Well, almost everyone.... who's any good at the game.
I've just done a quick survey of my long-time reference points in the game, people who strike me as making consistently smart decisions, and who - most of the time - get pretty high overall finishes as a result. Quite a lot of them are below the gameweek average this week!!!
There are all kinds of reasons why Gameweek 1 tends to be even more RANDOM - and unpredictable, and unfair - than most other weeks of the season:
1) A lot of people are so desperate to pull out an early lead that they'll blow one of the bonus chips right at the start of the year. (With the unnecessary extra bonus chips being thrown at us this year, that's likely to be even more common.) These premature chip plays don't generally work out all that well (especially with a Bench Boost: my national league leader wasted his this week, only got a 10-point lift from it, with two non-starters), but they do give some extra points - and those briefly inflate the ranking of the managers who made such a foolish play.
2) Team and individual form is extremely unpredictable at the start of the season, as players and coaches haven't had much preparation time together - and the pre-season games rarely give us any useful guide to how things are likely to go in the Premier League. There are usually a lot of surprising - and disappointing - performances on the first weekend. This time, we've seen rampant-in-pre-season Chelsea, greatly strengthened Manchester United, and always sprightly Newcastle completely dominate their opening matches - without managing to generate a really good scoring chance between the three of them! Liverpool and City, while managing to win fairly comfortably, didn't really play very well, and looked defensively vulnerable (against probably lower-half sides!). Arsenal and Villa were extremely poor. Only the Spurs and Forest games really turned out as expected: and even there, Forest's performance was a massive step up from their worryingly goal-shy pre-season.
3) Even the refereeing is sometimes a little extra-dodgy too! It's natural enough for match officials to feel a bit of extra nerves for their first match of the season; and they are inevitably just a little bit ring-rusty after the summer break. Mistakes are, unfortunately, that bit more likely. (Chris Kavanagh's penalty award against James Tarkowski might be one of the worst decisions we see all season. And VAR - just as guilty, just as inept - apparently did nothing to query it.)
4) The ongoing transfer window causes so much disruption. Some players are excluded from selection altogether. Others (Eze, perhaps? Watkins?) might be somewhat distracted by thoughts of an imminent move away from a long-time home club. And most new arrivals probably haven't yet spent enough time training with teammates to be considered for extended minutes. Lineups, tactics, and team balance can all be thrown up in the air by all this uncertainty. And we have a few more weeks of it to suffer, before teams finally start to settle down into the sort of shape we can expect from them for most of the coming season.
5) Almost no-one's at their best yet. Pre-season is too short, and the practice matches too uncompetitive, to really get anyone back up to peak physical condition or mental sharpness for regular top-flight games. Some players haven't trained while waiting on imminent transfers. Others have joined a new club too recently to get fully integrated and up-to-speed yet. Even the earliest summer transfers - like Joao Pedro and Ait-Nouri - probably aren't yet completely familiar with the style of their new teammates and their new coach. And it might prove to be an additional problem for Chelsea and City that they were still playing in the Club World Cup just over a month prior to the new season. As players push themselves that little bit too hard when still not yet 100% fit, injuries (even - especially - in training) tend to be more common early in the season. Rotation and early substitutions to manage fitness worries are also far more common. And very few players or teams come out of the blocks in Gameweek 1 already at their very best. (A few might: we've seen magnificent performances this weekend from Gibbs-White, Reijnders, Ekitike... But they are just a handful of outliers. Most players - most of the most fancied FPL players - had pretty subdued first games.)
6) There is no 'template' as yet. Well, there never is, as it is popularly misconceived - an obvious and incontestable 'Best 11' that almost everyone at least has heavy representation from! But what we do often see later in the season is a common pool of perhaps 20-30 clearly superior players, from which the vast majority of FPL picks are taken, and perhaps relatively few good 'fringe' options outside of that core 'most popular' group. This results in most of the better FPL teams usually having 6 or 7 or 8 members of their starting eleven in common (not all the same 7 or 8 players, but selections from that common pool matching up in several places). At the beginning of the season, this 'pool' of justifiable selections is far wider: there are 21 players with an initial ownership of 20% or higher, a further 36 with an ownership above 7.5%; a total of 70 options with an ownership at 5% and above! And the 'fringe' of possible left-field picks for the last couple of spots in a squad or starting eleven extends quite a bit further than that.
This far greater variety in the composition of FPL teams allows for a far greater spread of points returns - with far more room for a big return from an unexpected source to have a massive impact on the initial rankings.
In this opening week, for example, Tijani Reijnders was one of the standout performers; but a goal from him is likely to be a relatively rare event, as he's most likely to start as one of the pair of central pivots who play a mainly defensive role. And he wasn't even a guaranteed starter; and probably won't be a guaranteed starter in every game, given how many other midfielders City have to choose from (and that Rodri, when fit again, will surely always be one of the two selected for these central roles). Even at his temptingly low price-point, a 25% initial ownershp was way too high: he was a 'sheep pick' that paid off (in the opening week, with a bit of good fortune; but perhaps not in the long-term....). He's certainly a great player, and might turn out to be a great FPL pick this season; but he was a wildly risky pick for the initial squad, given the significant uncertainties about his goal potential or his starting role or the regularity of his selection by Pep.
Likewise with Antoine Semenyo, while he is often dangerous in attack, he's also been very inconsistent. I've followed him closely over the last couple of seasons, and have usually managed to have him in my side when he's hit a little patch of goalscoring; but his returns overall have been rather disappointing. There are lots of other tempting - probably better - attacking midfielders in the mid-price segment, even at his own club, and certainly across the rest of the league. And Bournemouth, reeling from the loss of so many key players over the summer, are not expected to have a great season; nor were they expected to get anything in an evening game away against the defending champions. Semenyo didn't even have a particularly good game overall; he just happened to score two excellent breakaway goals - in quick succession, mid-way through the second half. Again, 10% ownership was absurdly high for such an unpromising prospect; but that 10% got off to a very good start. (68 FPL managers apparently played their first Triple Captain chip on him - which was utterly, utterly daft, but paid off ridiculously well for them! There is no justice in this game. Or very, very little...)
Or Riccardo Calafiori, widely expected to lose out to Myles Lewis-Skelly or Jurrien Timber at left-back in this game (and very unsure of a regular start in this slot for the season) - he was extraordinarily lucky even to be on the field. But the United keeper spooned a corner into his own net (after being jostled - possibly unfairly - on the line by Saliba) in the opening minutes, and the Italian happened to be able to get his forehead to it as it crossed the line... for the only goal of the match. Arsenal somehow hung on to a clean sheet, despite being absolutely overrun by the home side for most of the rest of the game. Thus, a player who wasn't even expected to start wound up with a massive 13 points, the joint third best score of the week. Only 2% of people owned him this week - but that's at least 1.5% more than should have owned him. And that 2% got off to a flying start!
How did these players do so well, when widely - and rightly - fancied prospects like Palmer and Enzo Fernandez, Eze and Sarr, Mbeumo and Cunha, Ndiaye and Grealish and McNeil, Wirtz and Frimpong, Saka and Rice all somehow came up blank, and a few like Marmoush and Cherki and Amad Diallo weren't even given a start? How did the forwards who'd looked so good in pre-season, Joao Pedro and Watkins and Bowen, all disappoint, while the one who most definitely hadn't, Chris Wood, suddenly came good again? That's just the luck of the draw. You can never foresee clearly what the FPL outcomes are going to be for any given week. But in the early weeks of the season, the element of unknowability and devastating surprise is even stronger than usual.
You should not be too disheartened if you had A DREADFUL START to the season.
The opening Gameweek is especially unpredictable, and a lot of weird shit happens. There is much more scope in this week than in most following ones for LUCK to run absolutely rampant.
But LUCK - for most people - has a way of balancing out over time. Better results lie ahead for shrewd and well-informed FPL managers!!
