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

I pointed out last week that it is misguided - morally reprensible, 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 ovreall, 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 convenitent 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 leat 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.

It's neither A SPRINT nor A MARATHON

 

You often find folks on the FPL online forums saying about this Fantasy game of ours: "It's a marathon, not a sprint."

And you can see what they mean: it's supposed to be dismissive of people who gloat unduly over a single week's success (or become too disheartened at a single week's disaster...), reminding them that things can change over a long season, and - most importantly - that you should focus on longer-term goals, longer-term planning than merely optimising for the coming gameweek.

It's just unfortunate that the phrase has become devalued by overuse, reduced to a glib cliché - whose true significance is rarely reflected upon fully.

And the thing is.... it's not a marathon either. 

The FPL season is actually more like a series of middle-distance races.

It breaks down into into roughly 5 or 6 blocks of fixtures (of about 6-8 games each; though, depending on circumstances, they might occasionally be a little longer, or - rarely - ever so slightly shorter). And you should really be planning your transfers around these blocks; trying to optimise your team not just for the next gameweek or two, but for the next six or so.

There are some 'macro' features of the season, the same every year (or most years), which affect this division into blocks: the chaos of the two transfer windows at the beginning and the mid-point of the football year; the insane fixture congestion of December/January, and the brutally cold weather throughout the winter months; the interruptions of the international breaks; the loss of players to the African Cup of Nations or the Asian Cup in mid-season every two or four years; the appearance of Blank and Double Gameweeks at the latter end of the season, and the growing distraction of other competitions for those teams who've reached the later rounds in Europe or the domestic Cups.

Then there are some more 'micro' features that may shift from year to year: some teams have more of a 'wobble' of form in the bleak midwinter than others; some struggle more with the demands of European football, due to unfamiliarity and/or a lack of squad depth and/or being particularly unlucky with injuries; the promoted sides usually take some time to adapt to the top league, and don't start to become even moderately competitive until a third, or a half, or two-thirds of the way through the season (but can throw quite a spanner in the works when they do); some clubs may suffer unwelcome upheaval, and/or get the benefit of a 'new manager bounce' from a change of manager; and so on. Most crucially, each season is shaped by patterns in the fixtures; there are usually a few major 'turns' in fixture-difficulty, where a number of teams shift from having mostly very difficult to mostly much easier fixtures at about the same, and these can be a cue for multiple changes to an FPL squad.

It makes no sense to 'plan' for the FPL season as a whole (except insofar as you should recognise its likely 'shape', based on the factors above, and thus be mentally prepared for the likely key moments of difficulty and opportunity spread throughout it). You need to break it up into more manageable chunks, and plan your squad-building around each of those.

Constantly telling yourself that "it's a marathon" may provide some solace when a gameweek goes badly for you; but it can also be a dangerous distraction. You need to be focusing on what you're going to do to prosper over the next month or so.

[I speak as someone who's been a keen runner their whole life, and who's had some experience at all kinds of distances.

I've always been tall for my age, and when I was in Primary School I was considered quite a devastating sprinter (though, of course, this was largely because we only ever ran about 20m or 30m, and most of my peers still had the coordination of newborn foals). In my teens I discovered that I was much better suited to the middle distances: I never quite had the stamina to push hard for a full mile, but was pretty quick over 800m and 1,000m. However, I was never very serious about competition, I was more concerned with the meditative aspect of running; and so I gradually transitioned into running slower and slower, over longer and longer distances. And as I entered my forties, I became interested in taking on the challenge of running marathons - and even a few ultra-marathons. So, I have a perspective on this topic, I feel I have a deeper understanding of the metaphor than most people.]

A helpful trick for picking your Captain

A further, playful follow-up to this morning's post about the dreaded Captaincy conundrum...

As I noted there, you should usually have at least 5 or 6 decent Captaincy candidates to choose from (if your squad's any good!), and - Fate and Luck being what they are - you'll probably quite rarely land on the best one. And you can wear a lot of years off your life fretting about a choice that is essentially impossible.

So, I quite often say to people online that if you're really finding it hard to choose, you should try writing the names of your candidates on Post-It notes, sticking them on a dartboard, and then throwing darts with your eyes closed until you hit one of them. It works as well as anything else.

Now, true, I usually say this somewhat flippantly. But there is a certain magic in this technique. And it is this: it puts you in touch with your intuition, it reveals to you a decision, a preference that had already formed in your subconscious mind, but which you hadn't been aware of (or were fearful to acknowledge).

Much as with a coin-flip, where if the coin lands on the choice you don't really want, you suddenly find yourself saying, "Well, I should do best-of-three on this....!", so too with this expanded 'random decision-making process', you'll immediately recognise if you don't fancy the selection your wayward dart has made for you.... and that will lead you towards recognising the choice that your 'gut' wants you to make.

And for things like this, the 'intuition' is usually much better at evaluating the mutliple variables and making a shrewd selection than the conscious mind is - at least if your intuition is well trained by a lifetime of close watching of football. (See Malcolm Gladwell's book 'Blink' for some interesting case studies on the power of 'spontaneous decision-making'.)

But one final WARNING:  If you ever think your Captaincy Conundrum is down to a binary choice (as many, many folks on the forums often seem to do) - you're almost certainly wrong. (Or you have a very, very poor team!)

Can ANYONE be Captain?

 

Well, in theory, yes.... But in practice, usually NOT.

A little postscript to my post this morning on the trials of selecting your weekly Captain in Fantasy Premier League....

Now, in general, FPL doesn't give regular rewards for anything other than goals. And forwards, of course, tend to score most of the goals. So, you're likely to be better off choosing a forward to be your Captain, right?

Well, yes,..... except that many of the best forwards are in fact classified by the game as 'midfielders'. And many players, even if you might properly consider them as 'midfielders' rather than 'forwards', nevertheless, at least when they're in hot form, may score nearly as often, or even slightly more often, than the best forwards. And midfielders are privileged in the game's scoring system - getting more points than a forward for a goal, often picking up a free additional point for a team clean sheet, and generally being a bit more likely to pick up asssists and bonus points too (and also the newly introduced 'defensive points').

So, most of the time, it makes the most sense to give the Captain's armband to a goalscoring 'midfielder'.

Of course, some 'forwards' (especially the freakish Erling Haaland), when they're in form, do offer a particularly strong prospect of a goal almost every week; and may have a significantly elevated chance of registering a brace or even a hattrick against a favourable opponent. So, they can often be worth considering for the armband, ahead of your best midfielder. (However, it's a bit of a risk. Even Haaland doesn't score in every game; and he sometimes fails to score in games where he's expected to enjoy a landslide. And a midfielder who registers a goal and an assist will usually out-point a forward who notches a brace of goals, so.... midfielders are generally the better way to go. Even when Haaland does score a brace, he's very rarely the 'Player of the Week'!!)

And it also sometimes happens that none of your attacking players, 'midfielders' or 'forwards', have a particularly inviting fixture in a given gameweek, while a few of your defenders are facing teams who are really struggling to score any goals; so, you might occasionally take a chance on a defender getting a clean sheet. Although,... clean sheets are a very precarious thing to trust in for points, they can evaporate so easily (one tired mistake late in the game, one wondergoal out of nowhere, one dubious penalty award....). So, this is only really something you want to gamble on in that rare circumstance where none of your forwards or midfielders looks like a strong prospect for the gameweek. 

Strangely, there seems to be a common superstition against ever giving the armband to a goalkeeper. But in fact, in one of these weeks where the prospects look better for you in defence than attack, a keeper facing a weak opponent is usually a better prospect than a defender, because they can earn additional points for saves as well as the clean-sheet bonus. (In the past, some FPL managers might have been tempted to chase the higher 'points ceiling' from a defender, who might also pick up an attacking return of some sort; but attacking returns for defenders are vanishingly rare, and have been becoming more so in recent years with shifts in the tactics of the game against using full-backs as advanced wide players. Defenders might theoretically be able to earn more points in a match their team is likely to win comfortably; but in practice, the keeper usually does. However, this season the new 'defensive points' will probably even the balance up, giving defenders a much stronger chance of earning 2 extra points in a game; although that doesn't decisively rule keepers out of consideration, because they can often earn 2 or more points for their 'saves' in a game - and, if they make a lot of saves, they tend to be more likely to claim the maximum bonus points as well.)

You have to weigh up a nexus of factors - the regular points potential of your candidate players, their current individual and team form, and the likely difficulty of their fixture - to try to determine the best points prospect for the week. [And use your own judgement on this; don't try to rely on one of those ludicrously bad 'points predictor' apps.]

And YES, it can be anyone, from any position - even (though rarely) the goalkeeper. But 3 or 4 times out of every 5, it should usually be a midfielder.

Don't worry about points left on the Bench!

 

People on the FPL forums are often found fretting extravagantly about the number of points they've had unused on the Bench in this past gameweek. And many - even among the supposedly more experienced and shrewder managers in the game - often seem to fetishise the idea of minimizing your Bench points (as if it's somehow wasteful of resources, and an indicator of bad play).

Now, OK, it is bad play if you are frequently leaving a player on the Bench who returns a very good haul - in preference to a player you started whose prospects clearly weren't quite as good in that week's fixtures. 

A really good haul on the Bench is, of course, frustrating. But that's going to happen to everyone occasionally: it's a game of luck, and you can't reliably predict who's going to come up with the big points in any given week; occasionally you'll be taken by surprise. But if you find you're quite regularly having one of your best returns from a player on the Bench, then you might be having a few problems with your decision-making.

However, the Bench is also part of your team - and you will occasionally (quite often!) have to draw on your Bench through auto-substitutions to fill out your starting lineup. So, consistently getting pretty decent points out of your Bench collectively, and out of each of its individual members, is actually a very good thing - a sign of a well-balanced squad.

Moreover, you should look to have a pretty competent back-up goalkeeper, and at least one strong back-up defender - to enable you to rotate those positions around difficult fixtures. And so, sometimes, you're actually going to have a first-choice keeper or defender on your bench - who might surprise you with a good return, despite having been in a very unpromising fixture.

There are also going to be occasions when you might choose to omit one of your top players, in any position, either because of a tough fixture, or because they're a doubtful starter due to a yellow-flagged injury problem or a likely rest before or after a big European game, or on returning from international duty (South American players are typically omitted in the first weekend after an international break because they've had to fly such a long way only a couple of days before the game). And then those players may play anyway, and have a big game. 

You shouldn't blame yourself for occasional misfortunes like that - only if you made a choice purely on form and/or fixtures to leave one player on the bench in favour of starting others, and you were wrong, and that is happening a lot.  Learn to distinguish cases where you made a sensible and justifiable decision to omit someone and got unlucky with it, from cases where you just badly misjudged your players' relative points prospects based on form and fixture-difficulty.

You should generally be hoping for an average of 5-6 points per game from all of your starters; but your average return from your Bench back-up players shouldn't be too far short of that, certainly not much below 4.5 points per game.

If you're often getting 16-20 points on your Bench, that's not a bad thing at all; it's a sign of good squad strength. (If you're regularly getting a lot less than that [when everyone is starting], you have a problem - and you're going to pay for it sooner or later.)

Players' season totals really DON'T MATTER

I already touched on this point quite extensively a couple of weeks back in this post on the price steps that are applicable for categorising FPL player options in different positions. However, it's such an important topic, I felt I should say a little more on it.

The problem here is that many FPL managers fall in thrall to the silly, dangerous delusion that ALL YOU HAVE TO DO in the game is identify the players who are going to get the highest totals for the season. (With the usual corollary that the players likeliest to do this are those who got the highest totals last season - which is a reasonable but not infallible guide to form.)

It seems paradoxical, unfathomable to many - but this is just NOT TRUE (not generally so, anyway; there will always be some exceptions, which I'll outline below).

The thing is, you really need to be pulling in around 200 points or so from every starting slot in your squad over the season, if you are to have a chance of finishing near the top of the rankings. In fact, since you're bound to come up short of that - perhaps well short - for many of the slots (defenders and goalkeepers just don't produce points at anything like the levels of the best midifelders and forwards), you really need to be aiming for more like 250+ points from at least a few of your highest-returning slots.

[It's very difficult, in practice, to get anything like 'optimal' returns from your captaincy picks throughout a season. But, even if we grant that you can match or slightly better the return from your top squad slot with your armband choices (Note: this might not be - probably won't be - a single player, held in the team all season.), and even if you could get a fairly good lift from all of your 'chips' (although we have double the usual number of chips this season, it's pretty unlikely they'll be collectively worth a lift of anything like an extra 100 points over the season), and even if you can get, say, 4 squad slots returning something close to 250 (whereas 2 or 3 hitting that level would be remarkable...), and even if you could hit that ideal of a 200-point average across the whole of the rest of your starting eleven (which would entail you having a very strong bench as well, since you're going to have to be drawing on those guys fairly often to fill out the main line-up),..... you'd still probably come up 50-100 points short of last year's global champion. That's how big of an ASK it is!!  But that's what we all have to aim for.....]

And 250 points is an enormous season-total for an individual player. Usually, there are only 1 or 2 players who manage that in a season; but quite often, there are none. There are only ever a handful who manage to get over 200 points each year - and usually only a little over that threshold; and again, it's possible that sometimes no-one will even crack that seemingly more modest milestone.

So, you can't usually rely on any player - even your Mo Salah, Thierry Henry, Wayne Rooney, Erling Haaland types - to deliver you the kind of points you need from your best positions in the eleven. Even the very best players don't always reach that level; occasionally, they might come up a long way short.

Even when the top players have a really outstanding season, they are very, very rarely the highest-returning player across every shorter run of games within the season. There was almost always a player who, across 4 or 5 or 6 games, was delivering more points than them once or twice over the season. That was even true of Salah in his record-breaking season last year; his returns tailed off in the latter part of the year, and there were spells when it would have been profitable to drop him for someone else. [Of course, it can seem like an unacceptable risk to swap out one of these top-performing players. As I discussed in this post, their ability to deliver some exceptionally high gameweek hauls, and their overall consistency - with few if any long runs of 'blanks' - often makes them worth holding on to for an extended period of time, and occasionally, perhaps, even the whole season. Furthermore, the fact that they're usually very high-priced players makes it much more difficult to swap them in and out of a squad at will; so, once you have them, you may feel somewhat stuck - obliged to persist with them, come what may. But that will often be a mistake: even the best players almost always hit runs of less impressive form,... while a cheaper rival is suddenly banging in goals every week. You must not let yourself become bewitched by the glamorous reputation of a top performer; if they're not the top performer right now, you need to be ready to let them go.]

You can't expect to be able to hang on to any player for the whole season. You need to be trying to wring more points out of every slot in your line-up than any single player can produce. In order to achieve that, you have to seek to constantly rotate in the best current players over a short run of games.

As I explained in the post I mentioned at the top here, previous season totals are a useful guide to likely performance in the current season. But what you're really interested in is not the actual season total, but the projection of a theoretical season total from recent form - when the player you're looking at has been getting a regular run of starts and has been playing well. You will often find that that number is well over 250 points (if he's been averaging around 7 points per game in his last 3 or 4 starts) Their actual season-total won't be anywhere near that, 99 times out of a hundred; they'll get injured, get dropped, or just suffer a bit of a drought at some point - their run of high returns will come to an end sooner or later. But you need to try to have them in your side when their pro rata returns are up in that golden zone. 

If you become fixated on your Haalands and your Salahs, you risk missing out on a lot of players who could actually give you more points than them - at least for a part of the season.

In addition to this problem that even an exceptional player like Haaland or Salah will rarely guarantee you a big enough points total to make them an attractive season-long hold, there is also the - again, often perversely unacknowledged or stubbornly denied - fact that.... the game is about getting the best returns collectively from your starting eleven (backed up, on occasion, by your bench), not just from a handful of top-performing players.

Even if Haaland and Salah do outscore the next best option in their positions by a massive 50 or 80 points over the season,.... you can almost certainly more than make up that margin by being able to afford substantial upgrades in almost every other starting position with the money you save by not having them.

Players like these can be worth having, at least for certain spells of certain seasons; but they are almost never - only in the most exceptional of circumstances - worth having for the entire season.

If you think you MUST have players like these just because they seem likely to be the season's top-returning picks - you are committing a grave error. There will be certainly be other (cheaper!) players who outscore them in short spells during the season. And there will certainly be a massive opportunity cost in going without so many other top players in order to afford them.  (I may have a little more to say about this in a few days....)

Don't take a chance on uncertain starters (or new arrivals)

 

As I noted last week, I have often been guilty of taking a few too many risks in my own initial squad, and this has no doubt played its part in the fact that I have generally suffered a rather poor start to the FPL season.

With me, it's a rather specific foible of getting tempted to gamble on a fringe pick, a promising up-and-comer who isn't yet quite established as a regular starter at his club, or not at any rate as a significant force in FPL. Last year, for instance, I fancied that Jarrell Quansah was likely to get a few starts, because of a minor injury problem with Konate, and that he might prove good enough in that spell to earn a regular place; instead, Slot grew disillusioned with him very quickly, and took the almost unheard-of step of yanking him off at half-time in the very first game - wrecking the youngster's confidence, and effectively ending his Liverpool career. (Though I can understand why he did it in terms of the tactical situation on the pitch, I still feel that was a mistake on the Dutchman's part: possibly gaining a marginal advantage in the immediate game-state does not outweigh the damage done by potentially ruining a young player's career and thereby depleting the club's back-up resources in central defence.)  A year or so before that, I'd been bullish about Rico Lewis's prospects with City: and indeed, he was a regular starter, and playing very well, early in the season - but, of course, Pep being Pep, that didn't last very long. Going back a bit further, I was a huge fan of the talent of Norwich's elegant No. 10, Todd Cantwell, and was convinced he could become one of the best budget midfield picks for the season - but he too fell out of favour with his manager, and his career mysteriously tanked from that moment. (Yes, I could begin to worry that I am some kind of jinx....)

A bit later in the season, you can get away with taking one or two chances like this; bringing in a player who's not yet a proven points-provider, perhaps not even an absolutely certain starter; buying them early to get them at a low price, and carrying them on the bench for a few weeks until they start to confirm the promise you saw in them.

But in the opening weeks,... there are so many other uncertainties: players who might be displaced by new arrivals at the club, players who might be dropped because of an imminent transfer away, players who might not start or might only get short minutes because they're still short of full match-fitness, players who might go down with a last-minute injury....  Yep, at this time of year, you're quite likely to suffer at least one unexpected drop-out - perhaps even two or three, if you're a bit unlucky - from your squad every week, even among the players that you'd normally expect to be certain starters. (This is one of the key reasons why it's INSANE to consider playing a Bench Boost this early in the season.)

So, you really can't afford to load the odds against yourself by including any picks who are obviously in one of those most 'at risk' categories. We knew Isak was going to be mired in a transfer wrangle - and unable to play for anyone - for weeks. We knew Eze was likely to move this week - surely too late to have any chance of turning out for his new club this weekend. We knew Sesko and Gyokeres were relatively late arrivals, and hadn't trained much over the summer, and were thus likely to get quite limited minutes over the first two or three weeks. We knew that with Marmoush, Foden, Cherki, Reijnders, Silva, Gonzalez, Kovacic and Gundogan all competing for a small number of places in the City midfield, we couldn't count on any of them being invariable starters.

It was really not smart to pick ANY of these players in the initial squad this year.

Even if new arrivals at a club do appear to be more-or-less fully fit, and have had just about enough time to start bedding in with their new teammates, they remain unknown quantities: it is likely that they may take quite a while to fully settle in to a new style of play, and it might be weeks or months before they start producing their best; some, perhaps, if they're arriving from a lower tier in England or from an overseas league, may never successfully make the step up to this most physically intense and competitive of leagues. How soon - if ever - will Eze become a starter at Arsenal, what kind of role will he play there, and can he ever have the kind of impact for them that he had for Palace?? We just don't know. Will Cunha and Mbeumo gel together at United, or are their styles and personalities too different - will they end up in fractious competition with each other rather than synergistic cooperation?? And will one of them assume the penalty-taking duties?? We just don't know. How long will it take Gyokeres, or Sesko, or Wirtz to start producing their best form in the Premier League?? We just don't know.

Players like these are watch-and-wait options. They'll probably come good at some point, maybe soon;... but they're just not good bets at the very start of the season.

A scale of points

 

Following on from last week's observations on the significance of 'price steps' in FPL, here are a few thoughts on the similar tiering of points performance.

Of course, you don't know what points totals players are actually going to reach until the end of the season. And many of them will come up short of these thresholds because they've missed a significant number of games while injured or out-of-favour. 

Before the start of the season, you have to make your best guess as to what each player's final level is likely to be.  And then during the campaign, you have to try to calculate for yourself what end-season total a player is tracking for, if he's producing reasonably consistently while he has a regular start. 

You're looking for what a full-season total would be, on the basis of recent form.

Also, obviously, the 'levels' below aren't absolutely rigid: their boundaries are blurry - the top-end of one bracket is usually interchangeable with the bottom of the one above. However.....

I like to think of FPL player points-potential in the following steps or levels:

Level 0:  Less than 120 points for the season

Not worth considering. AVOID like the plague. Unless they happen to come into a really hot streak for a brief spell! That can happen to almost anyone....

Level 1:  120-139 pts

You really only want to consider going this low for your 4th and 5th defender spots, who are primarily for back-up only, and who you hope you might rarely or never call on. However, you assuredly will have to use both of them sooner or later (and not only for a possible Bench Boost!), so you should only consider going this low on points potential in your initial squad. Even these marginal positions need to be upgraded to Level 2 as soon as is convenient.

Level 2:  140-159 points

You want both goalkeepers and all your defenders (even the two back-ups!) to be solidly in this category - and, ideally, towards the upper end of it.

Level 3:  160-179 points

You'd like your top keeper choice, and at least one or two of your defenders to make it into this category - but that's a very big ask; it might not be possible every year. (Although there's much uncertainty at the moment arising from the abrupt introduction of the new 'defensive points'. It is possible that rather more defenders, and even a few defensive midfielders might just about get up to this level, thanks to the extra points now available to them.) But at the very least, you'd expect those players to be around the Level 2/Level 3 cusp.

It is very likely that your 2nd and 3rd forwards and your 4th and 5th midfielders will only be at this level for the season (perhaps even a little lower!); but these are the slots you need to be most often rotating, to try to keep catching players who are coming into hot runs of points-scoring form. That can elevate your effective returns for these squad slots to Level 4, or even perhaps Level 5.

Level 4:  180-199 points

You hope that your three best midfielders, one or two of your best forwards, and perhaps occasionally - if you're lucky - one exceptionally high-performing defender might get up to this level. If they do, they're probably players that you can hang on to for an extended spell; sometimes - though rarely - a full season-long hold.

Level 5:  200-219 points

This is starting to get into the realms of 'wishful thinking'. Only a handful of players ever get up to this kind of level for the season; and it is possible that, in certain years, no-one will. However, you have to watch out for the season-projection on emerging form, and recognise that some players will produce at this level for only a short run of games at a time. Try to be on them when they do!

Level 6:  220-239 points

This is now a very rarefied level. Only a few of the very best players are capable of getting this high. And you probably can't afford all of them. The big challenge at the start of the season is trying to identify the players likeliest to have a chance of reaching this exceptional level of long-term performance, then figuring out which of them look most likely to start the season strong,.... and frantically juggling your budget to see how many of them you can fit in.

Level 7:  240+   (God-like)

Now, of course, a top player who has a really outstanding season can get well beyond this, sometimes even edging up close to 300 points. And Mo Salah last season managed over 100 points more than this (but that was a once-in-a-generation freak, shattering even his own previous best by a huge margin!!). But, in general, this is an absolutely outstanding level, which not may players will attain even once in their careers. Only an elite few - Salah, Haaland, Palmer, the only members of the 'club' at the moment - have the potential to do so regularly. But a few others might be able to join them at these dizzying heights: Foden (if he can find his way again), Saka (if he can stay fit all season, and is unchained from the right touchline a bit more often), Wirtz (though probably in a year or two, rather than in his debut season), and maybe Eze (if he can stay fit and in-form, and enjoy slightly better luck; he really deserved at least a 200-point season last year...).

Who's likely to perform at these various levels this season?  Well, I'll try to give that some thought over the next few days. 

It's still really a bit too early to be thinking about choosing the initial squad!

But.... GOOD LUCK TO EVERYONE FOR THE COMING SEASON!!!

What a 'differential' is NOT

I touched on this in the introduction to my fuller post on 'differentials' this morning. But it's so important that I think it merits briefly highlighting in a post of its own here.

Many FPL managers (the vast majority, it would appear - from the online forums, at least) seem to have fallen prey to the self-harming delusion that 'differential' means prioritizing players who are less-owned.

That is UTTERLY BLOODY POINTLESS.

A less-owned player is only valuable to you if he's going to earn you more points than the more highly-owned alternatives. Which is rarely, if ever, the case....

And NOTE, the unfortunate corollary here is that high-owned players are to be distrusted and avoided. But, ahem, there are reasons why they're so high-owned: and those reasons usually include the fact that they've been producing scads of points!

The allure of the 'differential', conceived like this, is illusory. A decent player who's low-owned may have the occasional brilliant week; and, once-in-a-blue-moon, perhaps one of those rare great weeks of his will correspond to a week in which all the more popular picks fail to produce much. In that week, the owners of the 'differential' will feel terribly smug, as they temporarily gain rank because of their 'brilliant' pick; so smug, in fact, that they can overlook the fact that in almost every other gameweek of the season they have done much worse than the managers who went with deservedly more popular picks.

Any rank-gaining benefit you may occasionally reap from a 'differential' of this kind is also inevitably short-lived - because, if such a player really is wrongly overlooked and undervalued, is indeed coming into hot form and about to display huge points potential,.... lots of other FPL managers are quickly going to come onboard for him, and his ownership level will have shot up within two or three weeks.

It is not impossible to find this sort of 'differential' advantage occasionally; but it is very, very rare - and really not something worth making a primary focus of your game. Particularly if that leads you to chase every low-owned second- or third-tier player who looks like he might be such a prospect after one good haul....

The 'Cult of the Differential' usually leads to people desperately chasing points in the most reckless and stupid ways, and perversely ignoring more sensible picks.

Forget about ownership level, and concentrate on points-potential.

The true meaning of 'differential'

I have been meaning for a long time to address the topic of 'differentials'. It is one of the most infuriatingly overused terms, one of the most pervasive - and most destructive - myths in all of FPL-land.

The essential problem with it is that it's become such a jargon term that many people use it completely unreflectively, without even considering what they really mean by it - much less what it really ought to mean.

The most common, and dangerous, misconception that has become attached to it is that there is somehow an automatic advantage in choosing less-owned players.

THERE IS NOT. There is only an advantage in identifying less-owned (and/or cheaper) players who are going to score more points than the more highly-owned (and/or more expensive) alternative picks.

The much-abused term 'differential' is, however, highly relevant, meaningful, and useful in a number of other applications - which rarely or never seem to merit explicit consideration in FPL circles. 'Differential' value is actually crucial to all selection decisions; but it operates in a number of different ways.

Where the 'differential' concept actually MATTERS:

1)  Price differential:  Is the player you're targeting a better points-prospect than all other players available at the same or similar price-point?

2)  Position differential:  Is the player you're targeting a better points-prospect than anyone else you can afford in the same position category?

3)  Club differential:  Is the player you're targeting likely to give you a bigger points lift over the next best alternative than another player at the same club would give you over their next best alternative?  [This is the chief - and almost invariably unappreciated - argument against selecting David Raya; a fantastic goalkeeper, but not that much better than any of his rivals in FPL terms - while a number of his Arsenal teammates are (at least, sometimes) much better than most of their rivals.]

4)  Price-step differential:  Is the player you're targeting likely to give you a bigger points lift over the best alternative one price-step cheaper (usually you're focused on a positional comparison, but occasionally it might also be in the context of a club quota) than the points lift that an alternate pick might give you over their closest cheaper competitor?  At the start of the season, all price-steps are 500k, but later on, an interval of even 100k or 200k can sometimes make a big difference. [Most of the time, you'll just be looking at the possible impact of a one price-step difference between two options. But sometimes - particularly at the start of the season, when choosing the initial squad - you might be weighing up the advantage of spending 1 or 1.5 million more on a particular slot.]

5)  'Value' differential:  Is the player you're considering going to give you a better points-per-pound return than the alternatives? This is particularly relevant when you're choosing your initial squad, as you'll usually be running short of budget for at least the last 3, 4, or 5 spots and you really have to squeeze every possible point out of each of those picks - even if you expect to be able to leave them on the bench most of the time.

6)  Transfer differential:  Is the player you're bringing in likely to give you a bigger points lift over the guy you're replacing than other transfers in your squad might produce?

7) Team differential:  Does your overall team selection (and squad selection - because you will often need to draw on your bench) offer you a substantially better points-potential than the likely global average score this gameweek, and (perhaps even more importantly) than the selections of the key rivals in your mini-leagues?  [I prefer to maintain my team differential advantage by trusting that my opponents will make some bad picks, rather than by avoiding taking their good picks for myself.]

Ownership level has no bearing on any of that! The ONLY THING you should be interested in is whether a player (more properly, in fact, a group of players, in the context of each other) is offering you the best points return for the money you have available. 'Differential advantage' is all about identifying where you can get the most points, assessed within a number of different frames of reference.

'Ownership' will only become relevant for breaking a dead-heat: if you really can't decide between two possible picks, they seem to you to have absolutely equal prospects by all criteria - then you can go for the less-owned one. (But that NEVER happens.)

NO-ONE is a 'set-and-forget'

 

It is common in FPL for managers to suppose that their best players can be relied on for the entire season.  Indeed, many of the more naive FPL managers seem to expect that almost their entire squad should be able to be relied upon for the entire season!  Newsflash: it ain't so.

Now, if we go for a super-premium player like Salah or Haaland or Palmer, then, yes, we hope they're going to stay fit and in-form all season.

As I outlined the other day, in order to even approach justifying their enormous price-tags, players like these have to satisfy some extraordinarily demanding criteria - and, really, almost none ever do; not over the season as a whole.

Last year, Mo Salah enjoyed a freakishly good season, even by his freakisly high standards, and shattered the record for total FPL points in a season. But that was a real outlier of a performance, an order-of-magnitude better than even he has managed previously. That might be the only occasion in FPL history when a player has unequivocally been worth owning - and starting - in every single game. (And even then, he had a bit of a tailing-off in the latter part of the season that, really, made him no longer essential....)

In most seasons, Salah has suffered the odd little injury niggle, or a few fallow spells here and there; and every other year, he goes missing mid-season to take part in the African Cup of Nations. Last year, Haaland suffered a long run of poor returns as City's form began to crumble, and then had a couple of injury absences. At the very beginning of the season he was outstanding, and he started to do quite well again in the closing months; but for a long run in the middle, it was sheer madness to have hung on to him. Likewise, Palmer started the year very hot, but... his points returns tanked after Christmas, and it proved unwise to have retained him too far into the New Year.

Those are somewhat extreme examples. admittedly. But the general point holds: even the very best players rarely escape injuries or major dips in form in some phase of the season.

And even if they maintain modestly consistent performances and points returns, the competitive landscape around them constantly shifts: there may be other players who come into such hot form for a while that they're worth bringing in at the expense of your 'best' current players - even, perhaps, a Salah or a Haaland.

It is unwise to allow yourself to get wedded to the idea of set-and-forget players, picks from your initial squad that can be left in place all season. You never know who's going to suffer an injury or a loss of form, fleeting or long-term.  Some players may end up staying fit and being consistent enough to be worth keeping all season; but you can't predict that before the season starts - it's just a pleasant surprise, not something you should expect to rely on.

Although FPL managers tend to most often dream about their key attacking players having a dream season where they could be a set-and-forget, in fact it's usually only defenders or goalkeepers who wind up sticking in your squad for all 38 gameweeks.

This is partly because they tend to get injured rather less often than attacking players who have to run around a lot more. But it's more down to the fact that there isn't really a lot to choose between them: the differential points spread between the 'best' and 'second best' defenders (and keepers) is usually relatively small. And the best returners will usually be fairly consistent across the season; so, you can't often obtain much benefit by rotating in fresh players who've hit better form (as you most definitely can in the 'midfield' and 'forward' positions!).

But even here, injuries - and suspensions (far more common for defenders) - are a factor; and, even more so, shifts in fixture difficulty, since the attacking strength of opponents is a main determinant of defensive returns. Often you'll be able to hang on to one of your keepers and one or two defenders for the whole season; but rather more often, you won't.

It is a very RARE - and very, very lucky - circumstance if you manage to hang on to any of your initial squad for the whole season (other than Salah, in one of his most god-like years....).

And in fact, if you do end the season with a number of ever-presents, it's more likely a sign not of exceptional good fortune, but of laziness and stubbornness - of having obstinately (or inadvertently?!) hung on to players that, at some point, you really should have ditched.

Filling the bargain slots

 

At the start of the season, budget is usually very tight. And in order to make it stretch so that you can accommodate some of those more expensive - premium or super-premium - players that you covet, you're inevitably going to have to go for a few super-cheap choices to balance up your spending, so-called budget-enablers.

In general, I recommend going for TWO 4.5-million-pound goalkeepers, rather than anyone more expensive. Though, if you can find find any good starters at only 4.0 million  (rare, but it can happen), it's probably worth taking at least one of them.

Since even the best defenders don't offer very high overall points, you rarely want to be starting more than THREE of them. Hence, you can save money in the initial squad by going for a very cheap 5th defender,... and perhaps even a very cheap 4th as well (though you should always make sure that both are at least guaranteed starters). Your 4th defender will be needed as emergency back-up (if one of your starting three is an unexpected omission) and for occasional rotation (if someone is out with a suspension or a short-term injury, or is just facing a really daunting fixture). But, with luck, you will never need to call on your 5th defender (you should be prepared for the worst; but it may not happen...)

A good 5th midfielder almost always produces more than all but a few of the very best (and hence unaffordably expensive!) 'forwards', so you can also afford to go light on your 3rd forward spot; but never on your 5th midfield spot!

There are always good value options to be found amongst both 'forwards' and 'midfielders', and you can certainly save some money in the last two slots in both positions - but not at the lowest possible price-point: those players will almost certainly be very weak options, if not reserve players who will rarely or never get a start. Players like that are just dead-weight - who will probably leach value out of your squad. Cheap players should still be good players.

Beware of double-ups and treble-ups

 

With a few very high-performing clubs, who boast strong attacks and strong defences,... and several big players - well, it gets mighty tempting to gobble up as many of them as you can for your FPL team. Often we hear people online griping about how the club quota limit is unfair, unduly restrictive; how 4 or 5 players per club ought to be allowed.

We really ought to be grateful that that isn't the rule!

Reasons why we should be very wary about taking our full quota of players from any one club:

1)  If you're maxed out on a club, you're restricting your flexibility to bring in anyone new from that club (unless the player you want who's newly returned from injury or suddenly hit a hot vein of form is the same position and similar price to the same-club player you're willing to sacrifice for him - that change is going to require additional transfers).

2)  You haven't spread risk very well: if you have 3 players from one club, you're very exposed to the danger of having a terrible gameweek if that club has a bad day at the office. (Yes, we have often seen occasions where, for example, Van Dijk gets set off early in the match, and Liverpool go down to a team they ought to have beaten easily.... Shit happens!).

3)  Doubling up from the same club in the same position is usually redundant, and particularly risky. In the attacking positions, at least, players essentially share a finite pool of potential attacking points, and it usually ends up being a zero-sum outcome: a better return for one player means a poor or nil return for the other. There is almost never a team that creates such a huge pool of potential points and has such an equitable distribution of those points that two of their attacking players will both do really well in the same match (and you want all 6 or 7 of your attacking players to do well in the same gameweek, or at least to have a really good chance of that). And with two defenders, the upside is limited - while the downside from an unexpectedly disastrous result can be very, very dangerous to your FPL returns: clean sheets are such an uncertain outcome to chase, even with the best defensive teams, that the chance of picking up the occasional double clean sheet from your defensive three rarely outweighs the certainty of very poor defensive returns whenever the club you've taken two of those defenders from has a poor game.

4)  You create more work for yourself if the club is affected by a Blank Gameweek. This is particularly the case where the 'blank' is unexpected - perhaps the result of a last-minute postponement due to 'severe weather' issues like high winds, thick fog, or heavy snows. Remember, it happened last year, with the first Merseyside derby called off just hours before the FPL deadline because of concerns about Storm Darragh, leaving many FPL managers panicking and burning through transfers to rebuild their squads (because some, unaccountably, had not only been carrying 3 Liverpool players, but also 2 or 3 Everton players?!).

So, in principle, trebling-up on one club is best avoided. I wouldn't say NEVER do it; but I would advise being very, very cautious about doing it. And I would try to avoid doing it with more than ONE club (and certainly not with more than TWO!!).

You have to be careful with doubling-up as well: you don't want to add too much to the risk that a couple of cancelled fixtures could wipe out 5-8 members of your squad,... or that an uncharacteristically poor performance from just a couple of the teams you have representation from could completely sink your FPL Gameweek.