Why that Bench Boost didn't go so well

That glass isn't even half full, not anywhere near 

Apparently, over 800,000 FPL managers risked their Bench Boost on the opening weekend of the season. Most of them were probably duped into it by the surprisingly large number of influential online 'content creators' who (perhaps 'influencing' each other??!!) all suddenly decided - on very spurious grounds - that it might be 'a good idea'.

Here are the reasons usually given for this bizarre choice; and the reasons why they're all completely bogus.

1)  It can give you an early lead.

Yes, it can. It probably did, for many people. But a very small early lead that will rapidly evaporate as other managers play their Bench Boost more sensibly later in the season and get better returns from it. 

To optimise your points returns over the season, you have to try to optimise your returns for every individual gameweek; and playing a chip just to get an early lead does not do that.  If you 'chase the lead' like this, you end up in a worse position overall at the end of the season.

2)  You can set up 'perfectly' for your Bench Boost attempt using the unlimited transfers available in pre-season.

Yes, you can in theory. But as I explained the other day, there are so many uncertainties at the start of the season around form, fitness, tactics, and selection that you really have no idea how well anyone's going to play, or even if they're going to play (you don't always have 15 starters in Gameweek 1; heck, you don't always have as many as 13!!). You're betting completely blind. 

You will almost certainly get a better return from this chip if you play it later in the season (even if you're not able to set up 'perfectly' for it!) - when form has settled down, and you can feel more confident about what the most promising sets of fixtures will be;... and more confident about actually having a full 15 starters.

3)  The fixtures looked really 'promising' this weekend.

You imagined they might be promising. No-one had any real idea which fixtures were going to be easy, and which not. There are almost always a lot of surprises and upsets in the opening gameweek.  

This year.... Manchester United were comprehensively outplayed by promoted Hull; Liverpool were outplayed by unfancied Newcastle, and only salvaged a point with a contentious penalty in the last kick of the match; and Manchester City were outplayed at home by Bournemouth, and barely scraped a late, narrow win; Villa got absolutely thrashed by Brighton; Spurs got absolutely thrashed by Brentford; Sunderland unexpectedly lost to promoted Ipswich; Forest lost at home to Leeds (that was always going to be a tight one; but a lot of people fancied the strong home advantage at the City Ground, and the 'magic touch' of Oliver Glasner); and Chelsea were nearly held to a draw at Fulham thanks to some horrible goalkeeping by Robert Sanchez. So, almost none of those supposedly 'easy' fixtures worked out at all as expected. Amongst the Top 50-odd FPL picks in the first gameweek, the only big returners were most of the Arsenal starters, Palmer, Joao Pedro, and Rogers from Chelsea, and Ndiaye from Everton. 23 of them blanked; another 10 didn't even play (not good for a Bench Boost!); and Matty Cash ended up with -1!! Nearly two-thirds of the most popular players came up with nothing this weekend; and that should not have been a surprise - it often happens. Gameweek 1 is always very unpredictable, and often very low-scoring.

4)  If you went without one or more of the 'super-premium' players, you could afford a 'stacked' bench (and then use an early Wildcard to switch to a much cheaper bench, and maybe bring the omitted big names back in fairly soon).

That one is actually somewhat tempting - apart from the aforementioned problem of not having any idea how most of the opening matches are going to turn out!! But I haven't seen many people following this tactic; almost everyone seems to have been hanging on to at least one of the super-premiums, and a very large number have insisted on having all three (and many of these followed the sheep to Bench Boost anyway, despite, in many cases, having 1 or 2 obvious non-starters on their bench).

The further problems here - in addition to having no real idea who to put on your bench, even if you are able to set aside more money for them - are, first, that it's always a huge risk to go without the big-name players: they're 'big names' for a reason - they often produce massive hauls,... and they often start out the season very hot; Haaland particularly so. (Some years ago, I took a chance on going without the two biggest players that season in my initial squad, and they both scored hattricks on opening day!)  Second, there is a 'cost' to the early use of chips: not only will you almost certainly be able to earn more proints from a later Bench Boost, but hanging on to your Wildcard until later in the season (when you might hit a major injury crisis, or find that there's a big shift in fixture-difficulty for several teams, or a sudden swing in form for some teams) can also be very valuable. Committing to using both of these enormously powerful chips early in the season - when you don't really know what's going on with anyone's form - is.... just silly.

5)  Well, at least this gets the chip 'out of the way'!

Um, what??? No, I can hardly believe I've seen that view expressed by normally sane and sensible members of the online community, but... Believe it or not, this has been quite a commonly expressed sentiment about the early - very early - use of the Bench Boost. Because having a second Bench Boost and Triple Captain to use in the first half of the season is a new feature of the game, only introduced at the start of the 25-26 season, many people are still confused, flummoxed, discombobulated by the fact. They don't see any real value in these additional chips, and are thus inclined to use them any old how, as if it really doesn't matter. And many of them seem genuinely worried that they might just 'forget about them', and then find themselves having to use a handful of chips one after another in December (there will be 6 or 7 gameweeks in December, so.... still not a problem).

This attitude, of course, is utterly fatuous. These chips are valuable, and you should make a careful decision about when you can use them that will give you the strongest possible chance of extracting good value from them. That is emphatically not in Gameweek 1.

Two factors are crucial to a successful Bench Boost, one 'internal' and one 'external'. The 'internal' one is that you need to have a strong squad who are all fit and starting regularly. The 'external' one is that you'd like to have all 15 squad members - or as many of them as possible, at any rate - facing weak opponents in the same gameweek.

In Gameweek 1, you simply cannot be confident that all 15 of your squad members are going to start, nor do you really know which the softest fixtures are likely to be.

The 'global average' score is a powerful indicator of how worthwhile a particular gameweek has been for using the Bench Boost in. A high average indicates that lots of players produced big hauls, and that obviously increases the chances that you might have had many big hauls among your 15 squad members. The 'global average' in this year's Gameweek 1 was a dismally low 48 points; therefore, it was a very poor week to have Bench Boost-ed in.

Now, a lot of people are claiming they did really well on their Bench Boost last week. But did they really??

Players like Sangaré, Kayode, Lewis-Potter and Janelt of Brentford, Hinshelwood and De Cuyper of Brighton, Stach and Bijol and Justin of Leeds, Dewsbury-Hall and Ndiaye of Everton, and Tzolakis of Hull did very well,... and are the type of the players that people might have left on their bench. But these players are all pretty low-owned, so it's unlikely that many people had more than one of them, and many will have had none at all. And it was entirely fortuitous that so many 'fringe' players like this happened to get really big scores in a week in which fairly few players actually returned well. 

Moreover, in most of the cases I've looked at where people have proudly shared their teams, it's pretty obvious that one of these guys should in fact have been starting. And anyway, I always maintain that, since the Bench Boost is a whole-squad achievement, you really ought only to count the 4 lowest-returning players as the true value of your points-lift from the chip, whether you'd left them on the bench or not. After all, if a player doesn't play at all, he gets shifted on to your bench; I think you ought to do the same if a player has a shit game - when evaluating your Bench Boost. Most of the Bench Boosters this week probably heavily backed Manchester United (no-one returned) and Liverpool (Van Dijk and Wirtz, two of the most popular picks, didn't return) and City (Haaland and O'Reilly, the two most popular, didn't return) - and so had a pretty dismal week in their first eleven. Getting a good bench score but a terrible score in your starting eleven.... means you made some bad choices about who to leave on your bench; and it was not ultimately a good return from your Bench Boost. 

You really need to check how high above the global average you were to assess how well your Bench Boost did. I reckon, if you're not at least 20 points above, you did quite poorly (because you'd hope to get at least 10 points above global average most weeks anyway, if you're any good at the game; and 10 points is the absolute minimum you should be making from the Bench Boost, properly counted).

Some people will undoubtedly have done quite well out of it (some people will get lucky with any Bench Boost selection in any Gameweek!!). But not many, I think. And a good outcome does not mean it was a 'good' decision. Good decisions are carefully thought-out and well-justified, and give the highest probability of success for the majority of people following a certain path. 

Playing the Bench Boost in GW1 was not that. It was a bunch of people succumbing to greedy impulse and hare-brained logic, or just unthinkingly following some online 'guru' or other. And the majority of them were punished for that. (They don't know yet just how badly they were punished; but they'll find out gradually over the next four months, as perhaps a good 60% or 70% of the other managers in the game earn substantially more from their Bench Boost chips.)

I don't think I've come across anyone who can claim to have got an effective points-lift from the Bench Boost this week of more than 10 points; most are much lower. It should be fairly easy to better that later on - once we know what's going on with everyone's form.

And - good grief! - many people were taking the same approach to the Triple Captain chip: "I don't know what to do with it, it's burning a hole in my pocket. Let's just dump it in Gameweek 1, even though I have no idea what any of the results are likely to be, or who's in form yet."

It's a kind of masochism: these people just don't want to do well in the game, they're trying to sabotage themselves. It is very sad.

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!)

EVERYBODY has an AWFUL Gameweek 1

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!!