there are a few people who register +700 or +800, purely by virtue of their exceptional good fortune. (That might put them up near the top of the rankings if they're usually half-decent players who can manage around 2,000 points; it will put them in a very good final position even if they're 'noobs' or 'casuals' whose natural score should only be something like 1,800 points!!)

Consider the consequences of this, for the distribution curves of 'luck' and 'skill', and how they interact. The iron laws of statistics, unfortunately, dictate that above about 2,400 points, there are going to be progressively more people who are only averagely skillful (or perhaps even not very skillful at all!) but exceptionally lucky,... and progressively fewer people who are exceptionally skillful and only above-averagely lucky. 

Hopefully, the handful of managers at the very top of the tree will usually have quite a high level of skill as well as an extraordinary level of luck. (Last year's champion wasn't that impressive, but he was no slouch either.)  But everyone in the top 100,000 has necessarily been extraordinarily lucky; and an awful lot of them have been more lucky than anything else.

Finally, consider this little 'thought experiment'. Imagine an FPL mini-league of 100 perfectly matched players. They might not be 'perfect' players but they are very smart and very serious about the game, and there is no discernible difference in 'skill' between any of them (an unrealistic scenario, of course; but bear with me - it's a thought experiment). Moreover, they all play the game in complete isolation from each other, and from any external sources of advice; they each make their own selections based on their knowledge of football, without trying to second-guess what their opponents may be doing. (Again, unrealistic, perhaps.... But it's how I try to live!)

At the end of the season, do they all have exactly the same score? Of course not. There is almost certainly a clear 'winner' and a clear 'wooden spoon' recpient - with probably a span of at least 100 points, maybe 200 or 300 points between them. In the middle, where the majority of competitors are clumped together, there may several places where a few of them have exactly the same score. But towards the extremes of the distribution, at the highest and lowest ends, things will be much more spread out - with often several points separating two positions.

How to account for this divergence of results, if they're all equally skillful? Well, you have to accept a few premises here (but I hope they're all pretty straightforward and indisputable): a) There are no 'right' selection solutions in a game like FPL (because no-one can see the future); b) There are only 'most likely to be successful' solutions in FPL; c) 'Mostly likely to be successful' solutions in FPL are rarely unique; for most selection conundra there are several possible alternatives which are equally valid; d) 'Most likely to be successful' solutions in FPL do not always succeed; very often, in fact, some of the 'least likely to be successful' solutions do!

Therefore, presented with the same challenges every week, a group of people with identical skills in the game will make some of the same decisions as everybody else, but some different ones (though all seem to have equally valid chances of success, before the event). Some of those different choices work out well, and some work out badly. Aggregated over the season, a few players have done very, very well, and some - with exactly the same input of knowledge and skill - have done pretty badly.

Now, multiply that tiny sample by 100,000, and allow for much greater variation in both luck and skill (because - shock, horror! - bad decisions have a greater chance of being 'lucky'; or rather of having a 'lucky impact' on the overall competitive landscape, because although the chance of a successful outcome for a poor choice may be very small, it will happen sometimes - and when it does, its impact can be very large).

That is the game of Fantasy Premier League.

It is NOT a pure meritocracy. Don't try to kid yourselves that it is.

This season's 'early MADNESS'

 

Every year in FPL, we seem to get one or two particularly common 'ideas' floated in the last days of pre-season that are.... little short of BATSHIT INSANE.

This year, the front-runner seems to be the bizarre notion of dropping the Bench Boost chip in Gameweek 1. That would most definitely be popping the cork.... prematurely.

I discover that some folks in FPL-land think this is not so bizarre, and indeed a 'legitimate tactic' that you might contemplate in any season. (FPL actually rounded up a bunch of its so-called 'experts' to discuss this, and they nearly all claimed it was at least an option worth considering; but the reasons they gave were all so daft that they inadvertently made the case against perhaps even more strongly than I will now attempt to do.)

Now, OK, there are two unusual factors this year which might make the idea superficially tempting, for a moment.

The first is that we've just been given TWO Bench Boost chips for the year, for the first time - one of which has to be used in the first half of the season. Faced with this unfamiliar and unexpected bonus of an 'early' Bench Boost, a lot of FPL managers are completely bamboozled as to what it might be any good for (most have always bought into to the not-unjustified but dangerously overestimated benefits of playing the Bench Boost in one of the Double Gameweeks at the back-end of the season, and have no conception of how to take advantage of it in any other circumstance), and are being tempted to just get it out of the way.

The other is that the opening weekend's fixtures do look somewhat enticing for a few of the top clubs and players: Arsenal face nearly-relegated-last-year Manchester United (although United have always remained capable of springing the occasional upset, and they are at Old Trafford for this one), Liverpool are at home against a Bournemouth who've had almost their entire defence poached from them over the summer, newly crowned Club World Champions Chelsea have a moderately enticing home fixture against Crystal Palace (although they've had a limited 'pre-season', and might still be a bit knackered from playing in that big tournament only a month ago), Spurs are at home against promoted Burnley (but they had much the best defensive record in the Championship last year; and a lot of promoted sides make a spirited start to their EPL careers, even if they usually then soon slump towards certain relegation), City are up against Wolves (but again, that's away, and Wolves can be a very dangerous side; while City are in a bit of a rebuild, and still looked hopelessly vulnerable to the counter-attack against Al Hilal last month). Forest are at home to transfer-ravaged Brentford, Newcastle meet defensively shakey Villa (though that's away, and Villa usually enjoy a big home advantage; and the painful Isak transfer saga has blighted the Toons' pre-season), while Everton and West Ham face the other two promoted sides (but those fixtures really might go either way: the established sides are both away from home - and they're hardly the pick of the Premier League crop; both, in fact, might be in relegation trouble again this season...).

So - that's an OK set of fixtures, perhaps, but not a really great one.

But there are more important reasons why it's plainly bonkers to blow the Bench Boost chip in Gameweek 1:

1)  It's one of the most uncertain gameweeks in the entire season. Major transfer activity at a number of clubs means that, even more than usual at this time of year, it's a real toss-up as to what the opening lineups are going to be (some players might still be in the midst of transfer discussions as the first FPL deadline passes, and be omitted from a squad because of that, even though they're still at their current club; while recent arrivals probably haven't trained with their new teammates enough to get an immediate start). And increased rotation/shorter minutes for top players is also a much greater risk, when players are not yet quite back to full competitive fitness for the season. Injuries are also far more common at the start of the season, as some players push themselves a bit too hard, when still well short of optimum fitness; so, the risk of last-minute dropouts is perhaps slightly higher in Gameweek 1 than at any other point in the season. Having all 15 squad members looking certain to start is the first essential for a successful Bench Boost. In Gameweek 1, it is very, very unlikely that you will have all 15 players start.

2)  As well as the questionable match-fitness issue (almost no-one is likely to be at their best on the opening weekend, even if they do get a start), we don't really get any reliable indications on team or individual form from the mostly very uncompetitive pre-season games. So, we're all betting blind on the opening set of Premier League games: we really don't know what's going to happen with any degree of confidence - and there are often a few big surprises on the opening weekend of the season.

3)  Budget is so tight at the start of the season that no-one can afford a really strong bench. After just two or three months, shrewd FPL managers have usually managed to grow their squad value by 4 or 5 million pounds, at least 2 million of which might go to the bench. Also, quite often, you'll find that you can do without one or two of the premium picks you wanted at the start of the season - suddenly expendable because of form  or injury issues - and that can give you a huge amount of extra money to redistribute through the rest of your squad, including the bench. In Gameweek 1, you probably haven't got more than 17 or 18 million pounds' worth of talent on your bench; but quite soon, you could conceivably have 20 millions' worth, or even a little bit more. Which of those benches is likely to earn more points?

4)  Even if there weren't all these uncertainties about form, fitness, and lineups - the first weekend's fixtures just aren't that good.

And, as I just observed to one of these poor Bench Boost nutters on a forum: "Knowledge of how a gameweek is likely to play out is crucial to achieving a good Bench Boost (along, of course, with a high degree of confidence that all 15 players will start). Thus, literally EVERY gameweek after the first is a better week to try the Bench Boost."

There are obvious, incontrovertible benefits to waiting on the first Bench Boost a while - until you've built a slightly stronger bench, until you're more confident who's going to start and who's in the best form, until you come upon a really good set of fixtures. There are no conceivable benefits - and many likely, almost inescapable hazards - to gambling it in the opening Gameweek.

DON'T DO IT!!!

What a 'differential' is NOT

I touched on this in the introduction to my fuller post on 'differentials' this morning. But it's so important that I think it merits briefly highlighting in a post of its own here.

Many FPL managers (the vast majority, it would appear - from the online forums, at least) seem to have fallen prey to the self-harming delusion that 'differential' means prioritizing players who are less-owned.

That is UTTERLY BLOODY POINTLESS.

A less-owned player is only valuable to you if he's going to earn you more points than the more highly-owned alternatives. Which is rarely, if ever, the case....

And NOTE, the unfortunate corollary here is that high-owned players are to be distrusted and avoided. But, ahem, there are reasons why they're so high-owned: and those reasons usually include the fact that they've been producing scads of points!

The allure of the 'differential', conceived like this, is illusory. A decent player who's low-owned may have the occasional brilliant week; and, once-in-a-blue-moon, perhaps one of those rare great weeks of his will correspond to a week in which all the more popular picks fail to produce much. In that week, the owners of the 'differential' will feel terribly smug, as they temporarily gain rank because of their 'brilliant' pick; so smug, in fact, that they can overlook the fact that in almost every other gameweek of the season they have done much worse than the managers who went with deservedly more popular picks.

Any rank-gaining benefit you may occasionally reap from a 'differential' of this kind is also inevitably short-lived - because, if such a player really is wrongly overlooked and undervalued, is indeed coming into hot form and about to display huge points potential,.... lots of other FPL managers are quickly going to come onboard for him, and his ownership level will have shot up within two or three weeks.

It is not impossible to find this sort of 'differential' advantage occasionally; but it is very, very rare - and really not something worth making a primary focus of your game. Particularly if that leads you to chase every low-owned second- or third-tier player who looks like he might be such a prospect after one good haul....

The 'Cult of the Differential' usually leads to people desperately chasing points in the most reckless and stupid ways, and perversely ignoring more sensible picks.

Forget about ownership level, and concentrate on points-potential.