Here we go again...... (Or NOT!)

 

At some point yesterday, THE GAME went live for the new season. 

Yes, after a few days of shutdown-for-updating this week, the Fantasy Premier League website is up-and-running again, and ready to receive entries for the new campaign. As you can see in the screen-cap above, there are already 684,000+ managers enrolled after a matter of hours. These are the people who take the game really seriously... (and I, alas, am one one of them)....

If you are really concerned about your overall rank finish (you shouldn't be!), it's good to Auto-pick a squad and 'register' it straight away, because early-bird registration is a small advantage: the order of first entering your team is one of the tie-breakers applied to separate managers on the same points total.

But, what do you know, the site is glitching already!!  I tried early registration yesterday evening. And this morning, I found that my initial squad had been unsaved, and I had to Auto-pick again. And then the Auto-pick feature itself was glitching, only giving me a partial team, refusing to complete a full squad for me (and displaying a team full of bizarre data corruptions, such as suggesting that Viktor Gyokeres was now a midfielder???). So, I had to keep starting over from scratch, and it took several minutes to get the job (I hope!!) finally done and securely saved. (I guess it was another of those problems caused by the game's servers getting overtaxed by the high levels of early interest. During that brief time when I was struggling to get my team registered, the total enrolment had climbed from around 560,000 to 680,000!!! It really is best just to rely on how high a points total you can reach, and not be too worried about the exact 'rank' number that comes with it at the end of the season.)

Also, curiously, the site appeared to have allowed me to stay logged in this year. Though, perhaps that was only because I had only recently re-registered, and had no team data to clear from last year (having been shut out of my account altogether at the start of last season - not for the first time!)...?  In the last several years, the game site has annoyingly insisted on an extended re-log-in process where you have to create a new password for the new season. I would be glad if that pointless additional hurdle has indeed been removed now.

Although, I know, for many people this seems very hard, the best thing to do now is to walk away and cultivate another hobby instead for the next month. 

Don't log in to the FPL site again until after this year's Community Shield game: Arsenal v Manchester City, on Sunday 16th August.

As I said in one of my earliest posts on this blog: 

So much might yet happen before the Big Kick-Off - valuable hints about form and tactics and likely team selections  (not many, perhaps, but some...) emerging in the pre-season friendlies, players arriving or leaving in the summer transfer window, and, unfortunately, INJURIES. There really is no point in trying to select a squad - even provisionally - when we really have no idea who's going to be playing (and for which team!) on the GW1 weekend in mid-August. There is no point in even thinking about it.

It's not just a WASTE OF TIME - it's positively a BAD IDEA, something that will almost certainly lead to you making WORSE DECISONS about your selections.

Because of the way the human brain works... if you start looking at the player options, and allowing yourself to think, even vaguely, about possible squads, you will inevitably start making some decisions about your likely squad: decisions based on inadequate, incomplete, soon-to-be-outdated information; hence, in many cases at least, WRONG decisions. You probably won't be very self-aware about this; well, if you're even a little aware of it at the time, you'll almost certainly forget about it very quickly. But these proto-decisions - not always outright selections, but foundational preferences and prejudices and assumptions that will have a massive influence on selections - are mostly forming deep in your subconscious; and once they're there, they're very difficult to displace. The deep-rooted cognitive bias in favour of self-consistency means that once you've made a choice like this, it's very, very difficult for you to change your mind about it (especially if you don't realise you've made that choice, and/or don't know why you've made it!). There's a similar, very dangerous phenomenon called the 'anchoring bias' - which means you're very likely to make decisions based on the first one or two pieces of information you look at.

Anyone who's picked a squad two or three or four weeks out from the start of the season is VERY unlikely to have picked a good one. And they're also much less likely to be able to pick a good one later on... than someone who only starts pondering the options after the Community Shield.

That is some of the most unpopular advice I have ever offered here; but also some of the most important. Please try to take it on board.

I'm off to read good books and practice my guitar for the next 4 weeks. See you all again on Friday 21st August!!

[Well, OK, I will probably start putting out some pre-season tips in the week or two before that. But I won't be attempting to pick my initial squad until the day of the first kick-off - and neither should you.]

Fantasy World Cup: What are the Booster Chips worth?

 

I've said before that I think one of the main faults with FIFA's Fantasy World Cup game is that it has just too many chips - which it calls 'Boosters'. Subject to the same harsh limitation as in Fantasy Premier League that we can only use one of these at a time, it's really a bit of a struggle to get all 5 of them out of the way in a competition that only has 8 rounds (especially as you probably don't really want to be playing any of them in Round 1 or Round 3; and you may - like me - have occasionally found it impossible to play one when you wanted to because the game website mysteriously unsaved your selection of it!).

Sorry, I appreciate that this little note comes rather too late to be of any help to most people in planning how to use these chips - but perhaps it will still show up in search results in four or eight years' and be of some use in a future Fantasy World Cup game.

In planning how you might use these various chips, I think it's important to form a clear view of how they can be useful and how many points you can hope to make out of them.

Qualification Bonus - this is the most straightforward one: only available after the end of the group phase, it gives you 2 extra points for any points-scoring player in your final eleven who progresses to the next round of the competition. (However, for some bizarre reason, this is calculated as completely separate from all the regular points, and does not enjoy a doubling procedure for your nominated captain.)  Hence, the maximum you can make from this chip is 22 points, 2 points for every point-scoring member of your final eleven.

That actually makes it the most valuable of the chips, and the 'easiest' to realise full value from. However, in order to do this, you almost certainly have to play it in the 'Round of 32'. Thereafter, there are few if any badly mismatched ties, and it becomes harder and harder to correctly anticipate the outcome of all the fixtures in the Round. Correctly identifiying 11 (or 15!) players who will all qualify for the next round is relatively straightforward in the 'Round of 32', but increasingly less so thereafter.

Clean Sheet Shield  -  originally announced only as an additional 'Mystery Booster', we weren't even told what this chip was going to be until during MatchDay 3 (although there had been some accurate leaks online); and, like the Qualification Bonus above, it was only available for use in the knockout stage. This extends your chance to earn clean sheet points by treating a clean sheet as 'conceding no more than 1 goal' rather than 'conceding NO goals'. (It is very difficult to find a description of exactly how this is meant to work, since a description is still omitted from the official 'rules page'! I was pretty sure that the original description I'd seen had suggested that clean sheet protection was being extended to 'conceding no more than 2 goals'; but even if that is what they originally said or implied, that's not actually what's happening.)

Now, in theory this could earn you 5 extra points for a goalkeeper and up to 5 defenders, and 1 extra point for up to 4 midfielders (or 5, if you only field 4 defenders): so, the absolute maximum return is 34 points - very handy. But in practice of course, you're almost certainly going to want to play 2 or 3 forwards (in the 2026 iteration, anyway, it has been absolutely essential to play Messi, Mbappé, and Haaland or Kane in every MatchDay), so that will reduce the number of players who can benefit from the chip; quite probably, you'll only have 3/4 defenders and 3/4 midfielders who are eligible, reducing the reasonable maximum expectation to 24-28 points. (I think, as with the 'Qualification Bonus' above, they do not double this bonus for your captain selection - mean!). 

That's apparently slightly better than the 'Qualification Bonus', but.... you're choosing players, especially your keeper and defenders, because of the likelihood that they will win games comfortably and keep clean sheets; so, most of the time, most of your keeper/defender picks are keeping clean sheets anyway, and you're not getting any benefit from this chip - it's just a kind of 'insurance policy', in case one of your star defensive players unexpectedly concedes a solitary goal. You're only getting extra points for defensive players who concede 1 goal (rather than 0 goals or 2-or-more goals).

In practice, then, you'd be very lucky to make even 15-20 points off this chip. And it carries a very high chance of returning little or nothing (if all of your defensive players either keep a proper clean sheet or concede 2 or more goals...). [I played it in the 'Round of 16' this year and made a lousy 1 point off it - and that only because Bruno Guimaraes was subbed off shortly before Haaland scored his second goal against Brazil!!]

It would have been kinder to offer a bonus chip like this in the group stage, when clean sheets or low goals-against likelihoods are more predictable. Once we get into the knockout rounds, with higher stakes, more closely matched teams, and the possibility of extra time, it becomes more and more possible that matches will become high-scoring, with both sides conceding more than once. In 2026, there was only 1 goalless draw and 3 other clean sheets in the 'Round of 16', with only 4 of the 16 teams conceding only 1 goal (making their players eligible for the benefit of this chip); in the 'Round of 32', there were no goalless draws but 7 real clean sheets, while 12 teams conceded only 1 goal. 

This would suggest that the 'Round of 32' is probably the best round to play this chip in also, but.... it's really a bit of a lottery, just about impossible to predict which teams will concede 1 goal rather than zero.... and you might not want players from those teams (you have to think primarily about factors like how likely they are to score other points for you, and how far into the competition they are likely to progress; you can't just be including players because their fixtures look potentially favourable for this bonus!).

You should have more chance of picking up at least 1 or 2 players who concede only a single goal if you play this chip in a round where you have as many teams as possible represented in your Fantasy side. However, this is a truly random chip, not one you can really plan for; and it probably won't make a lot of difference when you play it. You could even leave it until the Final, when it would be an all-or-nothing play: there is a high chance that neither of the two Finalists will concede only a single goal in the game, but if either of them does, you might have multiple players picking up the useful extra points.

[Both the Qualification Bonus and the Clean Sheet Shield are treated as separate from a player's regular points: they are not doubled for your captain, and they do not count towards the 4-point threshold that a low-owned player needs to reach in order to earn his 'scouting bonus' points. This, to me, seems over-complicated, daft, and petty. And I do not recall seeing it explained anywhere in the rules; I just had to work it out for myself from bitter experience!]

12th Man - this bonus chip allows you to recruit an additional player for one MatchDay only: a 16th squad member who automatically counts as an extra member of your starting team (you can't choose to swap them out for one of your subs if they bomb!). The nice thing about this one is that it is free of any of the usual restrictions on country quotas or budget cap, so if there's a star player you can't quite afford, or an additional member of a top team like France that you covet because they're playing a very weak team and might be fancied to score a lot of goals - this is your opportunity. 

A top MatchDay return from a leading player has typically been in the range of 15-18 points in this tournament, so that's what you can hope to earn from this chip. But of course, even your Mbappés and your Haalands can have a blank here and there, so it might very easily give you little or nothing.

This is a very flexible chip that could be used on any MatchDay when the fixtures seem favourable. But there are two problems with that: i)  most of the other booster chips strongly favour use on a narrower range of MatchDays, so in fact with this one you're limited to the few MatchDays that might be 'left over', unclaimed by higher priority chips; ii)  you're more likely to want to use it while all of the starriest players are still in the tournament, which will bias you towards using it in the group stage or one of the early knockout rounds. I think MD2 in the group stage would probably have been the ideal time to use it this year.

Maximum Captain - this chip simply gives you the double-points score for the captain's armband on whichever of your players actually gives you the biggest return of the MatchDay, without you having to designate him in advance. As just mentioned above, the top scoring player in the MatchDay is typically returning about 15-18 points, so this chip might appear to be worth this much as a maximum. But if you weren't playing the chip, you'd get captaincy double-points from someone; and most of the time, you're picking someone that does actually give you a pretty good return - so the additional lift you could get out of this chip is usually only going to be a few points. At least, that's the case in Rounds 1-6 or 7, because the in-game 'manual changes' facility allows you to change captain between each match, and so you can, if you like, rotate the captaincy through a succession of your strongest players until one of them returns a good haul; especially in the earlier rounds when there are a lot of games, this usually means that you end up with a good score from your captain - possibly your maximum possible, and rarely more than 2-3 points lower.; so, that is the likely true value of this chip. 

However, in the semis you only get to try out two captains, and in the Final, you can't switch your captain at all, you're stuck with your original choice. So, I think this chip potentially has the highest value in the final round, or the penultimate round: you might of course correctly guess who your highest-scoring player in the Semi-Finals or Final is going to be; but there's quite a strong chance you'll pick someone who gives a fairly disappointing return, and in that case, the 'Maximum Captain' chip might have given you an 8 or 10-point, maybe even a 15-point lift.

Wildcard - unlike the other chips, this doesn't directly provide a positive points advantage; it's more of a rebuild chip, allowing you unlimited changes to completely refashion your squad. 

Some are tempted to use it to chase a points advantage early in the competition. Big points in the group stage are usually to be found from the most mismatched fixtures, very strong teams playing the weakest teams; but the teams with the most favourable fixtures might change dramatically between MD1 and MD2, and so you might want to make a lot of changes for MD2. Some are even tempted to use the chip ahead of MD3, because a lot of star players are often rested in the third game, if their teams have already secured first-place qualification in their groups.

However, I generally counsel that it is better to plan your initial squad to try spread optimisation of fixtures across MD1 and MD2, and to accept that MD3 is almost always very low-scoring in Fantasy, and isn't worth expending much effort on (take a few cheap hits if you need to in order to muster an eleven, but don't be wasting the valuable Wildcard on fixing your squad for a MatchDay that rarely produces many points anyway).

The Wildcard is best saved for possible 'emergencies'. As a tournament like this progresses, more and more players pick up injuries, or fall out with the team manager, or get suspended; and then, of course, in each round, half of the players and teams are eliminated - often quite unexpectedly in 'upset' results! This hazard is proving to be particularly extreme in the 2026 tournament because the game's designers have been very nigarrdly in the number of Free Transfers allocated for each round, and also because it's been an unusually competitive tournament, with almost every team playing near the best of their ability, and even some of the lesser teams proving to be quite a handful. After the 'Round of 32', almost none of the ties have been at all easy to predict the outcomes of. 

So, there is a very high chance that in the Quarter-Finals or the Semi-Finals, you may find yourself missing half or more of your squad - and that is when you need to use your Wildcard. (This shouldn't be an issue in the Final because you don't need a bench for that, and you are given 6 Free Transfers after the semi-finals. You should be able to distribute your semi-final picks so that, whatever the match outcomes, you don't lose more than 9 or 10 players - 6 free replacements plus an empty bench!)

IN SUMMARY:

Qualification Bonus:  Near-essential to use it in the 'Round of 32'. Expected yield: 14-22 points. (Maximum yield quite easily attainable!).

Clean Sheet Shield:  An utterly random and unpredictable chip, and largely worthless: only available in the knockout rounds - use it whenever it isn't getting in the way of a more important chip.  Expected yield: 0-12 points. (Maximum yield could theoretically be 24-34 points, but it's very, very unlikely anyone would ever get anywhere near that - and it would be a massive fluke if you did!)

12th Man:  Probably best used in the group stage, especially MatchDay2 - when you've had some indications of form in the first batch of games, and the stakes are still high for everyone (by MD3, a lot of teams have nothing left to play for, and there may be a lot of rotations). But this is a flexible chip that can still bring an advantage in the knockout phase; although you probably want to use it in the earlier rounds of that, when there are more top players to choose from, and you might not be able to afford all of them in your regular squad.  Expected yield: 10-15 points. (The maximum could be even higher, if you're lucky; but of course there is a non-zero chance that it could return you little or nothing!)

Maximum Captain:  Probably best saved for the Semi-Finals or Final, when you have a chance to gain a bigger 'differential' points lift from it, as you no longer have the opportunity to 'maximise' your captaincy return by rotating through multiple selections.  Expected yield: In earlier rounds, probably only 0-5 points (because your regular captain picks would usually do very nearly as well); but in Rounds 7 and 8, perhaps as much as 8-15 points. (Then again, it might easily be worth nothing - because your 'Maximum Captain' turns out to be the player you would have given the armband to anyway!!)

Wildcard: This might be of use sometimes in MatchDay 2, if a lot of your initial picks are in surprisingly bad form, and/or the most promising fixtures in the second batch of games are for very different teams than they were in the tournament openers. However, it is usually far better to save the Wildcard for possible emergency use (even if ultimately not needed, left unused!), to rebuild a squad after suffering heavily from unexpected eliminations going into the Quarter-Final and Semi-Final rounds.  

Expected yield: Impossible to quantify, since it's usually saving you from spending points on 'hits' (additional transfers above your 'free transfer' quota) and giving you additional points from better performances (or at least starters rather than non-starters!) from the players you bring in and, hopefully, giving you additional benefits from those new players through the subsequent rounds also; but conservatively.... 15-20 points!!

BEST OF LUCK!

World Cup Fantasy 2026 - Strategy for the knockout phase

The bracket for the knockout phase of the 2026 World Cup 

So, now that the Group Phase is over, we get into the real meat of the tournament - sudden death, put up or go home. And FIFA's Fantasy game is kindly giving us unlimited transfers (during this tiny 15-hour gap between the end of the 3rd Round and the beginning of the 4th!!): a de facto 'Wildcard', so that we can completely rebuild our squads for the second half of the competition.

In the Group Phase, we were concerned to try to optimise returns from the more mismatched fixtures, where the strongest teams and players seemed likely to have a better-than-average chance of really high returns because they were up against one of the competition's weaker teams (although it often didn't work out like that; none of this year's 'expansion teams' were completely toothless, and a few of them have proven to be quite formidable). This often means that the teams with the best prospects in Round 2 are completely different from those in Round 1, and there can be a case for playing the game's Wildcard chip straight away in that round to optimise for the apparently vulnerable fixtures (though that's a very risky ploy, as you often need your Wildcard later to fill huge holes suddenly appearing in your squad); but that didn't really happen this year, as the best performers were looking so much better than everyone else, you could trust them to probably give good returns against anyone. The other major hazard of the Group Phase is that there will be a huge number of rotations in the 3rd Round, with teams that have already secured first-place qualification resting most of their star players; but again, that didn't really happen this time - only four teams had secured top spot in the group after only two games, and two of them, surprisingly, fielded full-strength teams in the third match anyway. Messi and Pulisic, though rested, got decent run-outs and could contribute some points; Haaland was the only big name who didn't feature on the final MatchDay.

But that's all behind us now. How should we prepare our Fantasy squads for the knockout rounds to come?

Some things to keep in mind....

Elimination roulette - In the knockout phase, you need to take care to spread risk by never taking too many players from one team. You can't afford to leave yourself short for the subsequent round by landing yourself with a lot of eliminated players. The game tempts you toward self-destruction by allowing you to take far more players from one team than you should sensibly want; you don't want to be taking anywhere near the full allowed 'quota' of players from one country until the Semi-Finals and Final. Moreover, the larger number of transfers than we're used to in extended league format competitions encourages the dangerous hope that we might get away with it, that one wrong guess about a result won't leave us having to take 'hits' for additional transfers. But, oh yes, it can; it very often does. As a general rule of thumb, I'd say - try to take no more than 2 players per team in the 'Round of 16', 3 players per team in the Quarter-Finals, and 4 players per team in the Semi-Finals. Of course, this may vary, depending on whether there are any fixtures in the round that you feel you can trust as absolute gimmes (always a bit of a gamble!), whether you're making do with any empty spaces on your bench, and how many Free Transfers you have available for the next round. 

In the Semi-Finals, and perhaps also in the Quarter-Finals, you should consider spreading risk by taking roughly even numbers of players from both sides in a match. Although this guarantees that a certain number of players will be lost from the subsequent round, it also guarantees that a certain number will be saved. If you only take players from one side in each fixture, you lay yourself open to the possibility that you might guess the results wrong in every game and be left with no squad at all!

Also, of course, in this World Cup, there's a Third Place Play-Off game forming part of MatchDay 8 along with the Final; so, you don't necessarily lose anyone from the Semi-Finals. But you'd rather have as many players in the Final as possible, because it will be a more competitive match, and isn't likely to omit any of the teams' top players. The Third-Place game is usually quite unpredictable; neither side is hugely motivated by it, and often they play their second-string teams. 

Also, you need to be mindful that, if you max out your number of Free Transfers replacing eliminated players, you may be further screwed by injuries or suspensions, which tend to become more numerous towards the end of a month-long competition; then, you might find you have absolutely no wiggle-room for additional elective transfers to swap out players who've shown disappointing form.

Gambling on a thinner bench in the later rounds - In the last two or three rounds, you can consider gradually emptying your bench. As the games in each round become fewer (and less far apart; and, often, much more closely contested - meaning there might be low points for all attacking players, and perhaps scarcely any for keepers and defenders), the value of the manual substitutions is progressively diminished. In the Final, manual substitutions are no longer posssible (unless you have some players in the Third-Place Play-Off - not recommended), and the remaining value of your bench in being able to replace any unexpected non-starters by automatic substitutions (as in the regular Fantasy Premier League game) might be fairly minimal; so, you can consider having at least one or two gaps on the bench for that last game, perhaps even leaving it completely empty. For the 'Round of 16' - and sometimes, perhaps, for the Quarter-Finals too - with multiple games spread across multiple days, it is still worth trying to keep a full and strong bench; but after that, you can hang on to one or two eliminated players - ideally a cheap goalkeeper or defender - as a 'budget enabler' to leave yourself more transfers, and more money, to use on the rest of your squad. However, leaving gaps in the squad puts you more at risk of needing to use large numbers of extra transfers to rebuild the squad if some of your players are unexpectedly eliminated from the competition - that's why I would try to avoid it until the last couple of rounds.

It's even worse this year! - In last summer's Club World Cup, there was quite a broad stratification of ability levels among the participants; and so, many fixtures were relatively easy to predict - even in the early knockout rounds. In this World Cup, such disparities seem to be fewer, and not so dramatic; I fear most of the knockout games are going to be quite tough to predict the results of with any confidence. Moreover, the ridiculously biased bracket ths year means that most of the leading contenders are stuck in the same half of the draw and will all play each other relatively early on.

Also, I think this Fantasy competition is being especially niggardly with the extra Free Transfers. I can't remember for sure, but I think last year's Club World Cup, and most of the summer tournament Fantasy competitions I've played in before, gave 1 or 2 more transfers per round than this one is! That is going to make things particularly tight: suffering losses to your squad if you make some wrong guesses on game outcomes in a round will more easily necessitate having to resort to taking multiple 'hits' (at least additional transfers only cost 3pts each in this game, rather than the 4pts we're used to in FPL).

Hence....

Selection Strategy - In an ideal world, we'd try to focus on choosing players that we were reasonably confident were going to go deep into the competition (so, even if we were only right about some of them, at least there would be that strong core of players in the squad that we'd never have to change, never have to use precious transfers on). But with the way the draw is this year, half of the competition's best teams will be gone before the Quarter-Finals, and some of them might fall out even in the 'Round of 32'.

So, I think we have to spread our selections especially thinly - no more than 1 or 2 players from each country (because even if they do get through the current round, most of them are sure to be eliminated in the next round or two after that).

I would also avoid taking any players from a fixture that is hard to predict in the 'Round of 16' - because we're going to get enough grief from unforeseen upset results in this round, and from the inevitable carnage in the immediately subsequent rounds; we just can't afford to take any risks on players who look like they might not progress beyond this next game. For me, Holland v Morocco, Portugal v Croatia, and Belgium v Senegal are too close to call - so, I'm not touching players from any of those teams (even though I love Ismael Saibari - he's been my breakout 'player of the tournament' so far!). And I'd be wary of taking anyone from Germany, Portugal, Norway, or Switzerland - because, even if they do well in the coming game, they're almost certain to lose in the 'Round of 16': so, those are players you're going to want to be replacing before or after the next round. And there are enough unexpected changes you're probably going to have to make; you don't want to be loading your squad up with entirely expected changes you have to make!

Chip Strategy - This competition is rather over-cluttered with chips. And, if you didn't manage to offload one or two of them in the Group Phase (I tried, but failed - owing to an infuriating glitch with the FIFA website!), you might well find yourself with one left unused - probably the Wildcard, which is really a 'luxury' in competitions like this that is often not needed, best kept in reserve for possible emergency firefighting (if you find yourself missing half or more of your squad after a particularly bruising Round...!)

Moreover, most of the chips are probably going to work best in the same Rounds of the competition - but you can only use one per Round, so..... Yeah, it is pretty much impossible to choose how to make optimum use of them.

The Maxmimum Captain is probably the most flexible chip: it could work well in any Round. And I fancy it might actually yield the biggest advantage in the Final - where probably only one player will deliver a really big points-haul,.... but it's impossible to know for sure who that will be out of so many capable players on the pitch.

The other three, however, the 12th Man, the Qualification Bonus, and the just-announced Clean Sheet Shield, would probably all work best in the 'Round of 32' or the 'Round of 16'.

The Qualification Bonus, where you can get an additional 2pts for every member of your starting eleven who progresses to the next round, is probably going to work best in the 'Round of 32' - where you can have the highest confidence about anticipating almost all the results correctly. In the 'Round of 16', anticipating the game outcomes immediately becomes a lot harder - and you're much more likely to get some of your picks wrong. To have a good chance of getting somewhere close to the optimum 22-point haul from this chip, I think we really have to play it in the 'Round of 32' (although you might fancy that some of the 'Round of 16' ties are also sufficiently predictable to make this a valid option for playing this chip).

The Clean Sheet Shield (only revealed as such after the 3rd Round was under way; previously referred to only as a 'Mystery Booster') is rather more flexible, could go well in any round. I think it's a badly designed chip: it would have presented a more intriguing challenge if they only raised the threshold for earning 'clean sheet points' from 0 goals to 1 goal. But they're saying you can get 'clean sheet points' for any player who doesn't concede more than 2 goals. - which is basically everyone: very few teams have conceded 3 goals or more in this World Cup so far; and you would imagine that that is going to become even rarer, as the ties become more closely matched and more high-stakes. However,... we have quite often seen in recent tournaments that there can be some high-scoring games in the later rounds - partly because teams have to chase the result if they're behind, and may leave themselves vulnerable; and partly because there's the possibility of extra-time to factor in. Also, of course, some unexpected, unpredictable events may occur that lead to a team crumbling disastrously: an injury to a star player, an early penalty conceded or an early sending-off can lead to a very one-sided final scoreline. Something like this can happen in any round; but I think it seems slightly more likely to happen from the Quarter-Finals onwards. Also, of course, in the later rounds, you have fewer teams to choose your squad from, so the chance of you having one of these unlucky disasters impacting the points of multiple players in your squad is elevated. In earlier rounds, where you don't have any representation from some teams, and only 1 or 2 players from any one country, such disasters won't impact this chip too heavily. So, I'm inclined to regard it as a coin-flip option with the Qualification Bonus: you play one of them in the 4th Round and one of them in the 5th Round - you don't really want to risk hanging on to either of them any longer than that.

There is a temptation to play the 'individual bonus chips', the 12th Man and Maximum Captain, during the Group Phase - when we're likely to get some higher-scoring games, and it's easier to predict which those will be. But these chips can also work well later in the competition. The 12th Man (which allows you to field an additional player in your 'starting eleven', free of all the usual restrictions on budget, formation, and country quota), in particular, I think, will be an attractive option in the Quarter-Finals or Semi-Finals - when, with a bit of luck, nearly all of the top-performing players will be pitched against each other; but... we probably can't afford them all and/or we don't want to run the risk of having them all in our permanent squad, knowing that some of them must certainly be eliminated.

ADDENDUM:  Looking at the bracket now, I reckon the Quarter-Finals are going to be.... France v Morocco, Spain v USA, Brazil v Mexico, and Argentina v Colombia.

I hope these observations may have been of some use to someone.

BEST OF LUCK, EVERYONE!!!

Fantasy World Cup - a lightning guide

 

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

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

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

The scoring system is similar to, but crucially a little different from what we're used to with the Fantasy Premier League game. Most notably, all positions get an additional point for a goal, one more than FPL gives us; and defenders/keepers get 5 points rather than 4 for a clean sheet. There are also additional points for midfielders for every 3 tackles made (successfully, I assume - although the wording of the rule omits to specify this: this is yet another area where there's going to be a lot of obscurity around how Opta is choosing to interpret certain 'game actions') and every 2 chances created (again, no specificity on whether this only applies to 'potential assists' or can include earlier contributions to a move than culminates in an attempt on goal) - so, 'busy' midfielders could well rack up more points than we usually see in FPL; but it will often be something of a mystery how they earned them! Forwards get an extra point for every 2 shots on target - which should be a bit more obvious and straightforward to keep track of. It might be worth keeping an eye out for eager strikers who have a pop every time they get anywhere near the goal, even if their conversion rate isn't great. But there are no points here for 'defensive contributions' - the unwelcome innovation we've had to wrap our heads around in FPL this year. So, it's probably going to make sense to prioritise attacking players, midfielders especially, rather than defenders.

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

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

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

Also, strangely, there are no price increases in this game; all player prices remain fixed throughout. (This feels new. I think we had price rises in last year's Club World Cup game; I can't remember the last World Cup now!)

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

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

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

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

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

All of this probably means that, despite the absence of bonus points and defensive points, we should be seeing significantly more points available in each round of games than we usually do in most FPL Gameweeks.

IMPORTANT ADDENDUM: Yikes, I've only just noticed, half-way through the group phase that there is also a maddening wrinkle in the captaincy selection. You can't deselect your captain or vice-captain (you can only those selections by transferring the nomination to another player to take the place of one of them); and thus you can't readily swap your captain and vice-captain around; you have to move the vice-captaincy to a third player, to free up your current vice-captain for promotion to the captaincy. This could become problematic towards the end of the MatchDay, when you might run out of players you could still move your vice-captaincy to - or you would at least be left with your final player saddled with the vice-captaincy, unable to assume the captaincy for you (which would be galling if all your previous captaincy selections had all let you down, and your remaining player would have been your last chance for a decent haul from the armband). The only way to avoid this hassle is to select a vice-captain who will play right at the start of the MatchDay - so he won't be restricting your options of who you can make captain later on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As for the tournament itself....

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

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

BEST OF LUCK, EVERYONE!!!!

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

ANOTHER glitch!

I mentioned yesterday how unreliable the FPL website was. I have been spared such exasperations this year through the early-but-ultimate exasperation of being locked out of my account at the beginning of the year. But this morning, I happened to have a chance to be reminded of just how bad things can be - by looking over a friend's shoulder as he tried to make his weekly FPL tweaks.

My mate wanted to bring in Jan-Paul Van Hecke for the still-injury-flagged Jurrien Timber (fair enough, what with the double gameweek and all). He made that transfer. It was confirmed, and he was punted on to the 'Pick Team' page to select his lineup for the week.

Immediately, the page crashed,.... and he was asked to re-log in. OK, but.... the transfer was confirmed; we had seen his 'Pick Team' page for the week where Van Hecke was now installed in the defence in place of Timber. Yet, when he logged in again, what do you know, everything had reverted to as it was before - the transfer had been 'forgotten'.

I have seen this kind of thing happen to me many, many, many times before. And I suspect that the weirdly-coincidental 'timeout' for my friend, suddenly requiring a new log-in, was not really the problem. His change had been accepted and acknowledged; but then it was undone. The fact that the site had been on the cusp of demanding a new authentication should not have affected that; if the change is 'good', before the demand for a new sign-in, then... it's good. But really quite often - worryingly often - we experience the FPL website acknowledging changes we've made to our team,.... and then 'losing' them the next time we check in on the site.

I was advising someone on an online forum the other day not to take any chances with not bothering to make a team selection when playing the Bench Boost... because there is a non-zero possibility that the FPL site will randomly 'forget' your Bench Boost and leave you with a basic team entry; and if you've left all your best players on the bench, or haven't chosen your bench order very carefully, you could well be thoroughly screwed by that (on top of the not getting your Bench Boost screw-over!).

I've never actually experienced that particular cruelty from the FPL website. But I have several times had transfers 'lost', and a few times a captaincy pick 'lost' (once, even a Triple Captaincy - that hurt hard). And I have seen many people over the years complain of having a Wildcard or a Free Hit mysteriously 'unprocessed' - either leaving them with no changes for the week, or a huge points hit for the multiple changes they'd expected to be free of charge. (In some, perhaps many, perhaps most of these cases, folks have just done something wrong - omitted to hit the final 'Save your team' button, perhaps. But I have come across this so often now, including from friends of mine that I trust to be savvy enough not to miss steps in the process [however perversely concealed they may sometimes be!], that I really do think it happens sometimes. Probably quite a lot, in fact.)

You need to be very, very careful with your weekly selections - transfers, starting eleven, bench order, chip activation. And - even if everything appears to have been acknowedged and saved successfully - you really need to doublecheck again a little later. 

This is another reason why you shouldn't leave your team tweaks until just before the deadline. Though the main one is that the site is just likely to crash during extreme peaks in traffic, and not let you register any changes at all - that will screw you over pretty often if you leave it late in the day to make your changes. 

But you really need to make your changes,.... pause, take a breath, leave at least a 5 or 10 minute gap,... and then re-log in to the FPL website to make sure that your changes have actually stuck.

The FPL website is not stable or reliable. You need to be very, very careful in using it.

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

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

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

Here, then, are my....

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

1)  Having David Raya in goal

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

2)  Not having a decent back-up keeper

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

3)  Carrying 'dead wood' on the bench

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

4)  Being too 'template'

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

5)  Having too many long-term holds

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

6)  Having a weak midfield

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

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

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

8)  Too often starting four or five defenders

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

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

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

10)  Having obviously 'sentimental' picks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 time, 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.]