Fantasy World Cup - a lightning guide

 

The rapid onset of the World Cup this year (so soon after the conclusion of the domestic European season...) has caught me rather on the hop.

But here are a few - hopefully useful - pointers on the official FIFA Fantasy game for the tournament (not well promoted: only a few hundred thousand sign-ups so far!), which you can enter here.

As usual, the best free resources seem to be on Fantasy Football Scout, which has both a concise summary of the rules (much clearer and more accessible than those on the actual FIFA site, which you really have to dig around for!), and also line-up predictions (though, take these with a grain of salt - I suspect they're going to be well off the mark with some of them; but it's always impossible to know what selections a coach will make for the opening game). And this is the best injury update resource I've found so far, on Rotowire.

The scoring system is similar to, but crucially a little different from what we're used to with the Fantasy Premier League game. Most notably, all positions get an additional point for a goal, one more than FPL gives us.. There are also additional points for midfielders for every 3 tackles made (successfully, I assume - although the wording of the rule omits to specify this: this is yet another area where there's going to be a lot of obscurity around how Opta is choosing to interpret certain 'game actions') and every 2 chances created (again, no specificity on whether this only applies to 'potential assists' or can include earlier contributions to a move than culminates in an attempt on goal) - so, 'busy' midfielders could well rack up more points than we usually see in FPL; but it will often be something of a mystery how they earned them! Forwards get an extra point for every 2 shots on target - which should be a bit more obvious and straightforward to keep track of. It might be worth keeping an eye out for eager strikers who have a pop every time they get anywhere near the goal, even if their conversion rate isn't great. But there are no points here for 'defensive contributions' - the unwelcome innovation we've had to wrap our heads around in FPL this year. So, it's probably going to make sense to prioritise attacking players, midfielders especially, rather than defenders.

Oh, also, we're spared the vexing randomness of FPL's 'bonus points': none of that nonsense in the FIFA game.

There's also an additional point for a goal scored from a direct free-kick. This is a nice bonus, but probably not something that makes it worth targeting set-piece specialists - unless they're already worth having for their all-around game contributions. It just won't happen often enough to have any significant impact.

I have a similar feeling about the so-called 'scouting bonus': the possibility of 2 extra points if a player of yours scores >4 points in a match while he is owned by less than 5% of managers in the game. This was an intriguing new idea trialled in last summer's Club World Cup fantasy game. And it worked better in that, because although there were fewer teams, there was a generally higher level of quality - so, even some of the low-owned players were still pretty good. In this tournament, I doubt if any of the sub-5% players will be worth much, and it's almost certainly going to be more valuable to concentrate on players who give you a high chance of a big return - rather than players who give you only the modest chance of a fortuitous bonus. Also, of course, it's just so bloody obscure; it's very difficult to check up on a player's current level of ownership, and even more difficult to anticipate how that might change before the next Matchday deadline. If you obsess over trying to find these 'scouting bonus' opportunities, I suspect you're often going to be frustrated in bringing in a player at 4.5% ownership and finding that he's apparently nudged above 5% in the last hour before the deadline. [I think that happened to me with THREE of my 1st Round selections! I wasn't even targeting players at this level of ownership particularly; it was just fortuitous that I was looking for some slightly outside the box prospects, and happened to pick a few that had been ignored by the masses.... I'm pretty sure they were all down between 4.5% and 5% ownership when I picked them, but by early in the MatchDay had all risen to 5.1% or 5.2%; I don't know if that rendered them 'ineligible' for the bonus - because they didn't score enough points to qualify for it anyway!]

And, of course, we again have what has become a standard feature in FIFA and EUFA Fantasy games, 'active substitutions' - and a switchable captaincy. You can manually swap out a player who's given you a disappointing return - or transfer the captain's armband to another player - after each batch of games in the 'MatchDay' (a 'MatchDay' being all the games in one Round of the competition), so long as the new player you select hasn't yet played his game in that 'MatchDay'. (Actually, in this tournament, it appears that you can make such changes continuously, at any time, not just between the end of one day's games and the beginning of the next's; in past FIFA Fantasy games, such changes were 'locked out' while each batch of daily games was in progress.)  [And you'd think that this attitude should extend to allowing you to transfer in and out players who haven't yet played during the course of the MatchDay; but alas NO, there is a deadline of the first MatchDay kickoff for finalising your squad for the entire Matchday. Boo!]

I'm always saying that, even in FPL, you can't afford to go light on your Bench; but in international tournaments like this, with these 'active substitutions' as part of the gameplay, the Bench is part of your playing squad every time, and ideally your Bench players should be just as strong - or even stronger than - your original 'starting eleven'. You are going to have make use of at least 1 or 2 of those Bench players in every MatchDay, and usually - quite often, anyway - you'll need all of them.

The great dilemma with this 'active substitutions' rule, of course, occurs when you have a player who's made a decent score - 4, or 5, or 6, say - and you have to decide whether to 'stick or twist', whether to take the chance on dropping him for a substitute who could do better, but might well do worse. What makes this conundrum all the more challenging, especially in the first round or two, when we're still figuring out how the slightly unfamiliar scoring system is going to skew things from what we're more used to in FPL, and we don't know which teams and which players are most in form, and we don't know if it's shaping up to be a high-scoring tournament or not,... is that we have little idea what we should be satisfied with, what a decent 'above average' score for a player in each position is likely to be; even assessing that is a bit of a shot in the dark, at first. 

The key impact of this unusual rule in international tournament fantasy games is that: a) you have to try to spread your squad out over as many of the days in each MatchDay as possible; and b) you have to remember to arrange the starting eleven not in terms of what you imagine the strength of their points prospects is (as you would in Fantasy Premier League) but simply according to the date of their next game (you can select this as the key feature of your squad players to display under their names when reviewing your MatchDay seleections): the players playing last should be on the Bench, so that you'll be free to bring them in for any of the starting eleven who gave a disappointing return; and it's nice to have all four bench players having games later than any of the original starters, so you can wait to see which of them did worst for you.

A final - cruel, unnecessary - quirk of this rule is that regular automatic substitutions do in theory exist; but in practice, they don't, because the facility is suspended if you make any of these 'active' changes during a MatchDay. This is particularly galling if you forget to - or are unable to - swap out a captain who unexpectedly didn't play; if you made any active substitutions, your vice-captain pick won't automatically take his place, and you will be left without any double points from the captaincy for that round. Don't get caught out by this!

In many ways, a tournament fantasy game like this is even more of a lottery than one based on a full domestic league season; especially in this biggest of all football tournaments. There are just far more outstanding players to choose from - and any of them might have a stunning tournament,.... or an absolute stinker. And, of course, over a long season, we have plenty of opportunity to evaluate everyone's form and gradually improve our squads. Over this much shorter run of games, it's going to be difficult to recover from some 'bad' early choices and disappointing early returns.

In the group stages, I think it's likely to be better to concentrate on teams that enjoy the most mismatched fixtures, rather than on the biggest teams and the star players. With all due respect to Iran, Iraq, Haiti, Cape Verde, Curacao, Panama, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Uzbekistan (they at least have quite a decent defence; but I doubt if that can save them from a last-place finish),.... they ought to be pushovers for most of their opponents; and it is worth targeting players drawn against them in the group stage, rather than just focusing on the big-name players. [OK, I take that back - well, partly. Qatar and Haiti actually look more than half-decent. And that is the magic of the World Cup, that some of the small teams will prove capable of the occasional surprise performance or result. You can't expect that sort of resilience from all of them, though: I doubt if Panama, Jordan, Curacao and Cape Verde will have much in their locker.]

Once we get to the knockout stages, the bigger names may start to shine; and we should have a little more idea about how well they and their teams are performing. While some teams come hot out of the blocks at a tournament (especially if they've got an easy first opponent!), most take at least one game to start finding their feet, and some only start to build momentum as they progress into the knockout stages. (For this reason, I'd be very wary of playing any of the bonus chips on Matchday 1.) But also, after the group stage, the level of competition takes a massive step up, and the results of games become far more unpredictable. (I was just playing around with the bracket, and found that even in the 'Round of 16', almost every match-up I expected to eventuate was looking like a bit of a toss-up! And quite a few of the 'Round of 32' games were looking like they might not be entirely straightforward, either.)  Although the number of transfers increases significantly for each later round, you do have to be very careful to 'hedge your bets' - to avoid taking too many players from a small number of teams; you have to try to ensure that even if you bet wrong on the outcome of every game in a knockout round, you won't need to take 'hits' to rebuild a full squad for the next round. (You do that by taking players from both sides in as many games as possible, especially the games whose results are looking harder to call.)

And of course, just as with FPL and any Fantasy game of this kind, you must avoid getting sentimental about your favourite players, or your home country. Haaland might be the best striker in the world, but Norway are not a very good team all around and might struggle to get the ball to him enough for him to be very productive. England and Portugal don't look - to me - to have quite enough strength in depth to be serious contenders; and they have quite tough opening groups - so, I wouldn't be taking any of their players just yet.

For the chips, as I just said above, I would avoid risking any of them in Matchday 1, as there is just too much uncertainty about who's going to be playing, and how well. I'd say the final round is also probably best avoided, and perhaps also the semi-final round, as these tend to be quite closely matched and cagey affairs, often quite low-scoring. There is a strong case for playing the powerful 'bonus chips' - Maximum Captain (which gives you the captain's double points for whoever is your highest scoring player) and 12th man (an additional player added to your squad for one Matchday, without any of the usual restrictions on budget or country quota) for one of the group games, in which we're likely to see the biggest scorelines - and you might want to hazard one of them in Matchday 1. I think the 'Round of 32' could also work; as indeed could Matchday 3, at the end of the group stage, where the Maximum Captain might be particularly useful, given the unfortunate uncertainties about how motivated teams will be, and how many of their top players will even get minutes if qualification is already assured.

If all the top nations are safely qualified after two games, and thus likely to field their 'B teams' for the final match, that could be a prime occasion to resort to the Wildcard chip. But, of course, it can also be useful to hang on to that for dealing with a possible emergency later in the tournament - if you suddenly get a lot of injuries or suspensions, as well as having wrongly predicted which teams were going to survive into the subsequent round. This could be a further reason for avoiding the big-name players in the early rounds; if you focus on players from more mid-level nations, those nations are quite likely to have qualification still in doubt going into MatchDay 3, and thus will still probably field a full-strength team in the last game - while Kane, Mbappe, Ronaldo etc. are likely to get the day off.

The Qualification Bonus chip (2 additional points for every player who plays in a winning knockout game - even if only for 1 minute!) is probably best used in the Round of 32, because the outcomes at that point should be mostly more predictable, and you'll have been able to optimise your team for the fixtures with unlimited transfers after the group stage, and you can hedge to some extent by spreading your selections across more teams (even if you suffer one or two nasty surprises in the results, it won't make too much of a dent in your overall return from the chip).

The unfortunate complication FIFA is foisting on us is that there is also going to be a 'Mystery Booster' - an additional bonus chip which will only become available for the knockout rounds; and they're not telling us what it is yet. Having 5 chips to cram into 8 Matchdays - in effect, only 5 or 6, as the beginning and end of the tournament are much less promising for them - is already bothersomely cluttered, without the additional aggravation of not even knowing what one of those chips is. Many managers in the game, I'm sure, are going to feel overwhelmed by too much choice, and will end up playing most of these chips more or less randomly. But careful planning in how to deploy these chips could afford a significant advantage; so, don't let irritation at FIFA's muddled game design lead you into rash choices with this.

As for the tournament itself....

Switzerland (who have been blessed with by far the easiest-looking group), the USA (who are a pretty decent team, and should get something of a lift from playing on home soil), Turkiye, Morocco, Japan and Senegal are my 'dark horse' picks - not prospects to win the tournament, but capable of going a lot deeper into it than most people have imagined.

I am anticipating a win for Spain, although it could be a very close-run battle with France - and I fear we might have a 'premature final' if they meet in the same half of the draw. Brazil, Argentina, and Germany can never be discounted, but I feel they don't look quite strong enough this year, and will need a few breaks to go their way. Belgium and the Netherlands (and perhaps England and Portugal too), I expect to crash out quite early this year.

BEST OF LUCK, EVERYONE!!!!

Even if the FIFA Fantasy game is a bit of a mess in some ways, we should be in for a feast of football. Enjoy!!!

So, what does MAKE THE DIFFERENCE in FPL?

Last month, I made the rather bold assertion that... it doesn't matter all that much which players you pick in FPL. And I promised to soon go into more detail about what I believe does make the most difference to your outcomes in the game (but I was thwarted in that resolution by the sudden loss of my computer and Internet access!). Finally, I am trying to address that topic.

Now, of course, as I acknowledged in that earlier post, it does matter to some extent who you pick; just... not nearly as much as we'd all like to hope. Some FPL managers make a lot of really bad picks, and of course they don't deserve to prosper (although sometimes they do; there's too little justice in the game). But my key point there had been that there is usually quite a broad spread of potential good picks; and within that field of sensible, promising selections, most players will perform just about as well as each other - certainly over the full season, or a big chunk of it; but also surprisingly often over even a fairly short run of games. I have sometimes run multiple teams, with radically different tactics and selections - but they ended up with nearly identical final points totals. I regularly compare myself against a number of long-time managers that I consider to be shrewd and consistent; there are rarely more than 100 points between us at season's end, sometimes a lot less - even though we've made some wildly different picks. Yes, most years, there are a few players (maybe just one; maybe none...) who are performing so consistently above the general range of everyone else that they become genuine must-haves. But most managers recognise that Haaland or Palmer or Saka or whoever is an 'essential' (at least, for now; that status rarely lasts a whole season). There's almost always room for plenty of debate around who are the 'best of the rest' that you should have in the squad. And amongst these better players, there are usually many potential selections of almost exactly equal value.

So, unless you ignore this pool of solid talent, and wilfully make a lot of bad picks, most of your player selections aren't actually going to have a huge impact on your final points total or your rank - at least, as compared to other good FPL managers.

So, what does..... make the difference in our game?

I believe the main factors determining FPL outcomes are as follows:

1) Getting off to a flying start. The opening of the season is one big lottery. There are so many unknowns - players have switched clubs, some managers have changed, tactics may shift dramatically in the new season, revisions to PGMOL guidelines may have a huge impact (vastly fewer penalties over the last two years, while goalmouth wrestling at set-pieces is now routinely tolerated....; though that might change next year), and the pre-season friendlies don't usually give us any reliable guide as to what anyone's form or fitness or confidence is going to be like going into actual competitive games; we are essentially betting blind with our initial squad selection.

If you are lucky enough to correctly guess nearly all of the players who are going to make the hottest start to the season, you don't just get nice scores in the opening few gameweeks, you can get a huge momentum continuing through the first third or so of the season. People who've been less lucky, and have picked a lot of players who are unexpectedly dropped or strangely struggling for form, will have to use multiple transfers - perhaps even take a few 'hits' - over the opening weeks to put things right; they may even be forced into using their first Wildcard early - thereby missing out on the considerable advantage that it can give you if you are able to use it later in the first half of the season for a tactical rebuild at a key moment. 

While it is not impossible to make up for a poor start, it is very, very difficult: it can take until the mid-point of the season, or even longer. And it is possible, all too possible, to suffer such a bad start that you will never get back into the top 1 million.

 

2)  Being lucky with your captaincy picks.  While we do occasionally get a player who has such a long run of consistently high returns (not every week, but often enough to make him worth repeatedly betting on with the armband) that you can make them your default captaincy choice, even then you can't really expect them to give you a strong return more than about 1 week in 3 on average (and, even when they do, they often won't in fact be your highest points producer of the week!), And even when it might be reasonable to keep picking one outstanding player most of the time, it's never a good idea to make someone an invariable choice. Even last year, when Salah had such an improbable, record-smashing season, his returns tailed off a bit over the last few months. 

You should usually expect to have at least 4 or 5 of your players in any given gameweek who have an elevated chance of returning a really good FPL score; picking 'the right one' is next-to-impossible - you'll be wrong more often than you're right. You can't realistically expect to get a nice return from your captaincy more than once in every 3-4 gameweeks; and that will only actually be your best score of the week about half as often.

Unless.... you're very, very lucky. If your 'success rate' with the captaincy shifts upwards from a normal (actually, good) 30% to more like 50%, that can make a big difference to your eventual points tally. [An 'average' captaincy return is 4-5 points, a 'poor' one 2 or less, a 'good one' 8-10 points. So, every 10% that your captaincy success rate improves is probably worth an extra 15-20 points.]  You do tend to find that the global champion each year has been distinguished by an extraordinarily high return from his captaincy picks.

3)  Not being too heavily hit by injuries.  There can be an enormous variance in the impact of injuries on an FPL manager over a season; and this can make a huge difference to your rank (just ask Spurs!).  My record worst, a few seasons ago, was 55 injuries in a season (and that's discounting minor knocks and illnesses that only rendered someone 'doubtful' for a week or so; that's significant problems that made someone likely to be unavailable for an extended or indefinite period, and required their immediate replacement in the squad).  I reckon my 'usual' number has been in the 30-40 range - which is probably rather above the general average.

Think about it: if you have that many injuries, you have to use almost all of your Free Transfers - and probably some 'hits' too, far more than you'd like! - just on replacing injury absentees. You have almost no scope for making elective transfers to improve your squad on the basis of changing form or fixture-difficulty. You are hamstrung, disastrously limited in how you can approach the game. An injury to a major player doesn't just rob you of the points you hoped to get from them in the coming gameweek(s), it shackles your tactical options too.

And, of course, last-minute injuries, which you aren't able to replace and leave you with an unexpected hole in your squad, can have an even more negative impact.

4)  Lucking into the players who can give you a few huge scores (perhaps just the one).  I began by saying that the majority of players from the constantly varying pool of 'sensible choices' don't generally provide much differentiation in their points returns. But a few do - over a very short run of games, really by pure fluke. And if you can be lucky enough to be on a few of these at just the right time (most of these are players who don't provide long-term value, so you don't want to be owning them before they hit their sudden 'vein of form' - or for too long afterwards), it will make a huge difference to your end-season total. 

This is one of the most frustrating aspects of FPL, because, most of the time, there is no indication of where these sudden bursts of form come from: a player who's done nothing all season, perhaps even a player who hasn't been getting regular starts, sometimes produces a great game - and a nice FPL points haul - out of nowhere. 

In general, FPL veterans counsel against 'chasing last week's points', rushing in to buy a player who's just produced one big haul. And that is mostly sound advice: most of the time, this doesn't pay off. But occasionally.... it does: the player with no established form all season will produce another good return (maybe not in the very next game, but fairly soon), and perhaps even a third. It is a torturous conundrum as to whether to bring in a player who's had 2 or 3 decent returns in a short space of time: is this really emerging form, or just a flash-in-the-pan that's already over??  [Phil Foden produced an especially goading example of this just before Christmas. He appeared to be out of favour with Pep again this year, hadn't been getting regular starts; and, when he was playing, was mostly being deployed in a rather deeper role where he was having zero attacking impact. And then, in a period of extreme fixture congestion, where there was a midweek league game as well as crucial final matches in the Champions League group stage, he suddenly played 4 successive games within the space of a fortnight (though he didn't start them all!), and produced a double-digit haul in each of them. No-one had ever done that 4 times back-to-back before; and he couldn't even really have been expected to play in all 4 of those games, when they came in such quick succession. And there really had been no reason to fancy bringing him just before the start of that sequence. If you had, you were very lucky. If you didn't have him before the streak started, you might reasonably have thought the first haul was a one-off freak. And when he did it a second time, you might reasonably have thought that he couldn't possibly do it three times in a row - and probably would get rested in the next game anyway. And once you'd missed out on 3 successive hauls, you know you've missed the party and there's no point coming in for him now - even if he might get one or two more decent returns in the coming month. Last December, I wrote at length about how we make selection decisions like this, and the timing of them - with particular reference to this Phil Foden example. That was FPL at its cruellest and most taunting.]

5)  Getting a good return from your chips.  The chips are another huge randomizing element in the game of FPL. Certainly, you can make 'smarter' or 'dumber' choices about when to play them; but there is no guarantee that the 'smarter' choices will be rewarded (or that the 'dumber' ones won't sometimes unjustly work out well!). To get a really good return from your Bench Boost, you need to have all 15 squad members starting, and producing a decent haul; and there is absolutely no way to predict when that might happen - it almost never does. [The optimum return from the Bench Boost chip is probably slightly higher than it is for the Triple Captain, but the chances of that transpiring are far lower.]  As noted above in the point on the weekly captaincy selection, over the season you can't be confident that even your best player is going to return a good haul in more than 1-in-3 or 1-in-4 games, and you can never know for sure when those games are going to be. There is usually a rather higher chance of identifying the games in which a really good haul is most likely for them; but even in those (player bang in form, his team is bang in form, opponents are in woeful defensive form), it's never better than a 50/50 as to whether he'll give you a double-digit return or a blank. And the Free Hit, at least the 2nd one, is usually more about getting yourself out of trouble (most often, in a big Blank Gameweek) than producing a positive lift in a regular gameweek.

Every gameweek in FPL is a collection of bets. When you play a chip, you're making even more bets, or increasing your stakes. This expands the range of possible outcomes and generates a high variance in FPL points returns. Some people get very lucky with these returns, some get very unlucky. And this makes a big difference overall.

FPL is all about making predictions. And you can never be confident in the outcome of a prediction. You can never know that your initial squad is going to be near-perfect for the start of the season, you can never know that your captain (or your Triple Captain!) is going to produce a good haul, you can never know if a player is about to get injured, you can never know if a player you've just transferred in is about to produce a really huge return, you can never know if you're going to going to get a good - or any worthwhile - return from playing your Bench Boost or Free Hit.

'Skill' makes some difference in our game: smart FPL managers will - almost always - do much better than dumb, naive, inexperienced ones. But amongst the smarter managers, the only difference, really, is luck. The 'margins' in the game are to be found in these most random and unpredictable elements of it.

High variance - why this gameweek is likely to make such A BIG DIFFERENCE

 

It's not often a Blank Gameweek hits so hard!

But this season, there are really only two teams that anyone in FPL is likely to be trebled-up on. Arsenal and Manchester City are way out ahead of the field at the top of the table. Almost every other club has lost many key players to injury and/or suffered very up-and-down form; the other would-be title contenders have all had pretty disappointing seasons (though at least Manchester United have rallied strongly since the turn of the year). Arsenal and City are just in a different class to everyone else this year; and they've both reached the League Cup Final.

So, the League Cup Final, which in many years is merely a minor annoyance, this time is a body-blow. More than half of the top dozen or so most popular players in FPL this season are from Arsenal and City. 

Raya is by far the most popular goalkeeper choice; but Donnarumma is 6th, and Dean Henderson (who also has a Blank, because he would have been facing City in the League this weekend) is 8th; even the absence of Wolves's Jose Sa is going to inconvenience well over 1% of FPL managers. So, probably about 45% of managers in FPL are missing their first-choice keeper this week; and quite a few may have found themselves missing both keepers.

And many managers will be missing 4 or 5 others of their regular starters too. If they have been imprudently holding on to some Palace (and/or Wolves!!) players as well, and/or have suffered some additional injury problems, some might be looking at having to make 8, 9, 10 changes this week. Almost everyone is having to make at least 4 or 5 changes.

Think about the consequences of that. In most gameweeks, it's very rare that anyone makes even as many as 3 or 4 changes; most of the time, we get by with only 1 or 2 transfers in a week; quite often - if we've been lucky with injuries - we'll put out a completely unchanged squad.

But this week,... almost everyone is making multiple changes to their starting eleven.

Moreover, in most gameweeks, there is a high degree of similarity between most people's teams (not as much as many people suppose: there is never a clear-and-obvious 'template' eleven...). There's usually a handful of players who are so much better than everyone else in their position category that almost everyone owns them. And at the moment, those players are Gabriel, Timber, Rice, Semenyo, Haaland and O'Reilly (or Nunes). Outside of the TOP TWO, only Bruno Fernandes, Harry Wilson, and Joao Pedro are currently such compelling and almost universally coveted picks.

This week, we have to change out half or three-quarters of our regular starting eleven - and there aren't any particularly obvious replacements to choose from. Almost no-one else has suddenly come into particularly compelling form (Tavernier, possibly; Cunha or Casemiro...); and no-one has a really good fixture this week (Liverpool, Villa, and Spurs appear to have the most over-matched opponents; but they've all been in horrible form in the league recently....). 

So, this week, there is likely to be an exceptionally high degree of dissimilarity between selections, with everyone making multiple changes, and a pretty much wide open choice of what those changes might be... and uncommonly low predictability (because of rocky form and mostly very closely matched fixtures) as to how any of that is going to play out.

Most weeks, we're just buying one or two lottery tickets; this week, we're all buying a whole fistful of them!

And all of that means that there is sure to be an extremely broad spread of points this week. And that, in turn, means more volatility - more chance that you can have an exceptionally poor week and/or that others around you can have an exceptionally good week. Of course, things could work out in your favour; but they could also go very strongly against you. There is going to be exceptionally high volatility in the rankings this week, with a lot of people seeing big swings in their league positions.

Overall, it's almost certain to be an extremely low-scoring week. Many people have used a 'hit' (or several!), spent points to assemble a starting team, and so start off at an immediate disadvantage. Many more are making do with fielding a team that's at least one or two players short. Even more, who've just about got a full eleven, but have little or no cover left on the bench, are going to find that injuries or rotations leave them with less than eleven scoring players.

And, as I already pointed out above, most of the 'best' players are missing from this gameweek; and most of the fixtures that are going ahead don't look particularly promising.

Anyone, however, who does manage to field a full eleven, and hasn't had to spend any 'hits' to do so (or only 1 or 2 of them...) is in a position to achieve a big points-gain on the majority of managers, even without getting a particularly big points total. If the global average is only 20-30 points, a haul of 50 could give you a huge lift in ranking.

* NB;  The prospect of such a powerful points/rank lift should not have tempted anyone to use a Free Hit or Wildcard this week, because those chips will - absolutely definitely - be worth even more a little bit later in the season. Over 160,000 people are on a Wildcard this week, and over 1.3 million are using the Free Hit (according to Google AI, that is; so, it's probably a completely made-up figure - but it does sound plausible). Those folks should get a useful lift this week. But that advantage will almost certainly be wiped out (perhaps wiped out two or three times over) when they are smashed by the even bigger Blank Gameweek we face in GW34, and/or they find that they can't optimise their squad for the last few weeks of the season, when we should have one or two juicy Double Gameweeks.

There is, in fact, quite a good chance that people who played one of those chips won't even do that well out of them this week - because, as I observed already, there's a dearth of obviously in-form players to choose, or inviting fixtures to bet on. Moreover, I tend to think (in my more pessimistic moments, anyway...) that more of our decisions go badly than well (there's more bad luck in the world than good luck!), so making a large number of changes - especially when you don't really need to (many people playing chips are getting tempted to go a little crazy and change almost everyone) - is generally counter-productive. I suspect that, for the most part. people who made the minimum number of changes they could get away with this week will do better than people who splashed out with a chip.

And then.... well, people who chose to play a chip this week (or left themselve 'no choice' but to do so!) are fundamentally not smart managers. We could foresee the Gameweek 31 hazard months ago, and there is absolutely no reason to have been exposed to more than 5 or 6 blanking players this week (a problem that should have been easy to deal with, using a couple of saved transfers and/or hits). So, people who made dumb choices to get themselves into such a mess are also likely to make dumb choices trying to get themselves out of it, and you wouldn't fancy them to do particularly well in this gameweek (they don't deserve to do well).

[I was prompted to these reflections by encountering on one of the FPL forums the other day one of those arrogant oafs who insists on boasting about how good his rank is currently. I mildly pointed out that there was a good chance his rank would slip this week (he was a proud, naive Free Hitter), and he whined that I couldn't possibly have a 'crystal ball' to know that. Well, I didn't claim to know for certain; I'd said 'probably' - it was merely a significant statistical possibility. People in the top few thousands of the rankings are usually insulated from big single-week drops (or rises) in rank, because things get spread out up there: there aren't many other people within a narrow range of points. But that's in a normal gameweek. In a gameweek like this one, with such an exceptionally high variance in likely points returns, there will be a lot of big swings in rank, and even people at the very top of the rankings wno't be immune to them.

As I pointed out to the noxious oaf: There is a difference between WHAT WE CAN KNOW and WHAT WE CAN ONLY GUESS AT. Unfortunately, it is a difference that almost nobody in FPL-land seems to comprehend. 

We can know that there is going to be unusually high volatility in the rankings this gameweek; it just requires a basic understanding of statistics.]

Free Hit? Just say 'NO'!!

 

Damn, an awful lot of folks seem to be playing their Free Hit for this Gameweek. An awful lot!

I mentioned yesterday, as one of my 'Signs that an FPL manager isn't much good', that doing so was suggestive of simply having not thought ahead. We've known that the League Cup finalists were going to have a Blank Gameweek in the league programme this week since before the start of the season; we've known who those finalists were going to be for just over six weeks now; and we could have made a pretty good guess as to who they were going to be at least a month before that. This blip in the schedule should not be taking anyone by surprise.

What's more, the other two clubs blanking this weekend, their scheduled league opponents, Crystal Palace and Wolves, are not really clubs that anyone should have any FPL players from at the moment. There's not even that much reason to be trebled-up on either Arsenal or City right now. Arsenal's attacking players haven't been scoring enough goals, or even getting regular enough starts, to be in serious contention this season; even the great Bukayo Saka has faded into FPL irrelevance. For most of the season, Gabriel, Timber, and Rice have been incontestably the three Arsenal players to have; but Timber just picked up an injury, and Rice has had a bit of a lull in productivity recently - so, you could easily drop either of them, if you hadn't already. Even from City, there's been no overshwhelming case for a third pick for a while, after Haaland and Semenyo. And Haaland's returns have sputtered since the turn of the year; a lot of managers have already started deserting him. Nico O'Reilly has recently been about the most popular third pick from the club, but he too has just picked up an injury.

So, really, most smart FPL managers should not have found themselves with more than 4 or 5 players blanking this week; and it should be pretty easy to move a couple of them on to the bench for the week, and offload any others - even if it might cost one or two 'hits'.

If you did have exceptionally high exposure to this Blank Gameweek, you should have started offloading a few surplus players a few weeks back - and/or started trying to save up a few extra transfers even further back - to deal with this problem.

Yes, if you are still trebled-up on both Arsenal and City, and you somehow have one or two or three Palace and Wolves players too, and have maybe picked up one or two additional injury worries as well,.... then you could be in Free Hit territory.

But that was a situation you should have been able to anticipate the approach of, and taken earlier action to avoid. And even if that is where you find yourself,.... you might still be better off spending as many 'hits' as you need to in order to fill all the holes in your starting eleven; or compromising a little and accepting that you may just have to field a side one or two men short this week.

Because.... in Gameweek 34, the FA Cup Semi-Finals are going to wipe out four games from the league programme that weekend, not just two. The line-up probably wasn't quite as easy to predict as it was with the League Cup finalists. And the qualifiers were confirmed with only a little more advance warning; in fact, quite a lot less effective warning, very little time to save up any extra free transfers - because there are now no further Premier League gameweeks for the next three weeks. On that weekend at the end of April, we'll not only be missing City and Arsenal again (almost certainly), but also Chelsea or Liverpool, and West Ham or Leeds - and whoever those teams are drawn against in the league in that gameweek. Now, as it happens, probably no-one in FPL owns any West Ham or Leeds players at the moment, and not very many from Chelsea or Liverpool. But still, it's likely to be a significantly worse disruption than this week - and it might have been even worse.

Moreover, so close to the end of the season, and with the likelihood of Double Gameweeks in close proximity - probably, hopefully shortly afterwards - you really don't want to be messing your squad up with a lot of short-term changes at that point. You might be able to avoid the catastrophic impact of so  many missing players in that Gameweek with saved transfers and 'hits', but.... you're probably going to want most or all of those players back in immediately - which is going to cost even more transfers.

However difficult this looming Blank Gameweek may be to survive without the Free Hit, you should try to do so,... because Gameweek 34 is assuredly gong to be way worse, for at least 95% of us.

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

I pointed out last week that it is misguided - morally reprehensible, and usually unhelpful anyway! - to copy selection ideas from the teams of FPL managers who appear to be doing well. Even a genuinely smart manager rarely has his squad exactly the way he'd like it. And a squad that's been successful in recent weeks, or even for the whole season thus far,... really has no more chance (or not very much more) of doing well in the upcoming gameweeks than a randomly chosen selection. Things change constantly in FPL; and no-one can foresee the future. So - looking at what other people have done in the past is really of very little help.   Don't do it!

In fact, you can probably derive more benefit from critiquing the teams/squads of recently successful managers (because, as I said in that post last week, just about nobody's squad is ever 'perfect'). You may even find it consoling when you start to recognise that most of the people doing really well (particularly in the global league; but really, in any of the very big leagues, for clubs, countries, broadcasters, etc.) aren't really all that insightful, after all; they've just been very lucky with a lot of their picks;... but they're also usually making an awful lot of basic errors, which might eventually cost them their present eminence in the rankings (though, in a league of hundreds of thousands or of millions, there will inevitably be quite large numbers of people who manage to continue to be unreasonably lucky for most of the season...).

Here, then, are my....

Top Ten 'Red Flags' that show an FPL Manager isn't really much good

1)  Having David Raya in goal

This isn't a criticism of David Raya; he just happens to be the most conspicuous recent example of a more general phenomenon (Raya is, for the second season running, the most popular keeper in FPL - despite not actually being the highest points-scoring one...). People want the 'security' of going for a very consistent keeper with a high-performing club who'll keep a lot of clean sheets. But there are all sorts of reasons why this is almost never a good idea (I went into the David Raya example in much more detail here). It's not just Raya: it's any keeper from a top club - there's no good reason for choosing Alisson or Donnarumma either. Goalkeepers at top clubs tend to be expensive; but there isn't that much of a spread of points returns across keepers, so even the very best of them won't usually give you many more points than the second or third or fourth best - and one of those is likely to be much cheaper. Keepers at the best defensive sides rarely end up being amongst the top-returning FPL keepers anyway, because you earn better returns from saves and bonus points than from clean sheets. [OK, Raya is actually in first place at the moment; but mainly because he's played at least one more game than everyone else. There are a number of others who are running him pretty close overall, and have done better than him over runs of games.] Even if a keeper like Raya (or Donnarumma, etc.) does end up being the top returning keeper by some margin, you could almost certainly still have got even more points from a pair of cheaper keepers with good fixture-difficulty rotation. But the most powerful argument of all is that of 'club differential' advantage: in a club with a lot of good players, the keeper isn't likely to give you as much of a points-lift over his near rivals (even if he is the No. 1 overall) as some of his defenders or attacking players will. This season, Gabriel, Timber and Rice have all been much more valuable picks from Arsenal than Raya.

2)  Not having a decent back-up keeper

Even Raya (or Alisson or Donnarumma, etc.) won't be a good bet for a clean sheet against every opponent. And every keeper may pick up a knock for a week or two, or suffer a token rotation once or twice at the latter end of the season. You really need a decent second keeper that you can utilise as necessary. And, as I just explained above, in most years you're much better off going with two decent mid-priced keepers who enjoy convenient rotation around the most challenging opponents.

3)  Carrying 'dead wood' on the bench

Even at the start of the season, when budget is tight,... it is a dangerous false economy to have non-players on your bench; they'll quickly land you in hot water if you get a few injuries/suspensions, and no longer have any extra men spare to bring in to cover an unexpected rotation. And they tend to deplete your squad value, rather than grow it. Having a full and strong bench becomes even more important as the season goes on - particularly in the bleak midwinter months when we're often hit by multiple last-minute injuries and surprise rotations almost every week, and often need to call on automatic substitutions to fill out our starting eleven. There are occasions when you may wish to - or have to - carry a player on the bench for a week, maybe even a few weeks (a top player, a player who's increased a lot in value since you first acquired him, may simply lose you too much squad value through the dreaded 'transfer tax'; if you sell him, you might not be able to afford to buy him back); but in general, an injured player (or a player who's no longer getting regular starts, or is clearly in very poor form) is a liability - and you need to get them out of your squad straight away. FPL managers who frequently have an injured player (or two, or three!) on their bench, often a player who's been out for a week or two already, and isn't expected back any time soon,.... don't know what they're doing.

4)  Being too 'template'

Now, I dislike the notion of the 'template'; I think that, like many of FPL's irksome buzzwords, it is ill-defined and over-used. People seem to develop the exaggerated notion that there is, at any given time, a single 'best eleven' - that almost everybody owns. In fact, of course, selection decisions are never that clearcut: there's usually a pool of at least 30 or 40 most popular players who form the bulk - but almost never quite all - of most people's squads. And the thing is, popularity does not equate perfectly to quality; with many picks, there's a kind of collective hysteria, a mass stupidity behind them (the 'sheep pick' phenomenon I so often criticise on here). Many of the 'most popular' players are actually quite misguided selections, poor picks. And emerging talents, less well-known players who are just starting to hit useful form, will, at first, generally only be recognised by relatively small numbers of more astute football-watchers. Any FPL manager whose squad consists entirely of the obviously most popular players of the moment... is probably not really all that good.

5)  Having too many long-term holds

The essence of the game is that you have to rotate constantly, to try to find the players in the very best form for a short run of games at a time. Getting a player like Salah last year or Palmer the year before, who'll return high points again and again with remarkable consistency across the entire season,... is a freakishly rare event. There are rarely more than two or three players a year who come anywhere near to justifying long-term inclusion; in many seasons, there will be none. Any team/squad that's had a large number of its players unchanged for a long period.... probably isn't much good.

6)  Having a weak midfield

The midfield is where most of the points come from. Midfielders get more points for a goal than forwards, can more easily earn the new 'defensive points' than either defenders or forwards (although fairly few are actually the right profile of player to do so regularly), get a free extra point for a team 'clean sheet', and tend to be more likely to register assists and pick up bonus points as well. And a good many of them are really 'forwards' generously misclassified by the game as 'midfielders' (Semenyo, Mbeumo, Cunha, Trossard, Saka, Gordon), or at least fairly free-scoring advanced midfielders who might be expected to score nearly as often as a good centre-forward. Even in this untypically low-scoring season, this awful, awful season in which so many of the usual big producers in midfield have disappointed,.... 12 out of the top 24 FPL points-returners are midfielders. There is no excuse for going light in the mdfield, even - especially! - in the 'fifth seat'. The fourth and fifth midfield slots, in fact, are potentially the most valuable in the entire squad, and the ones you should be concentrating on rotating the most often - to get the most points from them.

7)  Having too many (any) safe-and-steady picks

With few attacking midfielders producing really well this year, while many defensive midfielders have had their points returns buoyed by the new 'defensive points' (but also by their scoring rather more goals than usual this season...), there has been a temptation for a lot of FPL managers to go for more seemingly 'dependable' options - like Declan Rice, Elliot Anderson, or James Garner. And indeed, players like these (and Enzo Fernandez and Casemiro and Ryan Gravenberch too) are in the Top 20 midfield points-producers at the moment. But.... only Rice is in the Top 5. And while there is something very reassuring about a player like this who'll give you a fairly steady drip-drip-drip of points, rather than many big gameweek hauls,... you really need to be chasing those big hauls! You really need to be looking to earn a minimum of around 6 points per game from every member of your starting eleven; and since it's almost impossible to get that from your keeper and defenders, even with hyper-efficient rotation, and since (as just mentioned in the previous point in this post) midfield is where most of the points come from, you really ought to be aspiring to more like 7 points per game from all 5 of your midfield slots; almost no single player ever achieves those sorts of numbers over a season - you have to rotate through the most in-form players. Those central defensive midfielders are only yielding 4.0-4.5 points per game; even the oustanding Rice is only producing about 5.5 points per game; that's just not enough to justify having even one of them in the squad as a season-long hold. Yet this year, many managers can be found with two or three of them; they don't know what they're doing. Almost every week you have one of these players in your squad, you're losing 1 or 2 or 3 points to someone who's making better use of rotations in these positions. [It doesn't only happen with more defensive midfielders; they just happen to be the obvious example this season. Last year many people were impressed with Morgan Rogers's excellent debut season with Villa; they bought him at the start of the year, because he was cheap, and held on to him all the way through, because he was mostly delivering decent points with a fair amount of consistency. But he only managed a season total of about 160 points: not anywhere near enough for a season-long hold!!]

8)  Too often starting four or five defenders

Related to the two points above about the paramountcy of optimising points returns from the midfield, a further sign of weakness in this area is the number of FPL managers who are regularly starting four or even five defenders. Yes, defenders have got a very useful little lift to their returns this year from the new 'defensive points'; and midfielders and forwards have, on the whole, been slightly disappointing. But still, we only see 2 defenders (both from Arsenal, of course) in the current Top 10 FPL points producers - and only another 7 in the next 20. And it's actually even worse than this; because defenders tend to start nearly every game (as long as they're fit); and, as I just observed in the previous point about defensive midfielders, they tend to be relatively slow and steady in their returns. They might constitute one-in-three of the best points-returners over the season, but they probably quite rarely manage to be one-in-four or one-in-five of the top points producers over any short run of games. There will certainly be occasions when especially favourable fixtures for your defenders and/or form or injury issues affecting some of your more advanced players may make it a smart choice to start four, or sometimes even five defenders. But such occasions will be fairly rare - the exception rather than the rule. FPL managers who are doing it every week (even this season, when the usual massive differential between defenders and more advanced players has been considerably eroded) are just pissing away points.

9)  Having too many double-ups and treble-ups

Taking too many players from the same club fails to spread risk: it leaves you dangerously over-exposed to negative impacts from an unexpectedly bad performance from that club - or to that club having a blank gameweek. And, frankly, there aren't usually many clubs who are good enough all around to justify taking three players from them. If your squad isn't drawn from at least 7 clubs, ideally 8 or 9 or 10, you're probably storing up trouble for yourself.

10)  Having obviously 'sentimental' picks

Being swayed by one's emotions and personal preferences is one of the greatest dangers in the game of FPL. Whenever you see a manager who has three players from a club who aren't in very good form at the moment (looking at you, Liverpool), you can be fairly confident that this manager is a fan of the club - and is making selections with his heart, not his brain. Such emotional biases can relate to individual players, and/or to previous experience in FPL, as well as to real-world club loyalties. People who have Salah in their squads this year are obviously idolaters who can't get over their admiration and gratitude for all the points he's delivered over the last several years. Sometimes, too, these emotional influences can work in a purely negative way: anyone who doesn't have any Arsenal defenders in their squad, despite their massive dominance this year, is obviously prejudiced against the club - and that prejudice is harming their FPL choices.

And  a couple more quick 'bonus' ones to finish with....  

You usually have to go digging around in a manager's history a bit to discover this (unless they happen to have played a chip in the current week you're looking at), but how they've used their chips can be very instructive. If they've played a Bench Boost in a week when some of their players had quite tough fixtures, and one or two were even doubtful starters, then they're not very good. If they often use their Wildcards quite early in the window, and sometimes to make only three or four changes with them, then they're not very good.

And of course,.... it's A VERY BAD SIGN if you find that a manager obviously hasn't thought ahead about a major hazard in the game. At the moment, for instance, top sides Arsenal and Manchester City have a Blank Gameweek this weekend, because they're playing each other in the League Cup Final (and their scheduled league opponents, Wolves and Crystal Palace, are also missing a fixture). This has been known for some weeks now; but many FPL managers are behaving as though they are completely blindsided by it. There is no very good reason for being trebled-up on either Arsenal or City at the moment (though many, it seems, are trebled-up on both); and even less reason to have any Palace or Wolves players (though a few might still have Dean Henderson, or one of his defenders, from the period earlier in the season when they were returning good points; and perhaps some might still have one or two Wolves players that they brought in for their Double Gameweek a few weeks back). But if you had high exposure to this Blank, you should have been moving out surplus players already, or at least saving up transfers, so that you could move out as many players as necessary this week (and, hopefully, bring them back, if you want to, as soon as possible thereafter). People who are being panicked into using their Free Hit this week (which will surely be far more needful for most people in the bigger Blank Gameweek caused by the FA Cup Semi-Finals in Gameweek 34), or find themselves having to burn lots of 'hits' in order to put out a full starting eleven,.... just didn't think ahead. And that's BAD FPL management.

All of these points should be pretty clearcut and uncontentious. Yet, somehow, many FPL managers seem to ignore them, or even to be in stubborn denial about them - even the supposedly 'good' managers.

Go on, take a careful look at the teams of any of the online FPL 'gurus' or 'experts'; or at those of any of the top 5,000 or 10,000 or whatever in the current global rankings. I guarantee you that almost every one of them will betray some of these telltales of fundamental incompetence in the game.

More ways to SELF-DESTRUCT

 

The FPL forums have been awash with nutters talking about using their second Wildcard this week. Yes, in Gameweek 22, barely three weeks into the New Year! Does THE MADNESS know no end??!!

The reasons why this is an overwhelmingly BAD IDEA ought to be obvious to anyone who has played the game for more than a few years

They are as follows:

1)  For any chip, there is more risk in using it earlier in its period of availability rather than later. During half a season, there will usually be at least a few, possibly several reasonable - perhaps pressing - occasions to potentially use a chip. And some of these may crop up unexpectedly, at little or no notice: you don't know they're going to happen until they happen. Thus, the later you can leave it to play a chip, the more confident you can be that there won't any longer be a better occasion to use it arising later on.

2) The general 'leaving it later' principle above is particularly true with the Wildcard because it is a 'rebuild chip' which allows you to make substantial and lasting changes to your squad, rather than just a one-off switcheroo to allow you to earn extra points in a single gameweek like all the others. It is potentially so valuable that it really should not be thrown away lightly, at the first sign of any difficulty in your squad. You tend to accumulate need for a Wildcard over time, as drop-offs in form and injuries and suspensions progressively weaken your squad. If things look bad this week, they might be even worse in another week or two!

3)  A crisis requiring a Wildcard to rectify it can also arise very suddenly: it is not uncommon to pick up 4, 5, 6 or even more injuries (or suspensions, or fallings-out-of-favour with the manager) inside a week or two. That is the kind of catastrophe for which you may need your Wildcard. And they can occur at any time (although they tend to become more common in the final third of the season...).

4)  Although this threshold will decrease slightly later in the season, you don't really want to be considering a Wildcard unless you have a case for making at least 5 or 6 urgent changes to your squad. If players aren't unavailable - through being injured, dropped, transferred out, suspended, etc. - it's never absolutely urgent to replace them, it's simply 'elective'. You should be able to carry under-performing players on your bench for a week or three, while you stock up more Free Transfers for a 'mini-Wildcard' shake-up. You can even sometimes take a chance on leaving a few 'holes' on your bench (hang on to non-playing assets) for a little while. And if an immediate change seems likely to be particularly valuable to you, it's OK to take a 'hit' - spend the extra points on it - a few times a season. Blowing a Wildcard for only 3 or 4 - non-urgent! - changes is A COMPLETE WASTE.

5)  At the moment, no-one should have such an urgent case for multiple squad changes. Although there have been a lot of injuries over the past month or so, mercifully, so far none of these have affected any of the really 'big' players: Josko Gvardiol is the only high-owned FPL asset who's been ruled out for a long spell. Moreover, we all just enjoyed an extra 'mini-Wildcard' this year, with the unnecessary additional transfers doled out for AFCON barely a month ago. If you used those sensibly to strengthen your squad during December (or saved at least some of them to allow yourselves a few extra transfers during the injury-ravaged month of January...), there should be absolutely no need to consider multiple squad revisions - or any at all! - just now.

6)  You don't want to be using a Wildcard at a time where there is more than usual uncertainty about what's going on in the Premier League, and perhaps an imminent possibility of significant changes in the FPL player-comparison landscape. And that is very much the case at the moment, in late January. The mid-season transfer window doesn't close for another 11 days, and there's usually a late rush of activity right before the final deadline (this year, on the evening of February the 2nd); some players might yet leave the Premier League altogether, some new big names might join from overseas. And even if you don't fancy any of the new arrivals themselves, you need to be mindful of the disruptive effect they can have on team selections and playing styles, of the possible knock-on consequences for players you do own, or might like to own. These impacts will not make usually themselves fully felt until at least a few weeks after a new player has joined - or left - a club; so, for this reason alone, it is utterly, utterly DAFT to consider using the Wildcard before the second half of February, at the very earliest.

7)  Quite apart from the upheaval of the transfer window, we are deep in the 'midwinter doldrums' now: almost every team is suffering poor or fluctuating form, most players are obviously getting tired or jaded, and many are probably carrying some sort of niggling injury. A crop of new more serious injuries is arriving every week. If you use the Wildcard now, there is an elevated risk that most or all of your new selections might lose form or become unavailable altogether within a few weeks: that is why you shouldn't use it in January. 

8)  There are also some more particular factors affecting the overall player-comparison landscape just at the moment. The five main ones are: a) additional upheaval caused by the turnover of managers around this time of year (Maresca and Amorim have just been replaced; Glasner had looked likely to go, but might survive; Frank looks under extreme threat, Dyche, Espirito Santo, and possibly even Howe also at some risk); b) the immediate and dramatic improvement displayed by Manchester United on being freed from the shackles of Ruben Amorim; c) the upturn in form and fighting spirit starting to be shown by all the clubs at the bottom of the table, making relative 'fixture difficulty' much more difficult to assess; d) the return of AFCON players (most of the more popular FPL choices went deep into the tournament and have only just rejoined their clubs; Senegal and Morocco were in the final last Sunday, and it is not clear if - probably rather unlikely that - their players will be back, or able to be immediately reintegrated into their club sides this weekend); e) the conundrum of Cole Palmer (and perhaps also of Mo Salah and Ollie Watkins); he's playing again at last, and faces a short run of fairly 'easy'-looking fixtures over the next month or so; many FPL managers are bringing him in just because of this enticing fixture-run - but that's almost certainly dangerously premature. He's still being troubled by recurring muscular discomfort, and is obviously a long way short of full stamina and match sharpness (he looked absolutely exhausted at the end of last week's game against Brentford, and he hadn't even been all that 'busy' in it - compared to his usual all-action standards); he isn't yet anywhere near his best, and looks like he might take at least a few more weeks to get there. If/when he does, he'll almost certainly be worth having; but because he's so expensive, that's probably going to require at least three or four transfers - not just one - to accomplish, to reallocate budget around a squad. The only other 'premium' players this season - Salah, Watkins, and Saka - might present a similar dilemma; we know they have the potential to make an enormous FPL contribution - but they haven't been doing so thus far; as soon as that changes, we may want them again,... and we may need to make multiple changes in one gameweek to achieve that. (You don't necessarily need a Wildcard to make these changes; in fact, you really shouldn't. But the point here is that there are a number of likely circumstances that might make you want to make substantial changes to your squad again in the near future - and these might undo many of the changes you've just made with your silly, premature Wildcard.)

Now do you see???

And, oh gawd, some people are talking about using their Bench Boost too. There's a much simpler argument against that. With so much injury, fatigue, and important European and domestic Cup games cramping the schedule at the moment, and thus a heightened rate of unpredictable player rotations - you can't count on anyone being a guaranteed starter at the moment; and thus it's very unlikely that all 15 of your squad will start (which is the bare minimum criterion for considering a Bench Boost play). Also, just about no-one has a really strong bench at the moment (you usually have to use some saved transfers or a Wildcard to 'set up' an optimum squad to get a really good Bench Boost return). And, even if this weekend's games were happening in less unsettled February or March, it still wouldn't be a good gameweek for a Bench Boost: there just aren't that many attractive fixture match-ups!!!

People considering either of these chip plays this week (or, good grief, yes, the Triple Captain or Free Hit too), are just BORED, IMPATIENT, or DEPRESSED (taking the recent run of terrible gameweek returns too personally: wake up, people, it's been SHIT for everyone lately!!), and looking to cheer themselves up with a whacky and impulsive move. All you are doing, my friends, is shooting yourselves in the foot. You'll get no decent advantage from these chips this week; and you will soon be ruing your choice when an obviously much better - or more necessary - occasion to use them comes along.

FOUR types of selection decision in FPL

 

It occurred to me the other day, when I was writing about Phil Foden's recent improbably hot run of form, that we may discern 4 main types of selection decision in FPL, differentiated by their timing.

Timing of a transfer: the FOUR TYPES

1)  Anticipatory/Speculative/Precognitive

If you go in for a player before he's started to show any clear signs of form - just following a 'hunch', or because you have some sentimental attachment to him, or because he's a big-name player who's often done well in the past (ahem, Mo Salah...) - you may sometimes get lucky with that. But you have to appreciate that it's a very risky play. Going in so early for someone is inevitably a big gamble, even if you may have some good reasons - though very subtle and uncertain ones - for the choice. Those reasons might be founded on past history (e.g., the player usually recovers strongly from a brief injury absence, regularly displays a particularly keen hunger to return to the fray after missing a few games for any reason, always bounces back strongly after just a few poor performances, often has a great game against this particular opponent...), a positive shift in team form or lineup or tactics, a favourable run of upcoming fixtures, some background information which may suggest a likely psychological lift (a spat with the manager or a legal problem resolved, a family problem improving, a bereavement receding into the past), or subtle indications on the pitch of a possible turnaround in fitness or confidence that might herald a sudden, imminent uptick in points-scoring form. If you weighed up such factors, and subsequent performances by the player seemed to vindicate your assessment, you may congratulate yourself on a perceptive early transfer decision. But more often, FPL managers who go in early for someone are just taking a wild punt, based on no substantive rationale at all; and if that player suddenly hits a hot streak of form out of nowhere, they've just been incredibly LUCKY - but they'll never admit that. [Disgruntled rivals may complain of them relying on a crystal ball or a time-machine, because there really seems to be no other way to explain how such a bizarre decision worked out so well for them....]

2)  Hasty/Hopeful/The Calculated Gamble

If you go in for a player after 1 or 2 good hauls, that will sometimes pay off for you. But again, it's very risky - you might be falling victim to the classically over-optimistic vice of chasing last week's points. 'Form' is not always accurately reflected by points returns; 'form' is often transient or inconsistent. You need to look for evidence of a general upturn in form that is likely to persist - and improve further - over a number of games. You can only find that kind of evidence by watching full games with close attention; stats are no substitute for that; and a highlights roundup is not good enough either - you need to have seen the whole game. 

3)  The 'Goldilocks Zone'

This is the 'ideal' time to make a transfer, the time when most 'smart' managers recognise that a player is probably now worth having. Now, as I just said above, because 'form' is not always reflected fully - or, sometimes, at all - in the FPL points returns, this 'sweet spot' might come when a player has started playing better, but has not yet produced any worthwhile points; or perhaps, they've only produced a few modest hauls, but (not yet) a really big one. And, although it might sometimes be possible to discern indications of a decisive upturn in performance from just one game, usually it takes a little longer to be confident of that. As I wrote in this essay at the end of last season attempting to define the concept of 'form': One good game might be a freak; two on the bounce is very encouraging, but it still might mean nothing; three.... is form.  Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, you can pinpoint the individual gameweek in which a player first began a streak of good points-scoring - even if those returns were at first quite modest and/or quite intermittent (and perhaps not really reflective of any strong positive shift in the player's or his team's performance at that point!). But as the season is unfolding, it is almost always impossible to recognise the exact moment of such a shift: it doesn't generally become visible until a little later - one, or two, or three gameweeks further on. And that is when you should be jumping on the player. Don't beat yourself up that you might have missed a few good hauls from him; be satisfied that you're getting good points from him now, points that a lot of rival managers are still missing out on.

4)  'Late to the party'

Often, you'll miss these 'early signs' that a player may be about to go on a tear. And that's forgivable - especially if, like me, you don't have good access to live TV coverage of the games. And the 'Goldilocks Zone' is very unforgiving, usually an extremely narrow window of opportunity: it's often just a single gameweek, and, even with the most generous dispensation, it can rarely be extended to more than two or three. However, after that point, it should be fairly obvious that this player is now a top pick, and if you continue to ignore him - well, then you're really not paying attention; or, worse, you're being stubborn (sticking to a previous selection in defiance of mounting evidence against it), or unreasonably prejudiced against this new option (perhaps he hurt you in the past: the old 'He always starts blanking as soon as I buy him' superstition - we've all fallen victim to that at one time or another). Often, such stubbornness grows out of being in thrall to the ideal of self-consistency, or what is sometimes called a 'committment bias'  - one of the most deep-rooted and damaging of our cognitive biases: we may have convinced ourselves that a player we'd picked ahead of the newly in-form player was always going to remain the superior prospect, or we may have convinced ourselves early on in this emerging trend of form that it was going to prove ephemeral - and nothing will now change our minds about this choice, no matter how much evidence is stacking up that it has now become wrong. But.... better LATE than NEVER. If you can overcome your pride, your stubbornness, your prejudice, and accept that a player is now so hot that you must have him - you might still be able to catch one or two more decent hauls from him before the streak dries up (as they all do, eventually).

In summary, then:...

The first type of transfer is very early: made before there has yet been any evidence of an improvement in a player's performance (or at least, not in his FPL points returns); it is hence a big, and probably unjustified, risk. Such transfers can occasionally pay off very well; but you should ensure that such a pick is based on definite evidence - if only in the form of positive background factors, rather than anything yet in the on-field displays - and sound reasoning.

The second type is also early, and possibly over-hasty: it is made on the basis of an improvement in performance, but perhaps only scant evidence of such, perhaps from just one or two games - which is rarely enough to make you fully confident of a sustained upturn in form. If you're allowing yourself to get over-excited about one or two good returns, you're most often not shrewdly anticipating the next big thing, but simply falling prey to a fatuous 'sheep pick'.

The third type is based on an astute assessment of early evidence of an upturn in performance: not just the FPL points returns, but the overall contribution of the player and the way he and his team are functioning together. Such evidence may occasionally be visible in a single game; but usually it takes two or three games to become persuasive.

The fourth type is at least slightly late - or maybe very late! - only recognising the turn in form some time after it has become evident, at least to the smarter and more perceptive FPL managers. (As a general rule-of-thumb, if The Scout - FPL's vapid, anonymous, in-house pundit - has just recommended a player,... you probably should have bought him at least one or two gameweeks back.)

To apply this template to the recent example of Phil Foden's extraordinary streak of goalscoring form....

If you'd gone in for him in Gameweek 13, that was definitely a Type 1 decision. And it must have been based on having a crystal ball, because there really was no indication that he was suddenly about to come good so strongly, after a long run of 'blanks', and often pretty anonymous performances (he'd only produced 20 points from the previous 8 games, with just a solitary assist!). A fixture against Leeds was not sufficient reason to start fancying a player who'd shown almost no indication of suddenly becoming a major FPL points contributor again over the previous two months. (Neither was a moderately promising fixture-run immediately thereafter. And it was only moderately promising: Fulham away is not a particularly 'easy' fixture; Palace away certainly isn't.)

If you'd bought him for Gameweek 14, that would have been a Type 2 decision. Was there really any evidence in the Leeds game of a decisive change in mentality, confidence, style of play (or in team tactics, that might give him more scoring opportunities...)? Not really. And that good performance was only against Leeds, who are struggling at the bottom of the table. Moreover, there were two further Premier League games within the coming week, and we might reasonably have expected that Foden would get short minutes in these games - or perhaps be rested completely for one of them - and/or might have been inhibited a little by fatigue. I would say, getting Foden in GW14 was essentially just chasing last week's points; there was not yet any convincing rationale for buying him.

The interesting question is whether, after two outstanding displays in quick succession, it would have been a Type 3 decision to get Foden in Gameweek 15. I would say NO. Foden had just played twice within a few days; and there was a crucial Champions League tie away to Real Madrid coming up the following midweek - and he did indeed get short minutes in this next match. Also, Sunderland were much the best of the three EPL teams he'd faced in this remarkable week - although they produced an uncommonly poor performance on this occasion, and, despite playing only just over an hour, Foden again managed to come up with a goal.

Acquiring him didn't really become a Type 3 decision rather than Type 2 until Gameweek 16; and arguably perhaps not even then. In the wake of the Real Madrid game, there was again a risk that Foden might be rested or subbed off early. And Crystal Palace are one of the best teams City have faced this season, the strongest defence in the league (after Arsenal's); especially away from home, a City win could not have been confidently predicted. Moreover, it is statistically extremely improbable that any player will achieve 4 double-digit hauls in a row (has it ever been done before??) - and while that wouldn't argue against acquiring Foden for this game, it should counsel that it was unreasonable to expect another very big points return from him. And yet - astoundingly - he did produce yet another haul! But that was a once-in-a-blue-moon freak; and if you bet on that, you were lucky rather than brilliant.

This might be a rare case where there was in fact no 'Goldilocks Zone' for acquiring Foden. There have been good reasons to doubt if he would be able to extend this scoring streak in each gameweek that it has continued; and the calculus on this was greatly complicated by the December fixture congestion and the huge importance of City's looming Champions League clash. In each of those four - closely packed-together - gameweeks, there were reasonable arguments for remaining hesitant about acquiring Foden: It was becoming increasingly unlikely in each match that he would produce another successive big haul, and increasingly likely that Pep might rest him. 

Moreover, Doku had been a very attractive pick from City for a while, and Cherki was just becoming so - before Foden suddenly caught fire. And if you already had one of these (or perhaps Nico O'Reilly; albeit that he's in a different position category, that pick would still be eating into your club quota from City), it would not have been unreasonable to hang on to them, in preference to Foden - whose newfound burst of form might well have quickly fizzled out again. And even if you had fancied bringing Foden it, it was still a somewhat speculative pick - so early in the emerging hot spell, after such a long barren streak, after such a disappointing season last year - and it might not have been a leading transfer priority; especially as the mounting toll of injuries and suspensions in the bleak midwinter was using up most of the available stock of Free Transfers for the majority of FPL managers (even with the bonanza of extra transfers we were just given in in GW16).

Perhaps, perhaps... transferring in Foden has jumped straight from a Type 2 to a Type 4 decision!

However, I would suggest that acquiring Foden now, for Gameweek 17, is probably the Type 3, 'Goldilocks Zone' moment. 

Yes, paradoxical as it may seem, I think he's only become a really unassailably strong pick now - when his super-hot streak is (almost certainly?) over. You will have missed 55 points from 4 games in the last fortnight; but a fortnight ago, that was completely unforeseeable; and even as the fortnight played out, it remained hugely improbable. You shouldn't suffer any self-recrimination for missing out on the benefits of such a bizarre freak performance.

But now, we have seen clear evidence that Foden - and his team - are playing extraordinarily well; and this does seem to be a sustained shift in performance. Moreover, they're in a pretty soft run of fixtures still, with only the New Year game against Chelsea offering a significantly formidable opponent in the next month or so (and at least that one's at home). At this point, it is definitely looking foolhardy to resist buying him any longer.

With the benefit of hindsight, we would all realise that Gameweek 13 was the ideal time to have brought him in. With the benefit of a crystal ball, we could have realised that he would become 'essential' in Gameweek 14.... or 15,... or 16. But we do not enjoy those two benefits. And without them, it was reasonable enough to hold off buying Foden until now. Most of the FPL managers I consider 'smart' have not bought him yet (the few that do have him, I think had punted on him earlier in the season - and had probably only stuck with him thus far because they'd had other higher-priority problems to address with their transfers); but I anticpate that the majority of them will be going in for him now.

Alas, it is now statistically very unlikely that Foden will achieve yet another massive points-haul in the next game - even against defensively flakey West Ham. And you can be pretty damn sure that he won't rack up another 50-odd points over the next 4 or 5 games. But he is in sensational form, and has some inviting fixtures coming up.

If you already got him in the last few gameweeks, good for you; but you were taking a gamble on him, and were fortunate that it paid off so extraordinarily well. Now, though, it really is looking as if all of us should join you.