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, what 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 will 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.]
