Another Seasonal wish - directed to the Gnomes (or Elves) at FPL Towers....
Over the years, we have, unfortunately grown used to - and begun to accept - the bizarre and exasperating fact that, while FPL's own stats summaries list the number of saves each goalkeeper has been credited with, they omit to include any mention of the number of points they've cumulatively received for those saves.
With the introduction of the opaque, bizarre, and unnecessary 'defensive points' this year, we really shouldn't be surprised to find that there's a similar oversight here: the FPL website records the number of eligible 'defensive contributions' ascribed to each player, but doesn't bother to tally the number of 'defensive points' they've earned over the season.
What gives, FPL???
A simple Seasonal wish - directed to the Gnomes (or Elves) at FPL Towers....
As I complained at the end of last season, the 'Player Info' screens on the FPL website are an absolute abomination. Of course, our FPL overlords didn't take my observations about this onboard and implement any of the simple improvements I suggested in that post - not even the very elementary one of, if you insist on it being a pop-up screen rather than a full screen to be opened in a new tab, you could at least make it a BIG pop-up, near full-screen size, to obviate the need for those maddeningly fiddly scroller bars.
In fact, they've contrived to make this horrendous aspect of their UI design even worse this year, by making it into an even smaller pop-up.
Because of this, I've rather got out of the habit of using this feature at all. I get nearly all my stats from elsewhere now - even though it can be a little bit of a pain-in-the-arse to have to dodge around multiple different sites (or to have to resort to Google to try to find a source for something) rather than being able to find everything you need easily within FPL's own website.
So it was that I've only recently noticed that in addition to making the 'Player Info' pop-up screens unusably titchy, they've also dropped the match scores for the gameweeks from the first label-column on the left. We must be grateful, I suppose, that they still deign to include the name of the opponent, and whether the fixture was home or away, and whether it ended in a win, loss, or draw... But no scoreline?? Really??
It has become hard to tell if the management of The Fantasy Premier League enterprise are very stupid, very lazy, or just utterly contemptuous of the game's users. I rather suspect it must be ALL THREE.
The FPL website has bugged the crap out of me for years, and I've complained a number of times about how glitchy it can sometimes get - how, for example, it's dangerous to leave team selection until too close before the weekly deadline because the site is quite prone to crashing altogether when traffic volumes peak.
This year, I gather (from perusing various online forums about the game), the smartphone app version of the game has proven particularly unstable and frustrating in the opening weeks, forcing many people to have to turn to the web version instead in order to get their weekly housekeeping taken care of. I only ever have the web version at my disposal, as I am an avowed smartphone refusenik.
And I've been especially vexed by the fact that there no longer seems to be any option to 'stay logged in' for any extended period; and, indeed, I was often being logged out every hour or so. Also, when I did log in, my password was otten somehow 'forgotten' by the system, and I was having to go through the tiresome rigmarole of reopening my account with a 'recovery code' sent to my email.... sometimes multiple times in a day.
Annoying as this was, I was getting kind of used to it.
But then, our FPL Overlords escalated to the next level of vexatiousness, and stopped sending me the recovery code.
Now, I thought at first that the recovery code emails had just gone astray somehow, or been delayed for a little while. I checked in my spam folder a few times; I chccked my Inbox every hour to see if the codes had yet shown up; I requested a code to be re-sent several times. But this was Friday evening, just before the Gameweek 2 deadline, so things were getting rather critical. And in my timezone, the deadline is in the wee small hours of the morning; I really didn't fancy staying up all night for what was seeming increasingly likely to be a vain pursuit of regaining access to the account in time to update my team. So - I gave up on it. No team tweaks for me this week!!
However, I hadn't quite yet given up hope that this noisome glitch would eventually resolve itself, and my account be restored to me.
But over the weekend, the bastards revealed that they still had one further level of escalation: yep, they suddenly stopped recognising that there was a Premier League/FPL account 'associated with' my email address, and wouldn't any longer even give me the option to request 'recovery codes' that they wouldn't actually send.
Well, except that they didn't quite expunge my former account from their consciousness... If that email address was now 'unknown' to them, I should have been able to use it to open a new account, shouldn't I? But, oh NO - they weren't having that, either.
Now, if I deluged them with trenchantly worded emails about this business, perhaps they would relent and magic my old account back into existence. Maybe it would reappear naturally, if I just waited long enough - patiently trying to log back in every day, for a week or several..... And, sure, I have several other email addresses I could have tried to use to create a new account (albeit that I would have missed the first two gameweeks, so any whole-season goals or objectives I might set for myself would already be out of the window).
But you know what? I just couldn't be bothered. I took this as a sign from Fate that I wasn't meant to take part this year.
Heck, maybe I'm used to it - since I stopped taking part a little over half-way through last year as well (in protest at the noxious inanity of the dratted 'Assistant Manager' chip).
And I have often joked - with friends, and in various online forums I frequent - that I really enjoy thinking about the game more than playing it, and actually having a team of my own in competition isn't that compelling an element of my interest in FPL.
Maybe I'll return to it next year. Maybe I won't. (It might depend on how many more unnecessary changes the game's overlords try to foist on us next year!)
But what I chiefly love about the game is the added incentive it gives me to follow the Premier League more attentively - and the different perspective it gives me in my watching of the football every week. That, I believe, can continue.
And I have also come to enjoy reflecting on my experiences, insights, and opinions relating to the game of Fantasy Premier League, and to find satisfaction in sharing some of them with other enthusiasts - on platforms like this blog. That will certainly continue.
Cruel Fate has kicked me out of the game. But, in the words of Bernie Taupin, "I'm still standing...."
As I mentioned in my round-up of the week's action the other day, the perennial doubt and confusion over how bonus points get allocated has been added to this year by the similar lack of transparency regarding the new 'defensive points'.
So.....
Dear FPL,
Could you possibly put together some highlights reels for a few top players each week - demonstrating just HOW these 'defensive contributions' are being counted?
There are already a lot of weird things going on,... like Ait-Nouri getting a massive 'defensive contributions' tally despite not having an obviously super-busy game, and half the Bournemouth side also racking up big numbers on this new metric, while other players, like the excellent - and very industrious - Elliot Anderson, somehow just missed out on qualifying for the extra points.
At the moment, we don't know exactly how all the eligible actions are defined, or quite what they look like in practice,... or why some incidents might be counted as one rather than another, or not counted at all.
Really, the release of this kind of demonstration video should have happened LAST SEASON, to properly explain the idea before it was introduced.
But it definitely needs to happen now.
Please, Dear FPL - pretty-please-with-sugar-on-top, please give us some more clarity on what's going on with this new rule.
I said in my first - no, the second - of a series of bitter posts over the past week about the new changes in FPL this season that I assumed the overlords of the game were motivated by a desire to increase its reach and appeal - to draw in more participants.
Now, unfortunately, making the game easier and adding lots of shiny new gimmicks to it probably will entice in a lot of new players. But they will probably be players with fairly low levels of engagement, the sort who might easily become bored and drift away again.
I think there are some better ways to achieve a lasting growth in participating numbers. (After all, even the 10 million+ level achieved over the last few years is still pretty tiny compared to the Premier League's global following. According to this survey from the start of last season, the number of online followers [these days, usually preferred to official fan club enrolment as a gauge of 'popularity'] for all 20 EPL clubs was nearly 360 miillion. And of course, a lot of football fans around the world enjoy watching the League without necessarily supporting one particular team, or without choosing to 'follow' that team... So, the actual number of interested viewers is far, far higher. The League's 'potential viewership' is often rated at over 2 billion!)
Here are my suggestions:
1) More effective promotion
Apart from a few short TV shows and podcasts, there's really very little other effective outreach to make people more aware of the game. As I noted the other day, FPL has only just got itself a Whatsapp account (at least a decade after the rest of the world started going mad for the platform). Its Facebook page is LAME beyond belief. And I don't think they even have their own Instagram account.
Actual advertisements would be a good idea. The Premier League could probably lean on clubs to provide some adverts on pitchside hoardings cheap or free. Doing a few roadshow events could be a huge help too; that would then get them a lot of free local media coverage, as well as some 'social media' buzz.
And FPL could surely do more to work with media partners to promote the game. Major national/regional broadcasters, in particular, have a vested interest in creating more excitement around their EPL coverage (because it keeps their viewership up, and thus enhances their revenue returns from the sport), and enccouraging more participation in FPL should help with that.
And yes, doing this sometimes in other languages, and making some targeted initiatives to increase awareness in countries with big Premier League fanbases, might also give a massive boost to the game's enrolment - which leads to my next point...
2) Multi-lingual content
Does FPL even provide subtitled versions of its TV shows/podcasts (I've never seen any sign of such)?? Or translated versions of its website and Facebook page (and tweets and whatever)?? Let alone any original content in languages other than English?! The EPL has an enormous following in Malaysia and Indonesia; but FPL doesn't seem to do much if anything to build its following in those constituencies. The EPL has an enormous following in China; but, last time I looked, that country had scarely any FPL players. (According to this survey, fewer than 10,000; although I have no idea how authoritative this might be - there isn't even a date on it, but the figures quoted for other countries suggest it's fairly recent).
3) More and better prizes
I already mentioned this point in my '5 Wishes' for the new FPL season a couple of months back. With millions of pairs of eyes on the game every week, it really ought to be capable of generating enough revenue to provide a very substantial prize fund. At the moment, the season's Global Champion wins a weekend break in London; most of the other prizes (not even that many in total!) are little more than a 'lucky bag'. It's pathetic, ludicrous.
Five or six-figure cash prizes (in US dollars/euros/pounds) ought to be possible. Although, rather than have really huge prizes for a few top achievers (I think low five-figures ought to be enough!), I'd prefer to see lots and lots of more modest prizes: monthly jackpots for winners and at least a few runners-up in all the country leagues, and perhaps some of the larger 'public' leagues as well (broadcasters could surely be persuaded to put up their own prize funds for leagues run in their name?).
Simple stuff. But do we see any sign of this from the FPL organisation? NO. Only a deluge of more bloody silly GIMMICKS every year!
I ran through the other big changes to FPL this season a couple of days ago, but this is the really HUGE one, and I thought it needed a post of its own.
In the first change to the basic scoring system since the game's inception 20-odd years ago, FPL is all-of-a-sudden proposing to give additional points for defensive actions: players will now earn 2 points if they register 10 or more clearances, blocks, interceptions, or tackles in a game. (Midfielders and forwards are eligible for these points too, but very unlikely to qualify [apart from your ball-winning monsters like Caicedo and Rodri!] - even with the token lift of gaining credit also for ball recoveries.)
There are more than a few things wrong with this.....
1) All change is unwelcome, because it disrupts continuity
Especially changes to the fundamental points structure of the game! We like to have ready comparability of data - for ourselves and for players - between the current season and previous ones. That goes out of the window as soon as you start tinkering with points allocations. (This was a principal objection to the introduction of the 'Assistant Manager' option last season - a three-week 'bonus chip' that offered the prospect of perhaps 80 or more additional points in the season.) Whatever 'flaws' it might have, the scoring system essentially has to remain sacrosanct: if you change the scoring system, you're making it a different game.
2) All change is unwelcome, because it confounds predictability
Tinkering with the points system skews the fundamental dynamics of the game. FPL has suddenly realised that the game's points structure is 'unfair' to defensive players?! But it - and every other similar game - has had this 'problem' for decades now, and it has shaped our entire approach to Fantasy management. This is why defenders (and defensive midfielders) are priced so much lower than other outfield players, why we don't allocate so much of our budget to them, why we usually only ever start three of them, why we're content to have one or two weak (occasionally even non-starting) defenders on our bench at the start of the season to stretch the budget.... Is all of this now going to change?? If it is, we need more information about the possible impact of the changes,... and more warning of their implementation. [See further below]
3) 'Cumulative' actions as a basis for points are clunky
At present, all direct points awards are made for single - obvious, relatively straightforward - game events (well, apart from goalkeeper 'saves', where the counting is highly dubious, and you only get 1 point for every 3 'saves' credited). There may occasionally be problems of attribution (especially with 'assists' and 'own goals'), but essentially you know when one of your players has scored direct points (rather than 'bonus points', which are vexingly opaque). Awarding points on a ticker, where your guy only qualifies for them after reaching an arbitrary total of (multiple different) game actions is going to be a completely opaque process: we won't often have any idea when our players have earned these points - we're just going to have to take it entirely on trust from FPL (and Opta, or whoever). That in itself is fundamentally unsatisfying. But it is also rife with the potential for controversy over 'miscounting': how vexing will it be if your star centreback or midfield stopper is only credited with 8 or 9 'defensive actions' when you feel quite sure he racked up substantially more than that? Even more vexing, perhaps, when a powderpuff player owned by one of your arch-rivals gets credited with 10 'defensive actions' out of nowhere, while your much more robust defensive choice is unaccountably spurned... (We have far too much of this already with the impenetrable eccentricities of the Bonus Points System!!)
4) Completely unclear how this is going to be tallied
No definitions are offered for any of these actions (much less illustrative examples); so, many of them are inevitably going to be ambiguous, contentious. There is a lot of scope for overlap between the four (five) different varieties of eligible action: is a player to receive double, or even triple credit if an action falls into more than one category - if, for example, a 'tackle' also results in a 'clearance'; or where an 'interception' leads to a 'ball recovery'? At the moment, we have no clue. (And one suspects the FPL bigwigs haven't even thought about this...) Do you suppose they'll even share with us the 'defensive contributions' total for every player in the Gameweek (fully itemised for the different eligible categories)? They bloody well ought to, but I fear they might not...
5) A perverse points structure
Why is the threshold for earning these points set so high? Why do we immediately move from 0 points to 2 points, making that threshold even more crucial? Why is the 'defensive points' award capped at ONE per game?? (A player who registers 22 eligible actions in a game is only going to get the same reward as someone who dubiously scrapes over the line with a supposed count of 10? How is that fair??) Surely - if we were going to start acknowledging defensive contributions in this way - it would have made far more sense to offer 1 extra point for every so many elgiible actions (6 or 8, perhaps)?
6) Uncertain impact
From similar experiments in other tournaments (points were awarded for 'ball recoveries' in Fantasy Euros last summer, for instance), it had appeared that very few players were ever managing to register more than 3 'defensive actions' (as mysteriously 'defined' by the game's rulers) in a single game, and it thus seemed that achieving a game total of 10 - even for a broad range of such actions - might be nearly impossible. However, FPL has revealed that a few players, at least, managed to do it 20 times last season! That could represent a seismic shift for FPL. But, so far, the game's authorities have only shared with us token 'top ten' lists of the defenders and midfielders who would have performed best under this points regime last season. We need far more information than this to guide our selections this season: we need to know every player's projected performance for last year (and, ideally, for a few years further back than that - maybe even for every season that they've played in the Premier League). Where this change is likely to have most impact is with cheaper defenders who score particularly well on this metric, and may possibly have a 10-15 point advantage on it over some of their more expensive colleagues, or at least over their same-priced peers. But we have no idea who those players might be! [I had thought for one giddy moment that at least they were going to show us a global total of 'defensive points' for every player for last season on the 'Stats' page, if not a breakdown of how they'd fared on each particular elgible action. But, alas, NO: they've added that category to the 'Stats' page for the coming season, but have not provided any historical data on this metric for previous seasons. And it's not yet clear what they'll be adding - if anything - about 'defensive points' to the individual 'Player Information' screens...]
7) Abrupt introduction, lack of adequate preparation (consultation, trials!)
As I mentioned in my post on the other new changes this season, FPL really ought not to introduce any changes - certainly not one as major and as massively disruptive as this - without careful pre-planning. Ideally, that should include extensive consultation with its community, and also some public trialling of the new points rules. It is not enough to provide a few gobbets of selective information about their impact for a handful of players; we need to have been able to watch those potential impacts unfolding in real time, for every player - over at least the second half of last season.
8) No thought given to the knock-on effects through the rest of the game?!
If this change is really going to mean that substantial numbers of defenders and defensive midfielders (30 or 40 of them, maybe more?) might be capable of earning at least 30-40 additional points per season, that is a very substantial change to the dynamics of the game - and it ought to be reflected in the pricing. Thus far, it appears not to have been. [Actually, it does appear that prices have been tweaked a bit. I haven't been able to attempt a thorough survey, but it looks very much as though a lot of defenders have been bumped up in price by 0.5 million this year (so, there aren't nearly as many at the base level of 4.5 million as you'd usually expect); and there may have been some compensating suppression of prices for certain midfielders, to try to balance things up and keep the overall budget manageable. This seems like a bit of a half-arsed and inadequate treatment of the problem.] This could be an unmerited windfall for FPL managers this season, offering us unexpected value in some players we'd usually spurn (but FPL hasn't given us enough information to make shrewd choices about this in our initial squads; we're going to have to keep our eyes peeled in the opening weeks of the season, to see where the most appealing bargains might be). But I don't think that can be sustainable going forward. Player prices - and the points potential represented by your squad budget - are inextricably tied to the total points potential in the game. If you increase the points potential by changing the scoring system, that must have an inflationary impact on player values. And unless you can pull off some chicanery with 'resetting' the relative values of players, pruning prices elsewhere to compensate for the rise in value of top defenders and defensive midfielders (though that too is likely to be value-distorting, making some players exaggeratedly more attractive because 'underpriced'), you're going to have to increase the budget cap too. FPL doesn't seem to have given any thought to any of this yet.
My hunch is that these new 'defensive points' will, for the most part, prove to be nothing but a costly distraction. The main drawback in them is that players are likely to score highest on these new metrics in games where their team is under the cosh - and thus they're very unlikely to pick up clean sheets (or any attacking contributions) at the same time. That trade-off means that, over any short run of games, they probably won't in fact score better than the players you would more likely have selected in the past.
They might, however, represent 'better value' - for the last one or two spots in your starting eleven, especially early in the season when budget is tight - over an extended run of games, if they can chip in these extra points with a dependable regularity. Strong performers like this seem likely to become the top value-for-money defensive choice, appealing options at least for the squad-filler places; those might well be not the highest total points-producers, but cheaper, generally quite unfancied players who unexpectedly pick up 10 or 20 points more than most of their defensive peers from the new rule.
But, in the midfield, regular goalscorers are certainly going to continue to offer far more points. And even in defence, despite the sharp shift in the past couple of seasons away from having full-backs link up with the wide attackers and make frequent overlapping runs into the final third, players who pick up frequent clean sheets and/or offer a significantly higher chance of occasional attacking contributions are still likely to be higher points producers.
These new 'defensive points' might ultimately prove to be just a bothersome irrelevance. But it's the uncertainty I can't stand. There was NO NEED to introduce a change like this. It's just thrown a spanner in the works!
#NoMoreChanges
Dear, oh dear - over this past weekend FPL Towers suddenly unleashed a deluge of announcements about changes to the game for the coming season: all completely unnecessary - and at best, ill thought-out, at worst, likely to be highly detrimental.
I said last year, amid the dismay and horror induced by the introduction of the vile 'Assistant Manager' chip, that I feared even worse things might follow on from it in succeeding seasons. And such now is indeed happening. The folks in charge of our game seem to be desperately pursuing 'innovation' - presumably just to grab more attention for the game, to try to attract new players to join it,.... but evidently without giving any proper consideration to whether these changes are needed or useful.
They fail to appreciate that continuity is perhaps the chiefest virtue in a game like this: continuity, clarity, consistency,.. and hence predictability.
A wise man said, "If it ain't broke, don't break it."
FPL's executives need to take that message onboard.
So, what are these changes?? Well, I'll try to briefly run through each of them, and explain why I'm unhappy with them.
1) Multiple Extra Transfers for AFCON
We are apparently to receive a gift of extra Free Transfers (bringing us up to a maximum of 5) ahead of GW16 in mid-December, to make it easier to cope with members of our squads departing for the African Cup of Nations tournament.
Completely unnecessary. It's only in every other cycle of AFCON that it more or less coincides with the Asian Cup, potentially depriving us of talents like Salah and Marmoush and Mitoma and Son at the same time. This is not one of those years: we only have to worry about African players. You're unlikely to ever have more than 4 or 5 of those at a time, probably far fewer; and it's really not difficult to move them out of your squad in advance - so long as you remember the African competition is happening! (With one or two top players, like Salah, it can be better to just leave them on your bench anyway - if they've gained a lot in value since you bought them, and you don't want to run the risk of losing that if you sell with a heavy hit from 'transfer tax', and then maybe have to buy back at more than you sold them for.) And since the introduction last year of the rule allowing us now to save up to 5 Free Transfers (a rare - thus far, unique - example of an FPL rules tweak that actually makes sense and is an improvement to the game!), we could easily have dealt with this minor speedbump by saving up some of our regular transfers over the month or so preceding. All this new transfer allowance does is.... compel us to use up every one of our available transfers in GW15, so that we can feel we're fully taking advantage of it. Utterly bloody pointless!
This is a rule-change that is plainly just pandering to the more incompetent FPL managers - who couldn't remember to wipe their own bottoms if you didn't hand them the toilet-paper and a set of instructions on how to use it.
Yes, FPL is now giving us TWO of everything: 2 x Wildcards, 2 x Free Hits, 2 x Bench Boosts, 2 x Triple Captains - one of each for each half of the season.
Again, completely unnecessary. We have generally only needed a Wildcard and Free Hit to deal with major fixture disruptions caused by the Cup competitions in the final third of the season; and there is a strong argument that even those aren't so necessary any more, since the really big Blank/Double Gameweek problem used to arise as a result of the FA Cup Quarter-Finals weekend - which no longer clashes with the Premier League schedule. Similarly, most people prefer to use their two bonus chips later in the season, particularly if one of the Double Gameweeks that happen then looks especially favourable. Extra chips in the first half of the season have comparatively little value, and there's certainly no pressing need for them.
And again, it's pandering to the less thoughtful, more superficial FPL managers, especially those who enjoy the game mainly for the thrill of gambling - taking silly chances on risks they haven't properly assessed. Those people would like to have a bonus chip in play EVERY WEEK. And the way things are going,... FPL might soon make that wish come true for them. I - and most serious players of the game - will have quit long before that happens.
3) Revision to the definition of 'assists'
Now, in principle, I'm not against this rule adjustment. I have complained many times about how players often seem to be denied an 'assist' purely because a lunging defender has got a toe-end to the pass they've played, even though that intervention sometimes does not drastically deflect the ball, and obviously does not prevent it from reaching the teammate who's going to score from it. Kaoru Mitoma seemed to be particularly hard done-by in this way: I think he's probably been unjustly denied at least 3 or 4 assists a season.
FPL has at least recognised that the core of this problem is the wildly subjective element of interpreting whether the eventual goalscorer was the originally 'intended recipient' of a partially intercepted pass, and are seeking to introduce more clarity and simplicity into the awarding of assists by scrapping this part of the definition.
However, this adjustment doesn't go nearly far enough. And probably only one or two freak cases like Mitoma may derive any noticeable benefit from it; otherwise, there will be just a handful of isolated instances through the year where it comes into play, for a different player each time. There are so many other problems with the concept of 'assists' - such as the fact that a player can receive credit for simply laying the ball off a mere foot or two, and indeed even for an unintended play such as an accidental deflection or a complete miskick. And I've long railed against the unfairness that the 'pre-assist' - the penultimate pass, which, far more often than the actual 'assist', is the one that really creates the goalscoring chance - gets no recognition at all, either in direct points or under the BPS (Cole Palmer might have a 400-point season in him if it did!!).
Moreover, FPL seem to have wilfully shot themselves in the foot even over this simple and uncontroversial enhancement to the rules - by introducing an arbitrary distinction between goal attempts inside and outside the penalty area; for some unfathomable reason, 'assisting' players will not get the benefit of this definition tweak if the goal is scored from outside the area. Now, probably this will crop up rarely, if ever; but whenever it does, it will create a new - and quite justified - sense of grievance,... as well as giving the potential for additional controversy as to where exactly the scoring player received the ball. Just completely NUTS!
Again, I'm in sympathy with the idea - but here it's been done in such an inept and half-arsed way that it's really just an annoyance rather than an improvement. These changes are utterly superficial, they barely even scratch the surface of the problems with the BPS.
All players are now to get the same BPS credits for scoring a penalty, which seems fair and reasonable; but it's still far too many credits, compared to the BPS rewards for most other game actions. And the fact that forwards still get way more BPS credit for scoring a non-penalty goal than other positions really makes no sense at all. Likewise, keepers are now getting 1 additional BPS credit for saving an attempt from inside the penalty box: again, it's still far too few points, given that a save - at least a really top-class one - is as valuable to a team as a goal at the other end; and creating the potential for controversy over whether shots from the very edge of the box were 'inside' or 'outside' (there is no need to make things more complicated, rather than less so). Goalkeepers are having their BPS credit for a 'penalty save' trimmed ever so slightly (too little to have any impact!); but they're still getting additional credit for a regular 'shot stopped' too - WHY??? Plus, of course, they already earn a massive direct points lift from a penalty save; and there seems to be no published definition of what constitutes a 'save' - do they still get those points and BPS credits if the opponent just skies it over the bar (because the keeper put him off...)?? It should now be a little bit easier for defensive players to get into bonus points contention if they make a lot of tackles, because their BPS score on that is now to be determined by 'successful' tackles rather than 'net' tackles (the surplus of tackles 'won' over tackles 'lost'); it's a bit more difficult to gauge how much of an impact this change might have, and it would seem fair and appropriate to tilt the balance of the BPS a little more towards defenders, since they mostly get close-to-zero recognition from it - but again, the number of credits awarded for a successful tackle is so small that a defensive player is really going to need to have a monster of a game to overhaul another player who's scored even one goal. The best tweak of the bunch is a substantial lift in the number of BPS credits given for a goalmouth clearance - but again, it's nowhere near as many as is given for a goal (and again, no definition is offered as to how close to the goal the clearance needs to be, or if it has to be a clearly deliberate action rather than just being-fortuitously-in-the-way of a shot).
I discussed the shortcomings of the BPS in some detail at the end of last season. As I see it, an effective overhaul of the system needs to reduce or eliminate 'double recovery' (at present, the BPS massively favours major game actions - goals, assists, saves - that are already rewarded with direct points,... while completely overlooking almost every other aspect of play. The BPS should cover a far greater variety of game actions, should drastically reduce the weight given to game actions that directly earn points, and should increase the weighting of other important actions - in both attack and defence - that do not directly earn points. That shouldn't be too difficult to sort out.
This season, special leagues have been created for the 'Top 1%' and the 'Top 10%', on last season's performance.
Reasonable enough (for once...); in fact, long overdue (I'd always kind of assumed that leagues like this existed already!). The problem here is a dangerous lack of specificity: it hasn't been stated how those rankings are going to be calculated. I fear it's going to be done on the 'Overall' League - which might invite very ambitious folks who find themselves only a little outside eligibility to fire up some bot-farms to create hundreds - possibly even hundreds of thousands, or millions - of dummy accounts in the closing weeks of the season: accounts that serve no other purpose than to inflate the total number of 'participants' and so increase the size of these 'elite' leagues for the following season. (Of course, this could be - and might be - done from the very start of the season, but I think the prospect of qualifying is going to be too remote and uncertain for anyone to think it's worth the trouble that far ahead.)
It would have made far more sense for FPL to specify that eligibility was going to be decided by standings in the 'Week 1' League - because all serious players make sure they're signed up before the start of the season; and anyone who does manage to get into the upper reaches of the rankings despite having missed out one or two whole weeks must necessarily have been absurdly lucky (even more absurdly lucky than all the people who managed it over 38 weeks; you just can't get anywhere near the top 1% in this game without being extraordinarily, outrageously lucky).
Or indeed, it might have been safer to go with a rigid cap on the number of enrants for these two new leagues: 100,000 and 1 million. That way, we wouldn't have to worry about the thresholds for qualification being artificially raised by the number of dummy accounts.
6) Lots of new AI bells-and-whistles
We haven't seen yet what this is going to entail (apart from the silly gimmick of offering you the option of an AI-generated 'team badge' - and, really, who gives a flying fuck about that?!), but apparently it's going to be kind of an automating of 'The Scout' to give managers 'customized advice' every week.
More help for the clueless 'casual' player is really not what we want in the game; it just undermines the advantages that should reasonably be enjoyed by people who give their selections a bit more attention. I've seen a number of folks on the forums recently who've griped - not unreasonably - that 'The Scout' is already quite bad enough, reminding folks of stuff they really shouldn't need to be reminded of, and highlighting players who've come into top form. The only thing I console myself with is that - at the moment - people who lean heavily on 'The Scout's advice probably aren't doing all that well from it, because 'he' tends to throw up a mixture of mediocre and often outright terrible tips along with the good ones, and even on the good ones, 'he's usually rather late-to-the-party. And I don't suppose the full AI 'Scout' experience will be any better; at least, not at first. In another two or three years, perhaps the whole game of FPL will have just become computers playing against other computers. I'm sure there are already a lot of idiots out there asking ChatGPT to pick their squads.
7) And.... ah, bless, they're on Whatsapp now
This may be an appealing development for those who live their lives on their smartphones. I resolutely abjure that lifestyle, so being able to receive content through Whatsapp is of zero interest to me.
This, I fear, is just a sign of how out of touch the folks at FPL are. Whatsapp has been a thing for, what, getting on for 15 years now; and increasingly ubiquitous over the last 7 or 8 years at least, as Facebook has progressively run itself into the ground. And they're only just establishing a Whatsapp account NOW? Heck, even I, the King of the Luddites, considered getting Whatsapp (and rejected the idea) several years ago....
8) Some changes to the appearance too...
I haven't really spent any time on the site yet, but it looks as though the changes are all trivial, superficial, worthless: for the most part, they seem as though they're trying to make the web version look more like the mobile app - which may bring some 'improvement' for mobile users, but actually just makes things that little bit more irritating when you're logging in via a computer.
I briefly entertained hopes that they might have done something to improve the godawful 'Player Info' screen (the leading recommendation for changes to the interface among many that I compiled at the end of the season); but in fact, they've made it even harder to navigate by making it SMALLER, rather than BIGGER (and it's still got those bloody - fiddly, hidden - slider bars!!! Aaaargh!!!). The only very small positive I've been able to find so far is that the 'Fixture Difficulty Rating' list now includes 9 gameweeks in its visible field rather than just 7 (though I very much doubt if they're going to allow you to scan back through previous weeks as well as future ones; we'll have to wait and see on that - another one of my many recommendations).
And, oh, I missed one..... yep, they're introducing a potentially HUGE & DISRUPTIVE change to the basic points system too. But that one will need a whole post of its own - in another day or two.
So, to my mind, really none of these changes has been unequivocally positive. Even the few that were seeking to address genuine issues of concern have done so in a frustratingly incomplete, inept manner. The larger ones, I would say, seem harmful rather than beneficial.
But even if these changes were better thought-out, I still wouldn't want to see so many of them launched upon us all together - and so suddenly, with no advance warning.
We really want stability in this game of ours: we want to see as few changes as possible.
I'd say, ideally, we don't want to see any kind of MAJOR CHANGE more than about once every 3-5 years.
And that quota's been filled for a good long way ahead by the introduction of the '5 Free Transfers' rule (a rare good innovation!) last year. We could do without any more tinkering until towards the end of the decade now, at the very least.
And good grief, if you are going to introduce MAJOR CHANGES (like the doubled chips and extra AFCON transfers and the defensive points), that sort of thing ought only to be done after public consultation with your community and, with innovations that affect points awards (whether directly, or indirectly through the BPS) with extensive - public - trialling (show us examples of the changes in action, live, during the preceding season).
The information overload FPL visited on us this weekend was just a complete dog's breakfast. It made our FPL overlords look as if they shouldn't be left in charge of a village fete.
#NoMoreChanges
As I've mentioned, often, I absolutely HATED the silly innovation of the 'Assistant Manager' chip, which I think RUINED the game for everyone this season.
If you're signed up for the regular FPL updates, you should have received an invitation in the last few days to participate in their End-of-Year Survey.
It includes questions about what you thought of the 'Assistant Manager', and whether you'd like to see it again next year (please, God, NO!!!!). PLEASE, EVERYONE, fill this in, and make sure to be as negative as possible about the dratted AssMan chip!!!
How to answer the FPL survey
If we don't all complain about it vociferously, there's a very real danger that it (or something even worse...) will be included in the game again next year - and RUIN IT FOREVER. This may be our one chance to make our displeasure with the chip heard.
There is also a space at the end of the questionnaire for you to address any other areas of complaint. I would suggest throwing in some criticisms of the AWFUL 'Player Info' screen, or various other aspects of the data presentation in the UI, the lack of any ready way of reviewing the player-by-player contribution to your team performance over the season, or, of course, the urgent need to revise the bloody 'BPS'....
I know I said I was done with this wishful thinking when I came up with this afterthought a week ago, but.... one final FPL wish-list item has occurred to me. This will be it now, I promise. (Until next year, anyway.....)
I'd like FPL to introduce a display of 'Team History' - not just the 'Gameweek History' list we have at the moment, which provides only headline stats for each week, but a more detailed breakdown of how each player has performed for us.
I envision a grid display, with our current players listed in 15 rows,... and then all players we've previously owned in further rows beneath those; then a column for each Gameweek, indicating which players started for us then (or were only on the bench), and how many points they returned. (It would also be nice to have a little pop-up triggered by the mouse-cursor clicked on each Gameweek, or even just hovered over it - revealing the breakdown of how the player earned his points for you in that week.)
The first few columns should also give a few summary totals: how many games the players have started for us, how many points they've returned, how much their price has changed while we've owned them.
This is pretty basic stuff, surely not much to ask??
Long ago, in one of my 'previous lives', I worked for a while in website design (I was more the sales/client liaison guy, but I had to work closely with the development team to fulfill the client's needs). And there were certain basic principles of UI design that were universally recognised - even a quarter of a century ago, in the early days of the Internet: a) Avoid pop-up screens (they're clunky, and people hate them); b) In particular, avoid 'large' pop-ups (they're an awkward compromise between small or mid-sized and full-screen pop-ups: if you need a larger display space, you should always go full-screen); c) Avoid sliders (really, really fiddly and irritating); d) In particular, avoid lateral sliders (shuffling from one side of the screen to the other in order to view all the information it contains is excruciating...); e) NEVER leave anything essential outside the initial field of view (if you have to have your sliders, they must be immediately visible when the pop-up opens; any 'control' items or essential information must be within the visible area of the screen when it first appears - you can't have people needing to scroll down to find a lateral slider, and then scrolling back up to look at the part of the screen they want); f) If you must have sliders, leave row & column headings outside the sliding frame - so that they'll remain visible and unmoved as you scroll down/sideways.
How many of these 'golden rules' does the FPL 'Player Info' screen break? That's right - ALL OF THEM! It is an abomination, a disgrace, an absolute shit-show.
There are several aspects of FPL's User-Interface design and data presentation that I'd like to see changes to; but we have to start with that one - it is the most massively annoying defect in the game, because it's a screen that we use multiple times every week.
Improvements I'd like to see in the game's UI
1) The 'Player Info' screen: make it a full-screen pop-up, or - better - an 'open in a new window/browser tab' full-page display. And reformat the layout, if necessary, so that it can be navigated without the need for slider bars. (It would also be nice if we could get hotlinks under the 'previous seasons' totals to open a page with the full week-by-week records for each year.)
2) a) The League tables: make them searchable by Gameweek (as well as, or instead of by month, which is the only option currently offered). It's nice to be able to easily check who the weekly winner is, in any league, or find out what your weekly position was in your country league,... or remind yourself how you did during a crucial double gameweek, or whatever. Shouldn't be at all difficult to implement.
2) b) The League tables: display the current total number of participants for each one!
3) a) Player search: make it available on every 'team' page, not just the 'Transfers' page. We don't need the full sidebar, just a search box. We often want to check up on a specific player - often mid-gameweek, while we're monitoring our own progress on the 'Points' page - and it is a pain-in-the-arse to have to keep switching to the 'Transfers' page (or to have to leave that open in a separate tab, which is what I usually end up doing) to do that.
3) b) Player search: clear the search automatically when parameters have changed, and/or add a quick 'clear' button. If I've switched my field of search from 'Midfielders' to 'Goalkeepers', I don't want to be told that no goalkeepers can be found... because the stupid bloody widget is searching for a goalkeeper called Mbeumo. (Again, it doesn't help that the 'search box' is usually off the bottom of the field-of-view when you're adjusting the other search parameters!)
3) c) Player Search: broaden the data field so that a player can be recognised from any part of his name. It can be impossible to find out anything about Diogo Jota's history unless you know that the game recognises him ONLY as 'Diogo', or about Korean forward Hwang Hee-Chan unless you realise that the game mistakenly believes Hee-Chan is his surname.
4) (a) Player Statistics: make that page searchable by gameweek also. By month, or over a particular run of gameweeks - with 'from' and 'to' selectable - would be nice too. But at the very least, we should be able to recap players' relative performances in any given gameweek. (And heck, it would be nice to have a 'Season so far....' total available under a by-gameweek search too, in addition to the figures for that week.)
4) (b) Player Statistics: make 'historical' records available as well, by adding a facility to search by season.
4) c) Player Statistics: for heaven's sake, start displaying the saves points as well as just the number of 'saves'! The number of saves is 'good to know', but it's not as important as how many points your keeper has actually contributed to his team (and yours). And after all, 75 saves in a season could represent anything from 0 to 25 actual points!!
5) 'Global Average' score: a pretty important statistic, it should be appearing in more than one place! Please add it to the weekly record in 'Entry History',... and to the 'Team of the Week' pages,... and anywhere else that refers to gameweek-by-gameweek results. And gosh, it would be nice if they'd tally the 'global average' for the season as well.
6) Captaincy rates: also a pretty useful statistic, it should be added to 'Player Statistics' - at least for the historical record; although live updates for the current gameweek would also be interesting to see.
7) a) Gameweek team records: make them 'historically accurate' as to player status. If we're checking back to see how we - or a rival - did in an earlier gameweek, we want to be reminded of players' injury/suspension status going into that gameweek, not NOW. That shouldn't be difficult!
7) b) Gameweek team records: also make the team 'Points' pages' linked league tables 'historically' sync'ed, so that if you click on that league, you'll see the standings as they were at the end of that gameweek. (Also, wouldn't it be lovely if clicking on your own team name in a league took you to the page that your rank actually puts you on? And perhaps, you know, you could even make the leagues searchable - by team name or by score/range of scores??)
8) Fixture Difficulty Rating: make it searchable backwards as well as forwards. Sometimes we want to check back on the pattern of fixtures (and their predicted difficulty [even though this is laughably inaccurate much of the time!]) in a previous gameweek; but, at present, everything prior to the following gameweek disappears as soon as a new gameweek begins. [And if they're going to keep the dreadful 'Assistant Manager' chip next season (although I'm fervently praying that they won't... #DownWithTheNewChip), would it be so much to ask if they could do something to highlight the fixtures in which a 'table bonus' would currently be available (or was available, in a previous gameweek)?]
9) The 'Transfer' process: streamline it, and make it more idiot-proof. We hear sob-stories many times a season of people who've ended up paying for multiple transfers because they'd somehow inadvertently failed to activate a Wildcard or Free Hit as they'd thought. And I sympathise: the transfer process at the moment is a bit clunky and confusing. I think in the past you used to have an option to play Wildcard or Free Hit within the 'Transfers' pop-up window; but that seems to have disappeared - why? It is an unnecessary hassle to have to go back to the main screen to activate the chip. And if transfers are blocked (because you've inadvertently chosen too many players from one club, or strayed over-budget), you should have the warning notice about that in the 'confirm transfers' window - not just find that it is frozen, without explanation, and have to go back to the main screen to find out what the problem is. And I DO NOT WANT to have an annoying pop-up ad inviting me to participate in 'Fantasy Challenge' at the end of this process, rather than the quick reassurance of a confirmation of a successful transfer.
10) Key buttons must be PROMINENT, CONSPICUOUS: returning to the point in my preamble about 'essential' items needing to be immediately within the field of view on a screen, FPL is often guilty of 'hiding' stuff in inconspicuous places at the edge of the screen, or completely out of sight off the bottom of it. Having to scroll down in the 'Transfers' pop-up screen to find the 'Confirm Transfers' button is a needless irritation; but even worse (in my experience, a very regular source of 'mistakes' - particularly with bench order or captaincy allocation) is the vital 'Save Team' button hiding off the bottom of the 'Select Team' page. If they're going to require a manual save to confirm the team (rather than just auto-saving every change), there should be a prominent warning notice to remind you of this: 'Do you want to save this team?' And it would make more sense to have the 'Save' button at the TOP of the screen (where it's immediately in view) rather than at the bottom. [And maybe we could make this button and/or warning notice about the need for manual confirmation into a 'Do you want to enter this team this week?' question - part of my plan for expunging 'zombie accounts' from the game. If you don't specifically 'enter' a team for the coming gameweek, I think you should get ZERO points for that gameweek. And if you fail to 'enter' for a few weeks running, your entry for the year should be deleted.]
There will probably be a few more points about the layout of the FPL website that occur to me over time, but I think this is enough for now; these are the most important ones. [Yep, I came up with one more.]
Dear FPL, can you please fix these things before next season? Pretty please.
I blame The Scout ( in particular ; there are many other sources of this psychopathy...). FPL's own anonymous 'pundit' regularl...
