Where do we go from here...?

Yes, I've been having a fair old tactics binge on Youtube over the past few weeks. After last week's pair of recommendations of videos on recent tactical evolutions in the game, I find myself doing a rapid follow-up with a couple more.

Following up closely on the topic of the first of last week's videos, this one from Football Made Simple looks particularly at how the rapid collapse over the past season or so of the 'positional play' approach developed by Pep Guardiola (due to the mass adoption of man-marking rather than zonal systems) has led to both Pep and Mikel Arteta having to radically modify their approaches to the game. This has involved developing far more versatility in the players (so that they can feel comfortable and be effective in just about any area of the pitch) and far more fluidity of rotation (so that they're tiring and discombobulating their markers by dragging them all over the pitch, shifting them miles away from where they're used to being). Despite some success for this new approach, the increasing impenetrability of the dense low-blocks employed against them for long periods by almost all their opponents is still starving them of scoring chances. One answer to that issue has been to look for players with more mercurial improvisatory talents, players with the close control and the imagination to carve an opening where none seems possible (such as Cherki and Doku now at City). An alternate approach - apparently more favoured by Snr Arteta, who has been presciently basing his squad-building around it for some years already now - is to assemble a corps of brick shithouses who can, when called upon, use their superior physicality to just power their way past, or through, defending players. Not that these options are at all mutually exclusive: Arsenal, after all, have acquired Eze to potentially amp up the guile supplied by Odegaard and Saka, while Haaland and Gvardiol and Semenyo are built like tanks quite as much as Gabriel and Timber and Rice and Havertz and Gyokeres. However, it still seems doubtful if either of these astute coaches has yet found anything like a complete answer to the new set of challenges being posed.

By coincidence, the same day I first saw that video I also happened upon a new post from The Different Knock reviewing Arsenal's tactics this season. (I have, in fact, been avoiding Alex Moneypenny's channel for the past few months, because he's such a diehard Arsenal fan, I had feared he might be getting a bit triumphalistic about their title-leading performance this season. To be fair, though, he does try to be very moderate and even-handed in his assessments, and resists getting too carried away....) It seems he's actually feeling a bit glum and anxious at the moment, recognising that Arsenal have once again been suffering one of their notorious 'midwinter wobbles', and that there is some foundation to the common criticisms currently being made of them: their predictability in attack (always down the right...), their excessive risk-aversion, their over-dependence on set-piece routines, and their woeful lack of threat from open play. [I've been saying all season - and was still sticking to the view, despite the first dawning of some doubts, when I did my second set of final position predictions around the beginning of December - that I just didn't feel they were quite good enough all-round to deserve the title this year, and could only win it by default, if all of the main challengers turned out to have poor seasons (which has been the case so far).]

And then, of course, my favourite video analyst, Adam Clery, just added a video about Arsenal's problems - a useful practical footnote to the above more abstract dissertations.

More TACTICS!

 

The informative tactical analyst and football historian DK Falcon doesn't seem to have been posting that much on Youtube lately (not that I've noticed, anyway....), but this interesting piece popped up last weekend. 

In it he outlines the recent major evolutions in top-level football tactics, explaining how the aggressive high press (the 'Gegenpress' developed in Germany in the early 2010s, and brought to England by Jurgen Klopp) was in part a dialectic response to the refined style of controlled possession inspired by Barcelona's 'tiki-taka'; and then in turn the 'press-baiting' approach (being prepared to play the ball around across the back indefinitely, ostentatiously putting your foot on the ball to defy the opposition to try to take it off you, and keeping your back line ultra-deep, sometimes even playing to and fro practically on the goal-line itself - to try to draw the first line of pressure high into the penalty area and expose an inviting gap behind it) and new ways of playing through the high press pioneered by Roberto de Zerbi were a response to this; and now the rapid growth of 'hybrid pressing' (combining elements of zonal marking and man-marking to produce greater flexibility, and enabling rapid transition from high press to mid-block modes) is a reponse to that.

And what's next after that?? Well, maybe something radically different - not just another counter-measure to the prevailing norms, but a new tactical idea that truly breaks the mould. By coincidence, Conor McAinsh's Football Meta published this video at about the same time, breaking down the innovative style of José Alberto's Racing Santander - currently top of the heap in La Segunda in Spain.

Alberto's approach is a kind of extreme 'relationism', largely shunning conventional structures and demanding a great deal of flexibility from his players to constantly rotate positions with each other and improvise their way out of difficulties. The essence of it is to mob the opponent on the ball, closing off all his passing options as quickly as possible; this typically involves concentrating most of the outfield players in a fairly small area, and often putting the entire team in the same half of the pitch. The advantage of this is that it does put the opponent under enormous pressure, with a huge numerical advantage around the ball; and if a turnover is achieved, the wide open spaces left elsewhere on the pitch can be exploited for a swift counter-attack. However, it is necessarily a tactic of high reward/high risk: if the opponent manages to elude this press, he usually has one or more unmarked players in acres of space, especially on the opposite flank, and is even better placed to launch a devastating fast attack. [Fernando Diniz enjoyed some success for a while with a similar system at Fluminense in Brazil a few years ago. The Purist Football did a good video on this back then.]

The window opens....

In addition to the escalating vagaries of form, the horrible winter weather and the sudden accumulation of injuries and suspensions in December, and the insane domestic fixture congestion we suffer at this time of year (when just about every other league in Europe is sensibly enjoying an extended break), we now have an additional layer of disruption due to the mid-season transfer window opening.

It began for the Premier League (and most of the other leagues worldwide) on 1st January, and - because the month ends on a weekend this year - the final deadline is 7pm, UK time, on Monday, 2nd February. A few of the European leagues have a little bit longer; Switzerland has a whopping two extra weeks. Clubs playing in European competitions have a few further days - up until midnight on Thursday 7th February - to submit any squad revisions to UEFA. 

At the moment, the best summary of all the details of how this works appears to be on Chelsea's website.

Fantasy Football Scout usually runs the best regular update page on all the moves; but of course, there's nothing confirmed yet.

It will be interesting to see if any Premier League clubs can radically shift their form and fortune with some handy acquisitions this month. Villa did some good business this time last year, getting Asensio, Malen, and Rashford in on loan for the second half of the season. Given how thin their squad now looks, after an absence of any major transfer activity in the summer, they could really do with some more of that this time. Burnley might also be looking to bring in a few new players to try to salvage their hopes of survival - although I feel a new manager is more needful for them. Palace, Newcastle, Bournemouth, Manchester United, and of course Forest and West Ham are also in conspicuous need of some strengthening.

For some clubs, though, the impacts of this window are going to be mainly negative - key players lured away from them. I really hope Antoine Semenyo will see out the season at Bournemouth; it would be a huge loss for them if he leaves. (And it will ruin his value in FPL for the rest of us, if he goes to City or Liverpool or Arsenal, to sit on the bench most of the time...)

Another holiday treat from ACFC

 

The always marvellous Adam Clery Football Channel has dropped another 'holiday special' video, this time on the remarkable Leicester City Premier League title win ten years ago. Is it really that long ago now? Seems like only yesterday....

This was a triumph so improbable that lifelong fan of the club, Gary Lineker, promised half-way through the season that he'd present the year's final 'Match of the Day' programme on the BBC in his underwear if his team achieved it.

A lot of people didn't think he'd go through with it - but he's a game lad. We're missing him this year, now that he's finally retired from the show.

A Christmas treat from ACFC

The excellent Adam Clery Football Channel (the best analysis show on Youtube; only founded at the tail-end of last season, but immediately indispensable) yesterday posted a 'Christmas Special' - a great little breakdown on The Greatest Moment Ever In English Sport, our majestic defeat of West Germany in the 1966 World Cup Final at Wembley. [And he's promised another 'historical' anaysis for the holidays soon, an examination of Leicester's extraordinary title-winning season.]

If you feel like watching the full match (it is a hell of a game), here it is:

I could have sworn I'd once been able to watch a colour version of the full match (shot on film for FIFA, where I assume this must be videotape of the BBC black-and-white TV coverage), but it doesn't seem to be available on Youtube at the moment; there are highlights only in colour. 

The Wembley crowd's singing of the National Anthem after the presentation of the trophy is the only time I have ever heard it sounding happy.

Yes, HISTORY can be fun!

 

The excellent DK Falcon doesn't post all that often (about once a month, at best) and tends to cover broader football topics rather than just recent matches or current shifts in tactics. But I always find his videos a good watch, and this latest one is particularly entertaining: a rundown of the more obscure labels for particular player styles/positions - many of which derive from countries other than England, and/or from more distant football eras, but are nevertheless still occasionally part of the current lexicon.

If you ever have nightmares about the possibility of being stumped at your next pub trivia quiz when challenged to explain the meaning of enganche, trequartista, ramdeuter, carillero, volante - then this is a must-watch for you!

The ONES you should be watching

 

Not players you should be watching out for (still far too early to be giving much thought to that!)... Rather, the online 'experts' I think are most worth giving your attention to.

As I've said a few times before (most notably here), the self-styled FPL 'gurus' are mostly moronic charlatans (and even the handful of 'good' ones aren't really all that brilliant or insightful) and are best avoided. The people I look to for help in understanding the game are online tactical analysts. And these, I believe, are the best of them.

My Top Youtube Resources for helping with FPL

Chirpy Geordie Adam Clery remains my No. 1 favourite: amusing as well as informative - and he doesn't go on too long. He was doing regular tactical breakdowns for FourFourTwo's Youtube channel over the past couple of years, but a few months ago he launched his own Adam Clery Football Channel (ACFC), in partnership with the UK's The Independent newspaper.

A very close second is Cormac McAinsh of Football Meta.

I also rather like the style of DK Falcon, although his output is a bit more intermittent - and he puts out a lot of more 'broad topic' pieces reviewing, for instance, the evolution of Pep Guardiola's tactical ideas. He's done quite a fun one of the overall history of football tactics from the game's inception in the mid-1800s to the present.

I think Chris French's Football Made Simple is also very good - although he also tends to do more broad overview discussions than breakdowns of individual matches. Also, some of his videos run just a little long, and - for me - I find that he sometimes gabbles a bit, racing on just a little too fast in his delivery, without enough appropriate phrasing or pausing to give us time to fully grasp what he's saying (particularly as he swaps very quickly to and fro between talking about the attacking and defending sides in a match, and seems to assume that you will have memorised the entire lineup for both teams as thoroughly as he has!). So, yes, he can be just a little bit hard work at times - but worth it. [He's recently started running an online Introduction to Tactical Analysis course. Unfortunately, I can't currently spare the time or the money to give it a try myself, but it looks very interesting. He also puts out an occasional newsletter via Substack that you can sign up for.]

I really like the Tactical Football Fanatic too, although his posting has been very sparse over the last year.

Football Manager Insider also has some good stuff (a bit of a Liverpool bias lately; but that might be down to them being champions, favourites to retain the title, and hyper-acive in the transfer market this summer - rather than a personal affection!).

Zekko Football is also sometimes worth a look; although he's another presenter who tends to rush his delivery a bit, and his diction is so poor that I often find it impossible to follow him without cueing up the closed-caption subtitles! He is perhaps a bit over-prolific too; I don't find his content compelling enough to be worth checking in on two or three times a week. He does a lot of breakdowns of recent games - especially in the Premier League - which can be informative (perhaps particularly useful if it's a game you happened to miss!); but I find most of his pieces fairly superficial, describing what happened in some detail -  rather than teasing apart how and why it happened.

Finally, one of my more recent discoveries in this field that also shows a lot of promise is Tactics Dojo.

Alas, I find most of FourFourTwo's Youtube content these days very dull and obvious (though the print magazine is still very good), and The Athletic isn't much better (the weekly 'podcasts', in particular, usually hosted by Ayo Akinwolere, are just painfully over-long...), but their occasional tactics or squad-building episodes with J.J. Bull and Jon Mackenzie are still worth a look. (I wish J.J. would branch out on his own. I think he could give Geordie Adam a run for his money as the most entertaining and accessible content-creator of this kind.)

I have a strong affinity for The Purist Football as well, though this is more of a 'general interest' channel than one that's ever likely to be directly useful in the week-to-week trench warfare of FPL. He only puts out a video every month or two, at most, and they tend to be more philosophical essays on the state of the game than dissections of particular teams or players. For me, this video on the impact of Guardiola's ideas, good and bad, is essential viewing.

I also have a soft spot for Alex Moneypenny's The Different Knock. He's an Arsenal uber-fan, so his channel is pretty much exclusively focused on The Gunners. But his breadth of knowledge and tactical acuity are very impressive; so, often the observations he has to offer on Arsenal will have direct or indirect relevance to other Premier League teams as well.

I thought The Football Analyst had looked very promising; but he soon seemed to give up on his Youtube platform, after posting some interesting stuff early last year. However, he's still posting some good pieces on his website. [I would particularly recommend an article of his from this time last year on Fabian Hurzeler's 'tactical identity', and this most recent one assessing the prospects of Benjamin Sesko.]

I also often enjoy The Athletic's Tifo sub-channel on Youtube, for more general observations on the game. They've recently started a fun little mini-series on The Entire History of Football.

I really think any of these channels - even frivolous little Tifo!! - will help your football understanding (and hence, your FPL prospects!) far more than following any so-called FPL 'experts'.

It HAD to be said....

Football Meta's amiable and insightful Cormac has become one of my favourite Youtube tactical analysts over the past year or so. And I was particularly glad to see him just drop this video, detailing the shortcomings of the dread 'building out from the back' philosophy. (For me, he doesn't really go far enough in his critque...)

I find this tiresome dogma, which has become almost universal in the Premier League during the past decade, is stifling the life out of the game - it is the new anti-football.

It is painfully dull to watch.

It imposes far too much pressure on keepers and defenders - which, I think, wears them down mentally, undermines their confidence, and utlimately tends to make them more error-prone not just in build-up, but in all aspects of their play. (Because mistakes by a keeper or his defenders often tend to be castastrophic, yielding a goal and perhaps costing the game, their errors are placed under far closer scrutiny than those of attacking players, and tend to be given more weight than their successful defensive actions. And when they are on the ball so much, in dangerous situations, and committing costly errors - or at least coming close to doing so - so often, in almost every game, these poor buggers are often now getting pilloried by the fans.... when it's really not their fault; it's down to their manager's style of play.)

And it is founded on what I believe is a fundamental misconception: the fearful, over-conservative conviction that restricting the opponent's chances is more important to ensuring victory than creating your own. (The problem here is that you cannot play football purely as a matter of statistics, because the element of chance can never be eliminated. Even if you can prevent your opponent from getting any clearcut chances [which is just about impossible], while you manage, say, 10 chances,.... your finishing might not be good enough to convert any of the 10 chances, while your frustrated opponent might yet produce a worldie of a goal out of nothing, or perhaps pick up a soft penalty. This approach does not guarantee wins; in fact, it makes them painfully hard to achieve. If you're content to accept a more free-flowing, 'chaotic' sort of game, in which both sides might enjoy something like 20 chances, you should be able to win - and win more easily, and by bigger margins - so long as you can defend the chances made against you better than the other side defends against yours.)

Even if the core philosophy behind it weren't so misguided, it is still wrong-headed in practical terms. Its supposed justification is encapsulated in the tiresome mantra: "The quicker it goes up, the quicker it comes back." Build-up from the back started because managers like Pep became afraid that long balls out from the goalkeeper were too often resulting in an immediate loss of possession, and the more patient approach was seen as being a way to hold on to the ball more effectively,.... and eat minutes off the clock.

However, that's a very questionable proposition. If your goalkeeper can kick accurately, and if you have some well-drilled routines to create different medium- and long-range passing options for him, and if you have very quick players who can run into space behind the opposing back line to chase down a long ball over the top, or big strong players who can win most of their aerial duels and hold the ball up until other teammates can link up with them,.... there's really not that much of a problem in retaining possession from a keeper's kick. Well, yes, it is always going to be a little risky; and you might end up losing possession perhaps as much of half of the time (at worst...). But so what? Losing possession in the opposition defensive third of the pitch shouldn't be a big deal. You ought to be set up for a quick counter-press to win the ball back again, or at least hamper the speed and ease with which the other side can start to move the ball back up the pitch. And even if they do start quickly on the counter, you should have good defensive midfielders who can snuff out most such moves in the middle of the park.

A loss of possession deep in the opponent's half isn't often going to result in a goalscoring chance against you. A loss of possession in your own final third, however, almost always does.

And we are seeing such turnovers during failed build-up play more and more often in recent years.

Perhaps when building-out-from-the-back first started to appear, there was some clearer benefit to it. It had the advantage of novelty in its favour; and most sides weren't equipped to counter it very well.

Teams were still often only playing with one outright forward, or at most two; and 'high pressing' wasn't yet much of a thing. So, a back-four, or even a back-three, usually had a comfortable numerical advantage in the first line, even without having the keeper step up into the back-line to create an additional passer - and sides playing out from the back could thus usually bypass initial pressure quite easily.

But now,.... many more teams are playing with a front-three,... and are regularly pushing one or more of their midfielders or advanced full-backs up on to the opposing back-line as well; sometimes, the numerical advantage is with the attacking team. And even though it mostly still isn't, pressing has become much more sophisticated and well-drilled: teams will choose their moments to press most vigorously, saving their energy for when it can be most effective, most devastating; and they'll target particular players or areas of the pitch, so that, even though they are outnumbered across the whole back-line, they can quickly achieve a crucial overload in the area around the ball.

The slow build-up idea might have 'worked' up to a point, when it was a surprising innovation. But things have moved on, the game has caught up with it - and overtaken it. 

Any tactical idea becomes limiting, self-damaging if it is too obvious, too predictable. And we now see so many managers who are so insistent on the slow build-up that they almost never stray from it, never allow their players to vary the way they play out. And that makes them very easy to 'read', easy to press,... easy to nick the ball off in dangerous positions.

I'm not sure that building-out-from-the-back ever really worked all that well. But it has now clearly become an absolute liability for many teams.

And did I mention, it's SO FUCKING BORING to watch? Aesthetics matter; this is 'the beautiful game', after all. Most fans, I'm sure, would far rather see their team come out on the losing end of a 4-3 humdinger of a game occasionally than watch them grinding out arid 1-0 and 2-0 wins most weeks. I know I would, anyway.

I think, I hope we are now seeing the last days of ponderous slow build-up from the back, in favour of more diverse, dynamic approaches to moving the ball forward from your own penalty area. It's been a long time coming. Too, too long....

He's back!

Like many football fans, I've been feeling rather bereft over the last few weeks - since the unhappy news broke that Adam Clery was quitting the FourFourTwo Youtube channel that he'd made essential viewing over the last 18 months.

Now it's emerged that, in partnership with The Independent newspaper, he's launching his own Youtube venture, The Adam Clery Football Channel (ACFC), where we'll be getting more of the chirpy, irreverent tactical analysis videos we've come to love. (It looks like he might still be working with FourFourTwo occasionally as well - but on more 'magazine'-type pieces, mini-documentaries rather than game analysis.)

I'm pleased to see that his first posting on the new channel concurs with my own positive impressions of Thomas Tuchel's debut in charge of England....

For those who don't know.... Adam is, as we say in Britain, a top bloke: unpretentious, down-to-earth, a regular guy - but also very shrewd about his football. He's become the 'gateway drug' for tactical analysis videos. There are other guys out there who will go into more detail about particular patterns of play, or how a team seeks to morph its formation between different phases of possession and so on; but if you just want to understand why Team X is doing so well recently, or how Team W has fallen away, or why the weekend's Y-Z derby game ended as it did... Adam's your man. He's brisk, breezy, accessible - with just the right amount of silly, self-deprecating humour to help hold your attention across a discussion that will often stretch to 12 or 14 minutes or so. His videos - sometimes on teams, sometimes on individual players, but mostly breaking down particular big game outcomes - are always both entertaining and enlightening, and I cannot recommend them highly enough. Do go and check them out.

The engagingly daft little 'teaser' vid for the new channel that he posted a few days ago is a fine example of the man's unique style.

Too much 'CONTROL'?

 

Alex Moneypenny - an Arsenal uber-fan who runs a Youtube channel on his obsession called The Different Knock (although it's pretty much exclusively Arsenal-focused, I find a lot of his observations - like this one - have wider applicability) - recently posted this video about a possible weakness in Mikel Arteta's (and many other modern football managers') general approach to the game. [The pertinent part of the discussion begins at around 10.14.]

He suggests that an excessive desire to assert 'control' in a game, and thereby to reduce as far as possible all elements of risk and unpredictability, may be misguided, counter-productive. It is unrealistic, impossible to expect to be able to eliminate risk altogether: so many games turn on a single against-the-run-of-play goal,... or a single terrible decision from the referee. But the single-minded pursuit of this unattainable ideal often comes at the cost of making your own game extremely conservative - perhaps more predictable, and certainly less exciting: if you take fewer risks, you create fewer chances for yourself. And if you have fewer chances to score in a game, you are perhaps putting yourself at a greater, not lesser, risk of losing a game to a single, untypical action, or a mere stroke of luck from your opponents.

Alex points out that drawing analogies from other sports about the value of focusing on fine margins may be misleading for football. Most sports are far more high-scoring than football, and thus the number of such 'margins' in a game that might swing the outcome will be much larger. In basketball or baseball or tennis there are dozens or even hundreds of individual actions in every game that may have a decisive influence on the final result; in a game of football, there are often only a handful - sometimes just one.

It has long been my own view that it is more important in football to play an effective attacking game yourself than to try to prevent your opponent from playing at all, it is better to create a lot of scoring chances for yourself than to attempt to limit the opponent's opportunities to zero. As Alex says here, "When you try to stifle the opponent, sometimes you stifle yourself."

Also, of course, it makes for better entertainment. While fans of successful but mostly unadventurous football teams can usually force a smile through a string of arid 1-0 wins, we know in our hearts that they - like the rest of us - would really far prefer to be witnessing a 3-2 or 5-3 thrillfest most weeks....

How to get BETTER at FPL

Yes - a lot of these points are going to be basically the opposite of what I said last week in my post about the most common reasons 'Why people are BAD at FPL'. But I'll try to put a bit of a different spin on some things. And I hope this will still prove useful.

1)  Watch more football

There really is no substitute for it. Watch as many full games as you can (including other competitions, like the European games and domestic Cup rounds); watch good round-up shows with some solid punditry (BBC's Match of the Day is my oxygen....).  Learn what you can from the games themselves - before you start thinking about looking for advice or stats or whatever; all those other possible inputs should only ever be supplements to your own understanding of how the season is unfolding.

2)  Watch some tactical analysis

However shrewd you are at observing the finer details of the game, there are always going to be things you miss because of the limitations of TV coverage (limited view, limited replays,.. often inept, distracting commentary...) - especially if you're only able to watch brief highlights. I think it's incredibly useful to try to gain additional insights from experts in football - rather than 'experts' in FPL (see my third point, below).

There are some excellent tactical analysts on Youtube now. My favourite is Adam Clery of the FourFourTwo channel (only a year old, but it rapidly established itself as essential viewing for me during the past season) [in April 2025 he branched out to launch his own channel]. I also really like JJ Bull of The Athletic, Football Meta, and Football Made Simple. But Adam is The King - accessible, breezy, funny, but very, very perceptive in his breakdowns of team set-up and performance.

3)  Don't pay any attention to so-called FPL 'experts'

There are so many self-promoted, self-important would-be 'gurus' out there - the best of whom are no more insightful or persuasive than any of the rest of us who've been taking the game fairly seriously for a number of years; the worst of them are just idiots. Anyhow, you should always....

4)  Trust your own judgement

This is not a game you should play in pursuit of glorious prizes (because, with so many millions of players, your chances of ever winning anything are almost zero; and the prizes are SHIT, anyway....); nor for achieving a 'high ranking' (because - shock, horror! - finishing in the top 100,000 requires more luck than skill, and isn't much evidence of anything). 

You should only play to see how well you can do, to test yourself against self-set targets.... and to see how good a judge of a player you really are.

Relying on the recommendations of 'FPL experts', or asking online for help with your team.... is just cheating, really. And it's self-harming. Most of these guys don't know any better than you. And you'll never get any better if you don't make the effort to make your own choices.

5)  Learn how to use stats

Above all, be a bit more careful and thorough about how you use them. I see so many people on the online forums who grasp at one or two metrics to try to justify a pick, and convince themselves that these figures represent an unassailable argument in their favour; and oh so often, these stats are the wrong ones, or their 'positive' indication crumbles to nothing when compared with other, more relevant figures.

If you're not mathematically inclined, stats can just be bewildering and confusing, and it might be better to steer away from them altogether. I don't think they're nearly as helpful as paying close attention to the actual game action each week. But they can be very useful, if you use them appropriately: DON'T assume that they provide any easy or clear-cut answers - they do not.

6)  Be self-critical, and open to change

One of the biggest faults in all FPL managers (because it's a universal and deep-seated human fault) is a need to believe that we are right, and a consequent reluctance to acknowledge when we might have been wrong.

Even before you make a pick, you should take a break - for an hour, or a day - to pause and reflect on it; to try to think of other possible perspectives on the decision, to explore reasons why you might be wrong to want this player.

And every week, you should be asking yourself very carefully what isn't working out in your squad, and why. 

There are some players you get very fond of; some players that you are absolutely convinced are going to turn their form around at any moment and start producing big points in the next game. Those players you feel most confident in.... are probably the ones you need to think hardest about letting go.

That's more than enough for one post.  I daresay some other 'tips' may occur to me in the future; but I think this is a pretty solid starting point.

GOOD LUCK FOR THE NEW SEASON, EVERYONE!!!

[And by the way... I've said this already on the blog, and no doubt I'll say it again - often - but I do not claim to be any sort of FPL 'expert' myself. I am a smart guy with a lot of football knowledge and a lot of experience of FPL; so, I think my observations and insights are probably worth something. But I do not pretend that they are at all 'authoritative' - or necessarily and invariably 'correct'. They are just ideas that I hope people may find it interesting to ponder... even if they then decide that they don't agree with them.

And, while I might sometimes give examples of players I think are worth considering - or avoiding - I won't ever share my whole team, and I'll generally avoid making any specific player recommendations.

My aim with all my commentary on Fantasy Premier League - whether here on the blog, or on various forums where I sometimes contribute - is to try to show people not who to pick, but how to make picks.]