The ultimate REFRAME

I was asked - yet again - on one of the forums the other week what my rank is. And instead of just ignoring the enquiry, or castigating the questioner as an ignorant lout, I came up with this flippant response.... which I find contains a kernel of important truth. This is not silly bragging or empty, delusional consolation; it is a valuable reminder of where our true focus should lie.

"I am FIRST in the only league that matters."

This is always true, for all of us. Because the only competition that truly matters is the struggle with ourselves - to do the best we can, and to constantly seek to improve on what that 'best' can be.

Fretting about your 'Overall Rank', or even your status in mini-leagues, is a VANITY of VANITIES. It is not what the game of FPL should really be about.

Had we but world enough and time.....

 

.... we'd all win FPL one day!

I said last week, in my major post on what actually makes the most difference to your FPL season points total, that smart FPL managers should out-perform not-so-smart ones.... most of the time.

But alas, I'm not convinced that is true: at least, not as often as it should be, not over a single season - not in our unitary existence.

The thing is, with such a huge number of manager accounts in the game every year now, you're inevitably going to get a huge number of them that prosper by sheer dumb luck (even among 'zombie accounts' that are rarely or never active!). And because the impact of luck in our game is far greater than that of skill, that unfortunately means that a very large number of those who do so prosper will prosper so extravagantly that they will outperform a lot of the merely skillful managers in the game who haven't had any out-of-the-ordinary luck, and hence that... not all, but a very great many of the folks in the upper reaches of the rankings most years are likely to be not really very good at all, to have reached that eminence mostly or entirely by luck.

It is my belief that the truly smart FPL managers would only be able to convincingly display their superiority over the masses across a very long timeframe.

You do see some evidence of this, with some of the best long-time managers having now produced fairly consistently decent - though rarely or never outstanding - results over 10 or 15 or 20 years. But even for this to happen, for one's 'true average' level of attainment to emerge, for you to prove your ascendance over the majority of other managers in the game (many of whom will have averages buoyed up by one or two extraordinarily lucky seasons...), it will usually take many, many years - maybe, in some cases, too many years, more than one human lifetime.

And for a really smart manager to win the global crown, or even to crack the top 50k or 100k, it might take him or her hundreds or thousands of lifetimes.

I speculate that if some sort of 'multiverse' hypothesis is indeed the case (that there are many parallel realities, perhaps an infinite number, all subtly different - and that hence, across that infinitude, everything that can happen, will happen somewhere), then smart FPL managers are enjoying their just reward somewhere each year. But within a single reality, it might take centuries or millennia before the dice fall that kindly for us.

For most of us, it will never happen - because life is too short.

'Chasing' is the ultimate DELUSION

A chap on one of the FPL forums recently was asking what tactics he should follow in the last two or three gameweeks of the season.

My reply was this:  You do what you'd do in any other gameweek. You pick the best team you can, and keep your fingers crossed for a good outcome. 

There is no way to 'protect' rank, or to 'chase' rank: you have no knowledge of what anyone else will choose to do, and no control over anyone's outcomes. 

If you delude yourself into thinking that a 'more cautious' selection or a 'more daring' selection is better, you're just distracting yourself from what you ought to be doing - trying to find the BEST selection.

That's all there is to it. 'Chasing rank' (or nervously 'protecting rank') is dangerous nonsense; it only leads to foot-shooting.

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.]

The main PROBLEM with FPL

People want to measure their success in the game of Fantasy Premier League. But there is no reliable gauge of your success. 

Your points total is primarily a measure of how lucky you've been.

Your rank is primarily a measure of how lucky everyone else has been, in relation to you.

The aim of the game should be to exercise and develop your skill in making the best squad selections (and 'chip strategy' decisions, etc.). But your points returns are not an accurate reflection of your skill and good judgement: they depend very largely on pure luck. (And, as I pointed out the other day, with the help of Youtube science educator Derek Muller, the effect of even small amounts of luck on final outcomes can be HUGE...) Very bad FPL managers can sometimes do extraordinarily well. Very good FPL managers can often fare very badly.... It is a cruel and unjust game.

We need to find other ways of gauging our progress in the game of FPL, other ways of taking satisfaction in it.

Perhaps a useful place to start is..... focusing less on how good you think you are, and concentrating instead on pursuing constant improvement in your decision-making process.

Another take on 'LUCK'

 

I've been following Derek Muller's excellent science channel, Veritasium, on Youtube for several years, but I only just stumbled upon this video of his from 4 or 5 years ago on the role of 'LUCK' - in sports, and life. 

Just over 3 minutes in, he has a fascinating example of a mathematical simulation he ran of the competitive selection process for NASA astronaut training - which apparently demonstrates that, with even a very small element of 'luck' at play in the process, at least 80% of those finally selected (overcoming daunting odds of around 1,700-1!!) will have displaced more able candidates by virtue of that little bit of crucial luck.

He doesn't go into a lot of detail about his simulation. I suspect that it involved multiple 'elimination rounds', rather as with a knockout cup competition - which would tend to cumulatively exaggerate the impact of the participants' luck. Nevertheless, it is a striking example of how great an effect luck can have in competitive outcomes.

And he was only allowing a weighting of up to 5% for the 'luck' factor in his selection tests. I think in Fantasy Premier League.... it's probably at least 50%; quite possibly more like 70% or 80%!!

I hate it when people naively brag about their rank in the game. Your rank proves nothing about how smart or capable you are. You can't get into the top 100,000 - or even the top 500,000 or so - without having a substantial amount of good luck. And statistics would suggest that the great majority of the top 100,000 are there mostly through luck (that 80/20 split comes up everywhere.....), at the expense of far more capable managers.

Derek also makes the useful point here that believing absolutely in your own ability and your deserving of whatever success you achieve tends to make you smug, entitled, and obnoxious - rather than sympathetic, tolerant, and helpful towards others; whereas trying to remain duly aware of the extent to which 'luck' has contributed to your success allows you to express the more positive traits of humility and gratitude.

Seeking to encourage the latter mindset is my primary mission on this blog.