Roll your transfers until after the international break

Rolling cheese, rolling people 

Rolling transfers is usually a good thing - especially since the rules tweak a couple of years ago that now allows us to bank up to 5 Free Transfers. Being able to make multiple transfers at a time can be hugely valuable, for the far greater flexibility it gives us to conduct mini-rebuilds of our squads.

Making purely elective transfers - 'chasing points' with impulsive changes when you have a full first eleven of players who are fit, guaranteed to start, and playing decently well - is usually a bad thing.

Making elective transfers is particularly a bad thing this early in the season, when form hasn't settled down yet, and so we really can't often have any sort of confidence about who might be a better pick than the players we have already.

And it's a particularly, particularly bad thing when we're soon likely to have special reasons for possibly needing to make a lot of changes at once. At the moment, we're about to enter an international break; and not just any old international break, but an unprecedented three-week monster of a break!

Now, I tend to think that the risk of incurring lots of injuries in international breaks is greatly overstated. The rate of injuries in international football is much, much lower than in club football (I can't actually remember ever having lost one of my Fantasy players to an international break injury....). However, the risk is there; and it must be heightened by the unusual length and number of matches of the upcoming break. 

But even more concerning is the disruptive effect that this must inevitably have on club training over the next few weeks. Any form we thought we had seen emerging in the opening few games is likely to evaporate: we're basically all starting our FPL season again from scratch on October 10th! (This is why, in an ideal world, you'd save your first Wildcard until at least the end of October.)  Moreover, there are a few potential 'turns' in fixture difficulty around then, which may prompt you to want to make a few changes to your squad as well.

We are all likely to need to use 1 or 2 transfers (maybe more) straight after the international break to replace injuries that emerge over the next three weeks. We are also very likely to want to use quite a few more transfers in the immediately following gameweeks, because of likely swings in form and fixture-difficulty emerging after this disruptive hiatus in the Premier League schedule. Thus, it is essential to have a few transfers in hand after the break. (Playing your Wildcard over the upcoming break would ameliorate this problem, but not erase it completely, because we're also likely to need to make quite a few changes in the following gameweeks as well.) 

And yet, and yet.... the FPL forums are again full of people asking, "What transfer should I make this week?"  Why are you making any??  Why are you even thinking about it??  It makes no sense.

Why that Bench Boost didn't go so well

That glass isn't even half full, not anywhere near 

Apparently, over 800,000 FPL managers risked their Bench Boost on the opening weekend of the season. Most of them were probably duped into it by the surprisingly large number of influential online 'content creators' who (perhaps 'influencing' each other??!!) all suddenly decided - on very spurious grounds - that it might be 'a good idea'.

Here are the reasons usually given for this bizarre choice; and the reasons why they're all completely bogus.

1)  It can give you an early lead.

Yes, it can. It probably did, for many people. But a very small early lead that will rapidly evaporate as other managers play their Bench Boost more sensibly later in the season and get better returns from it. 

To optimise your points returns over the season, you have to try to optimise your returns for every individual gameweek; and playing a chip just to get an early lead does not do that.  If you 'chase the lead' like this, you end up in a worse position overall at the end of the season.

2)  You can set up 'perfectly' for your Bench Boost attempt using the unlimited transfers available in pre-season.

Yes, you can in theory. But as I explained the other day, there are so many uncertainties at the start of the season around form, fitness, tactics, and selection that you really have no idea how well anyone's going to play, or even if they're going to play (you don't always have 15 starters in Gameweek 1; heck, you don't always have as many as 13!!). You're betting completely blind. 

You will almost certainly get a better return from this chip if you play it later in the season (even if you're not able to set up 'perfectly' for it!) - when form has settled down, and you can feel more confident about what the most promising sets of fixtures will be;... and more confident about actually having a full 15 starters.

3)  The fixtures looked really 'promising' this weekend.

You imagined they might be promising. No-one had any real idea which fixtures were going to be easy, and which not. There are almost always a lot of surprises and upsets in the opening gameweek.  

This year.... Manchester United were comprehensively outplayed by promoted Hull; Liverpool were outplayed by unfancied Newcastle, and only salvaged a point with a contentious penalty in the last kick of the match; and Manchester City were outplayed at home by Bournemouth, and barely scraped a late, narrow win; Villa got absolutely thrashed by Brighton; Spurs got absolutely thrashed by Brentford; Sunderland unexpectedly lost to promoted Ipswich; Forest lost at home to Leeds (that was always going to be a tight one; but a lot of people fancied the strong home advantage at the City Ground, and the 'magic touch' of Oliver Glasner); and Chelsea were nearly held to a draw at Fulham thanks to some horrible goalkeeping by Robert Sanchez. So, almost none of those supposedly 'easy' fixtures worked out at all as expected. Amongst the Top 50-odd FPL picks in the first gameweek, the only big returners were most of the Arsenal starters, Palmer, Joao Pedro, and Rogers from Chelsea, and Ndiaye from Everton. 23 of them blanked; another 10 didn't even play (not good for a Bench Boost!); and Matty Cash ended up with -1!! Nearly two-thirds of the most popular players came up with nothing this weekend; and that should not have been a surprise - it often happens. Gameweek 1 is always very unpredictable, and often very low-scoring.

4)  If you went without one or more of the 'super-premium' players, you could afford a 'stacked' bench (and then use an early Wildcard to switch to a much cheaper bench, and maybe bring the omitted big names back in fairly soon).

That one is actually somewhat tempting - apart from the aforementioned problem of not having any idea how most of the opening matches are going to turn out!! But I haven't seen many people following this tactic; almost everyone seems to have been hanging on to at least one of the super-premiums, and a very large number have insisted on having all three (and many of these followed the sheep to Bench Boost anyway, despite, in many cases, having 1 or 2 obvious non-starters on their bench).

The further problems here - in addition to having no real idea who to put on your bench, even if you are able to set aside more money for them - are, first, that it's always a huge risk to go without the big-name players: they're 'big names' for a reason - they often produce massive hauls,... and they often start out the season very hot; Haaland particularly so. (Some years ago, I took a chance on going without the two biggest players that season in my initial squad, and they both scored hattricks on opening day!)  Second, there is a 'cost' to the early use of chips: not only will you almost certainly be able to earn more proints from a later Bench Boost, but hanging on to your Wildcard until later in the season (when you might hit a major injury crisis, or find that there's a big shift in fixture-difficulty for several teams, or a sudden swing in form for some teams) can also be very valuable. Committing to using both of these enormously powerful chips early in the season - when you don't really know what's going on with anyone's form - is.... just silly.

5)  Well, at least this gets the chip 'out of the way'!

Um, what??? No, I can hardly believe I've seen that view expressed by normally sane and sensible members of the online community, but... Believe it or not, this has been quite a commonly expressed sentiment about the early - very early - use of the Bench Boost. Because having a second Bench Boost and Triple Captain to use in the first half of the season is a new feature of the game, only introduced at the start of the 25-26 season, many people are still confused, flummoxed, discombobulated by the fact. They don't see any real value in these additional chips, and are thus inclined to use them any old how, as if it really doesn't matter. And many of them seem genuinely worried that they might just 'forget about them', and then find themselves having to use a handful of chips one after another in December (there will be 6 or 7 gameweeks in December, so.... still not a problem).

This attitude, of course, is utterly fatuous. These chips are valuable, and you should make a careful decision about when you can use them that will give you the strongest possible chance of extracting good value from them. That is emphatically not in Gameweek 1.

Two factors are crucial to a successful Bench Boost, one 'internal' and one 'external'. The 'internal' one is that you need to have a strong squad who are all fit and starting regularly. The 'external' one is that you'd like to have all 15 squad members - or as many of them as possible, at any rate - facing weak opponents in the same gameweek.

In Gameweek 1, you simply cannot be confident that all 15 of your squad members are going to start, nor do you really know which the softest fixtures are likely to be.

The 'global average' score is a powerful indicator of how worthwhile a particular gameweek has been for using the Bench Boost in. A high average indicates that lots of players produced big hauls, and that obviously increases the chances that you might have had many big hauls among your 15 squad members. The 'global average' in this year's Gameweek 1 was a dismally low 48 points; therefore, it was a very poor week to have Bench Boost-ed in.

Now, a lot of people are claiming they did really well on their Bench Boost last week. But did they really??

Players like Sangaré, Kayode, Lewis-Potter and Janelt of Brentford, Hinshelwood and De Cuyper of Brighton, Stach and Bijol and Justin of Leeds, Dewsbury-Hall and Ndiaye of Everton, and Tzolakis of Hull did very well,... and are the type of the players that people might have left on their bench. But these players are all pretty low-owned, so it's unlikely that many people had more than one of them, and many will have had none at all. And it was entirely fortuitous that so many 'fringe' players like this happened to get really big scores in a week in which fairly few players actually returned well. 

Moreover, in most of the cases I've looked at where people have proudly shared their teams, it's pretty obvious that one of these guys should in fact have been starting. And anyway, I always maintain that, since the Bench Boost is a whole-squad achievement, you really ought only to count the 4 lowest-returning players as the true value of your points-lift from the chip, whether you'd left them on the bench or not. After all, if a player doesn't play at all, he gets shifted on to your bench; I think you ought to do the same if a player has a shit game - when evaluating your Bench Boost. Most of the Bench Boosters this week probably heavily backed Manchester United (no-one returned) and Liverpool (Van Dijk and Wirtz, two of the most popular picks, didn't return) and City (Haaland and O'Reilly, the two most popular, didn't return) - and so had a pretty dismal week in their first eleven. Getting a good bench score but a terrible score in your starting eleven.... means you made some bad choices about who to leave on your bench; and it was not ultimately a good return from your Bench Boost. 

You really need to check how high above the global average you were to assess how well your Bench Boost did. I reckon, if you're not at least 20 points above, you did quite poorly (because you'd hope to get at least 10 points above global average most weeks anyway, if you're any good at the game; and 10 points is the absolute minimum you should be making from the Bench Boost, properly counted).

Some people will undoubtedly have done quite well out of it (some people will get lucky with any Bench Boost selection in any Gameweek!!). But not many, I think. And a good outcome does not mean it was a 'good' decision. Good decisions are carefully thought-out and well-justified, and give the highest probability of success for the majority of people following a certain path. 

Playing the Bench Boost in GW1 was not that. It was a bunch of people succumbing to greedy impulse and hare-brained logic, or just unthinkingly following some online 'guru' or other. And the majority of them were punished for that. (They don't know yet just how badly they were punished; but they'll find out gradually over the next four months, as perhaps a good 60% or 70% of the other managers in the game earn substantially more from their Bench Boost chips.)

I don't think I've come across anyone who can claim to have got an effective points-lift from the Bench Boost this week of more than 10 points; most are much lower. It should be fairly easy to better that later on - once we know what's going on with everyone's form.

And - good grief! - many people were taking the same approach to the Triple Captain chip: "I don't know what to do with it, it's burning a hole in my pocket. Let's just dump it in Gameweek 1, even though I have no idea what any of the results are likely to be, or who's in form yet."

It's a kind of masochism: these people just don't want to do well in the game, they're trying to sabotage themselves. It is very sad.

Dilemmas of the Week - GW 32 (25/26)

After nearly three weeks without any Premier League games (four weeks, for Arsenal, Manchester City, Crystal Palace and Wolves!), anticipating relative 'form' is going to be even more of a crapshoot than usual going into this Gameweek. But at least there haven't been too many new injuries since GW31,... and quite a few welcome recoveries.

Despite the relative dearth of new injury concerns, this is a prime moment to consider major changes leading into the league campaign's final run-in - and, in particular, to gear up for the imminent Double Gameweek in GW33 and the subsequent Blank Gameweek (because of the FA Cup Semi-Finals) in GW34. Indeed, if exceptional need - or foolish impatience - haven't prompted you to use the (largely superfluous) 2nd Wildcard yet, this is inevitably the optimal gameweek in which to do so. (And very nearly 500,000 managers have indeed done so. But that does beg the question,..... what the heck are the other 12 million up to???)

I am trying to streamline these weekly round-ups a bit from last year, restricting myself for the most part to just the injuries etc. affecting players that are likely to have a major significance in FPL; and also, of course, only to new injuries - I figure everyone should be aware of players who've already been ruled out for some time!  

[For some years, I have found the 'Injuries & Bans' summary on Fantasy Football Scout the most reliable resource for this kind of information; although this site, Premier League Injuries, is a very good alternative (often a little quicker to update, I think - though it did go through a bit of a glitchy period for a while last year).  Go check these out for more comprehensive coverage. 

I see the Fantasy Premier League site has added an improved 'Player Availability' page this year (though hidden under 'The Scout' tab?!). That also seems to be reasonably comprehensive and up-to-date, but god knows how it's supposed to be 'organised' - maybe by 'date of injury'? Obviously, arranging it by club and alphabetical order would be more sensible; but the denizens of FPL Towers seem to have a deep aversion to the sensible.]

I've recently discovered this additional resource, the weekly Predicted Lineups from Fantasy Football Edits. My longtime standby for this sort of news, Fantasy Footall Scout, does usually provide some explanatory commentary on its predictions, even including reminders of the key injury concerns, and sometimes also some discussion of possible alternate selections; so, if you like a bit more detail with your 'probable lineups' for the week, that could still be the preferable roundup to look at. But because FPL Edits is so stripped-down, it's rather more straightforwardly accessible, easier to scan through quickly; and I think it's also perhaps a tad more reliable with its expected formations and lineups, and a little quicker to update.

So, what are the conundrums we face ahead of Gameweek 32?

Does anybody need to be moved out because of injury?

Unwelcome uncertainties for Arsenal on their title run-in, as the recently impressive Piero Hincapie has apparently picked up quite a serious leg-muscle issue while playing for Ecuador, while Bukayo Saka, who was withdrawn from availability for the internationals for unspecified reasons (which were widely assumed to be exaggerated or entirely fake), is apparently still unfit to rejoin the playing squad. Moreover, Jurrien Timber, who suffered a heavy knock on the ankle against Everton in their last league game (four weeks ago!) is still a doubt, and Martin Odegaard - who has been almost constantly troubled by injury this season - had a fairly lacklustre game against Sporting in midweek and appeared to be limping when he was pulled off before the end. And now Riccardo Calafiori is also a doubt, after suddenly going missing from training on Friday. At least Ebere Eze appears to be over whatever phantom niggle was keeping him home from international duty....

Jadon Sancho suffered a heavy fall in a club friendly two weeks ago, and has a damaged shoulder which may continue to make him a doubt for a little while (although he's never really established himself as a regular starting prospect for Unai Emery).

Burnley's Hannibal Mejbri is going to be out for a while, after pulling a hamstring against Fulham last time out.

Palace winger Evann Guessand suffered a knee injury in Thursday night's game against Fiorentina, the severity still being assessed.

Leeds are suffering a tide of injuries in their back-line at a very inopportune moment: both Joe Rodon and Anton Stach had to come off in the FA Cup win over West Ham, after rolling their ankles badly. while Jaka Bijol (training knock) and Gabriel Gudmundsson (minor groin strain) were unavailable for that game, and might still be doubts this weekend.

Alisson was a late withdrawal from Liverpool's last league game, the defeat against Brighton, after suffering another leg-muscle issue - which now seems likely to keep him out until 'near the end of the season'. At least his new understudy Giorgi Mamardashvili was looking pretty sharp in Wednesday's game against PSG - but looking their talismanic long-time goalkeeper is further unwelcome disruption at a time when the club are starting to look in serious disarray.

Ruben Dias missed out on the League Cup Final three weeks ago because of a hamstring issue, and has since suffered a further setback which probably makes his return date still at least a week or two off (although you wonder if Abdudokir Khusanov hasn't been playing well enough to keep him out of the team now....). And John Stones withdrew from the England squad with a sore calf-muscle (although - who can remember the last time he was fit for a decent run of games??).

Sven Botman suffered a facial fracture in the north-east derby three weeks ago, but recent reports say that he is being fitted with a protective mask and that there is a chance he can be considered for selection against Palace (presumably at the expense of Malick Thiaw, who has had a few struggles in recent games). Fabian Schar was thought to be close to a return from his serious ankle injury three months ago, but has apparently suffered from an infection in the foot which may keep him out for some more weeks. Even more worryingly for Newcastle, Bruno Guimaraes was just about ready to return from his hamstring layoff, but went down with the mumps last week - which can be a particularly debilitating virus, one that can have a lingering impact on physical fitness for several weeks afterwards; so, I'd be betting that we won't now see Bruno again until the end of the season, if at all.

Just to make things even worse for Spurs, it's been announced that Mohammed Kudus has suffered a serious setback in his rehabilitation from a hamstring injury and may now require surgery (although, when things get as bad as this at a club, you can't help but wonder if some players are exaggerating injuries to just avoid being involved in the ongoing shitstorm any more....). Mathys Tel had to come off with a knock in the last league game against Forest, and Pape Sarr picked up a shoulder injury while playing for Senegal, while first-choice keeper Guglielmo Vicario had to have surgery on a groin hernia at the start of the break and is likely to be missing for at least another week or so. On the bright side, at least the club's first-choice back-four appears to be available again.... for practically the first time this season.

Do we have any players who are dropped, or not looking likely to get the starts we hoped for?

Harry Maguire is suspended this week, after getting sent off for a 'denial of a goalscoring opportunity' against Bournemouth last time. Meanwhile, Brighton's Lewis Dunk and Wolves's Yerson Mosquera are starting a two-match ban for having reached the threshold of 10 yellow cards for the season. 

After this weekend, we have an amnesty on suspensions for accumulated yellow cards till the end of the season. These are the players who stand on the precipice: unsurprisingly, it is mostly the defensive midfielders who've got themselves into jeopardy with their 'taking one for the team' fouls - Caicedo, Casemiro, Bernardo Silva, Joelinton, and Wolves's Andre and Joao Gomes, as well as Bournemouth full-back Alex Jimenez and Brighton winger Diego Gomez are all just one more card away from a 2-game ban, and so will have to tread very carefully this weekend; they might indeed be 'rested' to keep them out of harm's way.

Enzo Fernandez has been suspended by Chelsea for this gameweek (and for last week's FA Cup tie against Port Vale) for imprudently mentioning his eagerness to live - and play? - in Madrid during an interview he gave over the international break. Sounds like storm-in-a-teacup stuff, and I wouldn't expect it to impact his selection or performance for the remainder of the season (unless Real or Atleti have already made approaches about buying him this summer....?).

Did anyone give other cause to consider dropping them?

I'm not betting on a De Zerbi Miracle at Spurs just yet. Neither is anyone else, it seems: the North London club are now the favourites to join Wolves and Burnley in the drop, with some bookmakers trimming the odds on them going down to as little as 13/10.

Recently, Liverpool are starting to look very nearly as toxic, and it's now looking very much as if - without a dramatic turnaround in the league (I think we can write off the chances of a comeback against PSG in the Champions League) - Arne Slot will be sacked at the end of the season.

Did anyone play so well, you have to consider bringing them in immediately?

Three weeks after the last batch of games, 'form' back then is scarcely relevant. Although.... Harry Wilson had another absolute banger there, and it is astonishing that fewer than 25% of FPL managers owned him then. (That might be a strong indication of how many people remain 'active' within the game!)

BEST OF LUCK, EVERYONE!

What's up with ANYONE??

 

I reflected yesterday on the great uncertainty surrounding Erling Haaland's prospects for the remainder of the season.

But in fact, as we go into this fraught final stretch - with a Double Gameweek coming up next week, and a big Blank Gameweek the week after that (and the chance of a further small Blank/Double as well, due to the FA Cup Final now being held before the end of the league programme) - we really have bugger-all idea what anyone's prospects are,.... because it's now very nearly three full weeks since we last saw anyone playing league football (four weeks since City and Arsenal saw league action!).

Such a long hiatus in the league programme is unprecedented - and highly undesirable. It is a uniquely weird time of year to be starting over like this.

Some teams may have reaped huge benefits from the unaccustomed bit of rest, and perhaps even more from some intensive tactical training over the last week or so. Others may have gone to seed, lost their fluency and focus as a result of the long lay-off (especially if they weren't even involved in this past week's FA Cup or European ties...).

Thus, this gameweek is, alas, just about the worst possible time to play a Wildcard.

Unfortunately, it also, this season, the more-or-less inescapable time to play the Wildcard: the final run-in getting under way, only 7 gameweeks left (and, for most people, all the bonus chips still to play in that cramped period!), and relatively big Double and Blank Gameweeks coming up in the weeks immediately after this one. Unless you hang on to it to 'smart-bomb' a late round of one of your mini-league cup competitions, there really is nothing useful you can use the Wildcard for after this week - there is no alternative.

But that's hard to do when we really don't know what we're going to get from any team this weekend: 'form' is pretty much out of the window. At the very least, we're almost sure to see a few big surprises...

And hence all of those Wildcard selections we make this week are even riskier than usual, a huge shot in the dark!

GOOD LUCK, EVERYONE!!!

High variance - why this gameweek is likely to make such A BIG DIFFERENCE

 

It's not often a Blank Gameweek hits so hard!

But this season, there are really only two teams that anyone in FPL is likely to be trebled-up on. Arsenal and Manchester City are way out ahead of the field at the top of the table. Almost every other club has lost many key players to injury and/or suffered very up-and-down form; the other would-be title contenders have all had pretty disappointing seasons (though at least Manchester United have rallied strongly since the turn of the year). Arsenal and City are just in a different class to everyone else this year; and they've both reached the League Cup Final.

So, the League Cup Final, which in many years is merely a minor annoyance, this time is a body-blow. More than half of the top dozen or so most popular players in FPL this season are from Arsenal and City. 

Raya is by far the most popular goalkeeper choice; but Donnarumma is 6th, and Dean Henderson (who also has a Blank, because he would have been facing City in the League this weekend) is 8th; even the absence of Wolves's Jose Sa is going to inconvenience well over 1% of FPL managers. So, probably about 45% of managers in FPL are missing their first-choice keeper this week; and quite a few may have found themselves missing both keepers.

And many managers will be missing 4 or 5 others of their regular starters too. If they have been imprudently holding on to some Palace (and/or Wolves!!) players as well, and/or have suffered some additional injury problems, some might be looking at having to make 8, 9, 10 changes this week. Almost everyone is having to make at least 4 or 5 changes.

Think about the consequences of that. In most gameweeks, it's very rare that anyone makes even as many as 3 or 4 changes; most of the time, we get by with only 1 or 2 transfers in a week; quite often - if we've been lucky with injuries - we'll put out a completely unchanged squad.

But this week,... almost everyone is making multiple changes to their starting eleven.

Moreover, in most gameweeks, there is a high degree of similarity between most people's teams (not as much as many people suppose: there is never a clear-and-obvious 'template' eleven...). There's usually a handful of players who are so much better than everyone else in their position category that almost everyone owns them. And at the moment, those players are Gabriel, Timber, Rice, Semenyo, Haaland and O'Reilly (or Nunes). Outside of the TOP TWO, only Bruno Fernandes, Harry Wilson, and Joao Pedro are currently such compelling and almost universally coveted picks.

This week, we have to change out half or three-quarters of our regular starting eleven - and there aren't any particularly obvious replacements to choose from. Almost no-one else has suddenly come into particularly compelling form (Tavernier, possibly; Cunha or Casemiro...); and no-one has a really good fixture this week (Liverpool, Villa, and Spurs appear to have the most over-matched opponents; but they've all been in horrible form in the league recently....). 

So, this week, there is likely to be an exceptionally high degree of dissimilarity between selections, with everyone making multiple changes, and a pretty much wide open choice of what those changes might be... and uncommonly low predictability (because of rocky form and mostly very closely matched fixtures) as to how any of that is going to play out.

Most weeks, we're just buying one or two lottery tickets; this week, we're all buying a whole fistful of them!

And all of that means that there is sure to be an extremely broad spread of points this week. And that, in turn, means more volatility - more chance that you can have an exceptionally poor week and/or that others around you can have an exceptionally good week. Of course, things could work out in your favour; but they could also go very strongly against you. There is going to be exceptionally high volatility in the rankings this week, with a lot of people seeing big swings in their league positions.

Overall, it's almost certain to be an extremely low-scoring week. Many people have used a 'hit' (or several!), spent points to assemble a starting team, and so start off at an immediate disadvantage. Many more are making do with fielding a team that's at least one or two players short. Even more, who've just about got a full eleven, but have little or no cover left on the bench, are going to find that injuries or rotations leave them with less than eleven scoring players.

And, as I already pointed out above, most of the 'best' players are missing from this gameweek; and most of the fixtures that are going ahead don't look particularly promising.

Anyone, however, who does manage to field a full eleven, and hasn't had to spend any 'hits' to do so (or only 1 or 2 of them...) is in a position to achieve a big points-gain on the majority of managers, even without getting a particularly big points total. If the global average is only 20-30 points, a haul of 50 could give you a huge lift in ranking.

* NB;  The prospect of such a powerful points/rank lift should not have tempted anyone to use a Free Hit or Wildcard this week, because those chips will - absolutely definitely - be worth even more a little bit later in the season. Over 160,000 people are on a Wildcard this week, and over 1.3 million are using the Free Hit (according to Google AI, that is; so, it's probably a completely made-up figure - but it does sound plausible). Those folks should get a useful lift this week. But that advantage will almost certainly be wiped out (perhaps wiped out two or three times over) when they are smashed by the even bigger Blank Gameweek we face in GW34, and/or they find that they can't optimise their squad for the last few weeks of the season, when we should have one or two juicy Double Gameweeks.

There is, in fact, quite a good chance that people who played one of those chips won't even do that well out of them this week - because, as I observed already, there's a dearth of obviously in-form players to choose, or inviting fixtures to bet on. Moreover, I tend to think (in my more pessimistic moments, anyway...) that more of our decisions go badly than well (there's more bad luck in the world than good luck!), so making a large number of changes - especially when you don't really need to (many people playing chips are getting tempted to go a little crazy and change almost everyone) - is generally counter-productive. I suspect that, for the most part. people who made the minimum number of changes they could get away with this week will do better than people who splashed out with a chip.

And then.... well, people who chose to play a chip this week (or left themselve 'no choice' but to do so!) are fundamentally not smart managers. We could foresee the Gameweek 31 hazard months ago, and there is absolutely no reason to have been exposed to more than 5 or 6 blanking players this week (a problem that should have been easy to deal with, using a couple of saved transfers and/or hits). So, people who made dumb choices to get themselves into such a mess are also likely to make dumb choices trying to get themselves out of it, and you wouldn't fancy them to do particularly well in this gameweek (they don't deserve to do well).

[I was prompted to these reflections by encountering on one of the FPL forums the other day one of those arrogant oafs who insists on boasting about how good his rank is currently. I mildly pointed out that there was a good chance his rank would slip this week (he was a proud, naive Free Hitter), and he whined that I couldn't possibly have a 'crystal ball' to know that. Well, I didn't claim to know for certain; I'd said 'probably' - it was merely a significant statistical possibility. People in the top few thousands of the rankings are usually insulated from big single-week drops (or rises) in rank, because things get spread out up there: there aren't many other people within a narrow range of points. But that's in a normal gameweek. In a gameweek like this one, with such an exceptionally high variance in likely points returns, there will be a lot of big swings in rank, and even people at the very top of the rankings wno't be immune to them.

As I pointed out to the noxious oaf: There is a difference between WHAT WE CAN KNOW and WHAT WE CAN ONLY GUESS AT. Unfortunately, it is a difference that almost nobody in FPL-land seems to comprehend. 

We can know that there is going to be unusually high volatility in the rankings this gameweek; it just requires a basic understanding of statistics.]

Tomorrow's not an accident, it's AN AMBUSH

 

Compared to a few recent seasons, we have been remarkably fortunate with injuries so far this time. While there have been a lot of injuries cumulatively, and a particularly heavy density of them recently during the gruelling winter months, not many of the most popular FPL selections have been badly affected, and we haven't had multiple players wiped out in the same week.

Well, not until this last week.... Sunderland right-back Nordi Mukiele, one of the most popular 'cheap fifth' defender picks in the game, had already gone missing with a calf injury the previous weekend (immediately after I'd opted to leave him in my Wildcard selection...); and Florian Wirtz, whose ownership had soared since he started to discover better form around mid-December, had reported a back problem in the GW27 warm-up. Then, Erling Haaland - the most popular player in the game by far, with around two-thirds ownership - suddenly failed to show up this last weekend, having apparently suffered a knock late in training. Another popular cheaper defender, Joachim Andersen, went missing with an unspecified 'illness'. And other super-popular picks like Harry Wilson, Declan Rice, and Nico O'Reilly came out of this weekend's games limping, and are now stigmatised by the dreaded maybe-they'll-play-maybe-they-won't  'yellow flag'.

Many FPL managers will own at least three of those players; some 'unlucky' ones might own six or seven.

And to make matters even worse, this heaviest cluster of injuries-to-top-players we've experienced all season happens to come the week before the 5th Round of the FA Cup; this means that the next batch of Premier League fixtures is shunted forward into midweek - giving these injury-doubt players almost no time to shake off their problem. Most of these issues are probably so slight, you wouldn't expect them to affect fitness to play a full week later; but only two or three days later, I fear they are unlikely to be risked... And there's not much time for any more accurate and detailed information on these injury situations to emerge.

We're all flying blind into Gameweek 29, fearing that we might be without some of our key players,.... perhaps several of them.

But most of us will probably just keep our fingers crossed, and hope we don't end up with only 8 or 9 men on the park. There is a fair chance that at least some of these players will be able to turn out after all (Declan Rice is made of titanium, and will happily play through almost any injury short of a broken leg). Because of the FA Cup, these players will then have a further 10 days to recover before the next Premier League fixtures - so, almost certainly will miss no more than one gameweek. They're not players we'd want to let go of, unless we really have to. And, since they've probably increased in price quite nicely while we've had them, we'd take quite a heavy hit in squad value if we went for a quick sell-and-buy-back on any of them. So..... we sit tight, and hope for the best.

But this is WHY it's undesirable - an unacceptable RISK - to use your second Wildcard EARLY. It is not all that uncommon to suffer 5, 6, 7 long-term injuries within one or two gameweeks; if something like that happens, the Wildcard can help to dig you out of the hole.

This 'injury crisis' - potentially damaging though it is - is not Wildcard-worthy. (It's not even transfer-worthy!!)

We always have to be on our guard against possible sudden disasters like this. BAD THINGS do not happen all the time; but they do happen often enough that we need to be constantly vigilant, constantly prepared.

BEST OF LUCK, EVERYONE! AND DON'T FORGET THAT TUESDAY EVENING DEADLINE!!!

A LONG Wildcard?

Some folks like to play their Wildcard when there's a little interruption in the regular Premier League schedule - such as now, when we're skipping a weekend to make way for the 4th Round of the FA Cup, giving us 11 days between the FPL deadlines for Gameweeks 26 and 27. (Sometimes, when there's an international break, we may even get a 14 or 15 day gap between deadlines.)

There are four possible reasons for this preference (though two, no, three of them are pretty frivolous):

1)  You can take advantage of a 'best of both worlds' situation, being able to make transfers early (as soon as the deadline for the current gameweek has passed!) to avoid possible adverse price changes on players you're interested in - while having the security of being able to swap them out again, if they get injured before the next gameweek deadline. 

2) Since these long gaps between deadlines increase the risk of being hit by multiple injuries (there are invariably other games - European ties, domestic cups, or internationals - going on in the interval between regular league matches; and training seems to be becoming more hazardous than playing, in the modern game!), some may find it reassuring to have a Wildcard in play so that they can easily address any such developing crisis - even if they weren't hankering to make any active, improving changes to their squad.

3)  Some enjoy having the leisure to contemplate a major squad rebuild over a longer period of time. Some, indeed, find it difficult to visualise what different combinations of players would look like (and what they'd collectively cost...), and so actually use the 'Transfers' page for trying out multiple 'drafts' of possible new squads. And they can't get enough of this pleasant diversion: they want to drag it out over days and days.

4)  And some pursue 'trading for profit', focusing on trying to build their squad value rather than necessarily improving the total points-potential of their selection. Because there is more time for transfers to happen, and maybe more transfers needing to happen because of the longer period of time elapsed leading to a larger accumulation of injury problems, and because of the probability that more people than usual are using their Wildcards in a gameweek like this,... a long gameweek will tend to have a higher volume of transfer traffic, and this will result in a greater number of price changes. There are various FPL resource sites online that attempt to predict when price changes are imminent; but there's no 'rocket science' about that - it's fairly easy to anticipate which players are likely to be suddenly popular or unpopular, and you can check in on their recent transfers numbers regularly to see just how big a swing in ownership they are experiencing. 

Transfer trading for profit like this has become more difficult in recent years, as FPL has tweaked its 'algorithm' in a way that makes it rather less easy to trigger a price-change (in either direction), and so we now very rarely see multiple changes in the same gameweek. And of course, you need a player to go up in price twice in order to be able to make a profit on them, because the dreaded 'transfer tax' limits you to half the value of any increase in price since you bought him (rounded down!) when you sell a player on again; hence, you don't earn anything on a first increase in price, nor any extra on a third increase; and you can't reach a fourth increase during such a period of Wildcard trading, as the number of price changes within one gameweek is capped at three. However, where there is an extended gameweek, there is an increased chance that a player's price may rise twice (or twice more, if you were unlucky enough to miss out on his first price rise at the start of the gameweek; although the threshold for each successive price rise within the same gameweek is set far higher, so it is almost unheard-of to see three price rises in one gameweek), thus enabling you to take a quick 100k profit by selling him on immediately. 

In practice, these days it is very difficult to realise a rise in squad value of more than a few hundred thousand through this exercise. And it does take a lot of effort, in scrutinising the transfer numbers every day, and perhaps making dozens of speculative transfers over the course of the gameweek (most of which will return no profit).

So, really, only the first of those reasons is potentially a good one for considering a 'long' gameweek to be a tempting opportunity to trigger your use of the Wildcard.

But even that is a weak reason. And it is, almost always, going to be outweighed by the fact that, as I explained here a little while back, any interruption of the regular league schedule disrupts a club's usual training and preparation routines, and thus makes their form upon the resumption of league games more uncertain; and...  you don't want uncertainty when you're planning a major rebuild of your squad for the remainder of the season.

I rather feel that - in an 'ideal world', anyway - it's still too early to be contempating using the 2nd Wildcard. We haven't had time yet to evaluate the possible impact of changes made in the recent transfer window; and we've just seen a couple more managerial sackings (and we might yet see one or two more). And there are no major 'turns' in fixture difficulty likely for several weeks yet. It's always better to hang on to a Wildcard for as long as you can - unless there's a pressing need to use it.

However,... a possible factor that might tempt people to risk such an 'early' Wildcard now is the increasing attractiveness of some high-priced players who haven't previously been worth having: Wirtz finally getting into his groove at Liverpool, Palmer starting to pick up regular points with Chelsea again (though he still doesn't look fully fit to me), Semenyo settling in very well at City and - rather unexpectedly - getting regular starts (so far; I still fret that he might face occasional rotation once Doku's fully fit again), Sesko and Gyokeres possibly finding their scoring boots at last, and Mbeumo and Cunha also becoming very alluring as United's season has dramatically turned around under Michael Carrick. If you suddenly fancy bringing in even one or two of these players, that might require three or four changes - to shunt your budget around to be able to afford them. And if you have one or two injury problems as well,... then you're finding yourself in Wildcard territory. 

Better to hold off a while longer, if you can; but I can see how it's getting mighty tempting at the moment.

More ways to SELF-DESTRUCT

 

The FPL forums have been awash with nutters talking about using their second Wildcard this week. Yes, in Gameweek 22, barely three weeks into the New Year! Does THE MADNESS know no end??!!

The reasons why this is an overwhelmingly BAD IDEA ought to be obvious to anyone who has played the game for more than a few years

They are as follows:

1)  For any chip, there is more risk in using it earlier in its period of availability rather than later. During half a season, there will usually be at least a few, possibly several reasonable - perhaps pressing - occasions to potentially use a chip. And some of these may crop up unexpectedly, at little or no notice: you don't know they're going to happen until they happen. Thus, the later you can leave it to play a chip, the more confident you can be that there won't any longer be a better occasion to use it arising later on.

2) The general 'leaving it later' principle above is particularly true with the Wildcard because it is a 'rebuild chip' which allows you to make substantial and lasting changes to your squad, rather than just a one-off switcheroo to allow you to earn extra points in a single gameweek like all the others. It is potentially so valuable that it really should not be thrown away lightly, at the first sign of any difficulty in your squad. You tend to accumulate need for a Wildcard over time, as drop-offs in form and injuries and suspensions progressively weaken your squad. If things look bad this week, they might be even worse in another week or two!

3)  A crisis requiring a Wildcard to rectify it can also arise very suddenly: it is not uncommon to pick up 4, 5, 6 or even more injuries (or suspensions, or fallings-out-of-favour with the manager) inside a week or two. That is the kind of catastrophe for which you may need your Wildcard. And they can occur at any time (although they tend to become more common in the final third of the season...).

4)  Although this threshold will decrease slightly later in the season, you don't really want to be considering a Wildcard unless you have a case for making at least 5 or 6 urgent changes to your squad. If players aren't unavailable - through being injured, dropped, transferred out, suspended, etc. - it's never absolutely urgent to replace them, it's simply 'elective'. You should be able to carry under-performing players on your bench for a week or three, while you stock up more Free Transfers for a 'mini-Wildcard' shake-up. You can even sometimes take a chance on leaving a few 'holes' on your bench (hang on to non-playing assets) for a little while. And if an immediate change seems likely to be particularly valuable to you, it's OK to take a 'hit' - spend the extra points on it - a few times a season. Blowing a Wildcard for only 3 or 4 - non-urgent! - changes is A COMPLETE WASTE.

5)  At the moment, no-one should have such an urgent case for multiple squad changes. Although there have been a lot of injuries over the past month or so, mercifully, so far none of these have affected any of the really 'big' players: Josko Gvardiol is the only high-owned FPL asset who's been ruled out for a long spell. Moreover, we all just enjoyed an extra 'mini-Wildcard' this year, with the unnecessary additional transfers doled out for AFCON barely a month ago. If you used those sensibly to strengthen your squad during December (or saved at least some of them to allow yourselves a few extra transfers during the injury-ravaged month of January...), there should be absolutely no need to consider multiple squad revisions - or any at all! - just now.

6)  You don't want to be using a Wildcard at a time where there is more than usual uncertainty about what's going on in the Premier League, and perhaps an imminent possibility of significant changes in the FPL player-comparison landscape. And that is very much the case at the moment, in late January. The mid-season transfer window doesn't close for another 11 days, and there's usually a late rush of activity right before the final deadline (this year, on the evening of February the 2nd); some players might yet leave the Premier League altogether, some new big names might join from overseas. And even if you don't fancy any of the new arrivals themselves, you need to be mindful of the disruptive effect they can have on team selections and playing styles, of the possible knock-on consequences for players you do own, or might like to own. These impacts will not usually make themselves fully felt until at least a few weeks after a new player has joined - or left - a club; so, for this reason alone, it is utterly, utterly DAFT to consider using the Wildcard before the second half of February, at the very earliest.

7)  Quite apart from the upheaval of the transfer window, we are deep in the 'midwinter doldrums' now: almost every team is suffering poor or fluctuating form, most players are obviously getting tired or jaded, and many are probably carrying some sort of niggling injury. A crop of new more serious injuries is arriving every week. If you use the Wildcard now, there is an elevated risk that most or all of your new selections might lose form or become unavailable altogether within a few weeks: that is why you shouldn't use it in January. 

8)  There are also some more particular factors affecting the overall player-comparison landscape just at the moment. The five main ones are: a) additional upheaval caused by the turnover of managers around this time of year (Maresca and Amorim have just been replaced; Glasner had looked likely to go, but might survive; Frank looks under extreme threat, Dyche, Espirito Santo, and possibly even Howe also at some risk); b) the immediate and dramatic improvement displayed by Manchester United on being freed from the shackles of Ruben Amorim; c) the upturn in form and fighting spirit starting to be shown by all the clubs at the bottom of the table, making relative 'fixture difficulty' much more difficult to assess; d) the return of AFCON players (most of the more popular FPL choices went deep into the tournament and have only just rejoined their clubs; Senegal and Morocco were in the final last Sunday, and it is not clear if - probably rather unlikely that - their players will be back, or able to be immediately reintegrated into their club sides this weekend); e) the conundrum of Cole Palmer (and perhaps also of Mo Salah and Ollie Watkins); he's playing again at last, and faces a short run of fairly 'easy'-looking fixtures over the next month or so; many FPL managers are bringing him in just because of this enticing fixture-run - but that's almost certainly dangerously premature. He's still being troubled by recurring muscular discomfort, and is obviously a long way short of full stamina and match sharpness (he looked absolutely exhausted at the end of last week's game against Brentford, and he hadn't even been all that 'busy' in it - compared to his usual all-action standards); he isn't yet anywhere near his best, and looks like he might take at least a few more weeks to get there. If/when he does, he'll almost certainly be worth having; but because he's so expensive, that's probably going to require at least three or four transfers - not just one - to accomplish, to reallocate budget around a squad. The only other 'premium' players this season - Salah, Watkins, and Saka - might present a similar dilemma; we know they have the potential to make an enormous FPL contribution - but they haven't been doing so thus far; as soon as that changes, we may want them again,... and we may need to make multiple changes in one gameweek to achieve that. (You don't necessarily need a Wildcard to make these changes; in fact, you really shouldn't. But the point here is that there are a number of likely circumstances that might make you want to make substantial changes to your squad again in the near future - and these might undo many of the changes you've just made with your silly, premature Wildcard.)

Now do you see???

And, oh gawd, some people are talking about using their Bench Boost too. There's a much simpler argument against that. With so much injury, fatigue, and important European and domestic Cup games cramping the schedule at the moment, and thus a heightened rate of unpredictable player rotations - you can't count on anyone being a guaranteed starter at the moment; and thus it's very unlikely that all 15 of your squad will start (which is the bare minimum criterion for considering a Bench Boost play). Also, just about no-one has a really strong bench at the moment (you usually have to use some saved transfers or a Wildcard to 'set up' an optimum squad to get a really good Bench Boost return). And, even if this weekend's games were happening in less unsettled February or March, it still wouldn't be a good gameweek for a Bench Boost: there just aren't that many attractive fixture match-ups!!!

People considering either of these chip plays this week (or, good grief, yes, the Triple Captain or Free Hit too), are just BORED, IMPATIENT, or DEPRESSED (taking the recent run of terrible gameweek returns too personally: wake up, people, it's been SHIT for everyone lately!!), and looking to cheer themselves up with a whacky and impulsive move. All you are doing, my friends, is shooting yourselves in the foot. You'll get no decent advantage from these chips this week; and you will soon be ruing your choice when an obviously much better - or more necessary - occasion to use them comes along.

New Year's Resolutions

1)   I will not use my 2nd Wildcard at once.

I wouldn't actually be tempted to this year anyway. But, just as the Wildcard can be a too-ready 'comfort blanket' if you have a really bad start to the season, so too it can seem like an easy quick fix if you've suddenly taken a battering from all the seasonal injuries in this miserably cold December. But I generally feel that even if you are feeling thus battered, it's almost always better to take a hit or two to repair the damage, and/or soldier on for a while with one or two holes on your bench. An even worse injury crisis might well pop up later. And, if it doesn't, the Wildcard can be very useful at the end of the season for dodging around a Blank Gameweek, and/or optimising your squad for a Bench Boost play in a Double Gameweek. Or just for adapting to a major 'turn' in fixture-difficulty for a lot of teams. Having a few gaps in your squad at the start of the second half of the season is not a sufficient reason to give up such an important chip.

2)  I will not buy Dominic Calvert-Lewin. (Yet...)

Arguably, we're already a little bit 'late' to be considering that. It might have been nice to get him 2 or 3 gameweeks back, when it was becoming apparent that Leeds had taken a major step forward in their performance level, and that big Dom had settled into a scoring groove again - rather than just enjoying a one-off (or two-off, or three-off...) stroke of untypical good fortune. But 6-in-a-row is an exceptional scoring streak for anyone, and it must be due for a break now. And Dom, bless him, has rarely managed to stay fit for this long in the last several seasons. Moreover, that run of good results for Leeds in December came from a big slice of good fortune with the fixtures: they met Liverpool, Chelsea, Palace and Sunderland when they were woefully out of form. They are still at the bottom end of the table for a reason, and have few if any 'easy' fixtures; in the next couple of months, they might struggle to pick up points from anyone except Everton and Forest. Admittedly, Calvert-Lewin could be a handy 'budget enabler', if you were to decide you wanted to bring in Ollie Watkins or Hugo Ekitike. But I would imagine that most people are currently content with Thiago and Woltemade, who have generally been in excellent form, and have very nice runs of fixtures coming up.

3)  I will not buy Cole Palmer. (Yet. Or, probably, ever. Not this season, that is.)

Now, I am a huge fan of Cole Palmer. I think he's the best advanced playmaker we have in the Premier League. Only Foden and Odegaard come anywhere close; but Foden's much less consistent, and Odegaard far less of a goal threat - so, not that close. But Chelsea are a mess at the moment: no balance in the side, no consistency. And Joao Pedro and Liam Delap have not provided the answer to their scoring problem; they probably now regret letting Nicolas Jackson go! Now, 'Ice' Cole is capable of carrying a team on his own, and he might yet go off on a scoring streak, once he's fully regained his fitness. But it feels like that might still be some way off. With Chelsea's current form, his prospects don't look strong enough to be bringing him into your squad on spec.

4)  I will not bet on either Arsenal or City to win the title.

It's a two-horse race this year, and, at the moment, too close to call. I've long had a hunch that City will edge it - largely because they're so much more free-scoring: they'll rarely or never drop any points just from conceding a single goal; Arsenal probably will. But I think it would be rash to put money on that hunch. The outcome could well turn on significant injuries for one or other contender; losing Haaland would surely be catastrophic for City; but so might losing Saka or Saliba or Raya for Arsenal. Let's hope they both keep their full rosters intact, and give us a thrilling title battle right through to the end of the season.

5)  I will not laugh at Manchester United.

Well, you've got to have at least one that you know you're going to break almost immediately, and you're happy to allow yourself that. Even with some 'better' performances finally emerging (and a long overdue departure from the unbalanced, ineffective 3-4-3 system to which Amorim had been so stubbornly wedded for the whole of his first year), I still don't have much confidence for their season. They'll still almost certainly be the year's most risible under-performers - a club with pretensions to being European champions again who struggle to finish mid-table in their domestic league... And they accomplish this non-achievement with such an inventive array of foot-shooting every year, they have been a reliable source of mirth ever since Fergie retired. [Ha! - well, it looks like I'll be able to adhere to this one after all. With the United ownership finally putting an end to the Amorim fiasco just a few days into the New Year, we were suddenly able to start seeing again what such a talented group of players is really capable of. With the remarkably impressive start they've made under Michael Carrick's tenure as manager, they're starting to look as if they might even have a slight chance of getting into the title conversation! It's nice to have one of the tradtional 'Big Six' getting back to those sorts of levels. Competition at the top of the league feels a bit thin this year, with Liverpool and Chelsea still floundering rather - and Spurs again flirting with relegation.]

Now, of course, the 'resolutions' above about player choices or chip play might seem to be purely hypothetical for me, as some will remember that I got excluded from the game this year by a maddening FPL glitch at the start of the season. However, I am still 'playing along' on my own. And I empathise with all those who are still in the fray, still battling for mini-league glory.... So, I hope these observations may prove of some use.

A 'mini Free Hit' as well as a 'mini Wildcard'??

 

FPL's unnecessarily generous gift of extra Free Transfers in Gameweek 16 (another pointless innovation this year, supposedly meant to ease the possible impact of departures for the African Cup of Nations - although that has never been a big issue in FPL; and this year, it's a complete non-event, as no-one with any sense currently has any African players other than Bryan Mbeumo) is effectively a mini-Wildcard, enabling us to undertake a modest squad rebuild in mid-December.

However, it must be noted that this is not a gift of a fixed number of transfers (5), but only a top-up - to a maximum number of 5 Free Transfers. Hence, in order to take full advantage of it, you have to use up any existing Free Transfers you have in Gameweek 15 (e.g., if you still have 2 saved transfers going into GW16, you only get 3 new ones, to bring you up to the total of 5 all told).

I quite like the idea of trying to save up some transfers over the next few gameweeks (though that might not be possible, as injuries tend to come thick and fast at this time of year!), so that you can play 2 or 3 together in Gameweek 15 - perhaps even the full quota of 5 FTs in one fell swoop, if you're already carrying forward some saved ones. 

Since you'll have the opportunity for a similar big shake-up in the very next gameweek, with the AFCON Christmas present, this could be a one-week-only revision of your team - in effect, an extra Free Hit! 

But as this would only be a 'virtual' Free Hit, not the actual chip, you would be able to to play another chip that week. And as I said the other week, Gameweek 15 is a moderately promising prospect for a Bench Boost play, with a number of unbalanced fixtures you might want to exploit. (Although it's a bit of a risky bet for that chip, as there may be a high risk of fatigue, injury absences, or sudden rest rotations in what is the third gameweek scheduled within 7 days.)  Even for just the starting eleven, though, it's an unusual group of fixtures where you could benefit from putting out a one-off custom team. And 'optimizing' for this gameweek opportunity with saved transfers would enable you to hang on to your actual Free Hit (well, assuming you've still got it...) as insurance against a possible game-postponement emergency later in the month.  Something to think about.

Always risky to play a chip after a break

 

Well, certainly one of the 'bonus' chips (and as I said yesterday, the Free Hit should really be regarded as one of these too). Though, in fact, even a Wildcard play is a bit of a shakey proposition directly after an international break, as you really want your new selections to return good points for you straight away.... and in these gameweeks, there is too much uncertainty about that.

WHY?  Because the disruption of the usual club routines for the better part of two weeks tends to have a negative impact on team and individual form, and makes game outcomes more unpredictable.

Certainty, of course, is impossible in a game like FPL; but if you're going to risk one of your valuable bonus chips, or implement a major rebuild with the Wildcard, you want to have a high degree of confidence that all of your players are likely to have good games. And you just can't have that level of confidence about likely performances in the gameweek straight after a break, just as you can't in the early weeks of the season, after the summer lay-off.

Even if players aren't physically fatigued by long-distance flights and heavy game-minutes, and haven't picked up some injury niggle that hasn't yet been publicly announced, they can often be emotionally depleted by a particularly high-stakes game (especially in this most recent break, where World Cup qualification was on the line for many teams). But more importantly, their usual routines have been broken: they've been playing with different teammates, working with different coaches, implementing different game tactics and set-piece routines to what they're used to with their clubs. And when they return, they have limited time to get back in the swing of things, with only a day or two of training before their next league match; detailed tactical preparation, in particular, can be very difficult on such a tight schedule. And even the players who stayed at their clubs, while they should be feeling fresh and well-rested, will also have missed out on full training with their regular teammates for 10 days or so.

This is why we get so many wild fluctuations in form, so many 'unexpected' results straight after a break - and thus, why it's such a big, and probably unwise, gamble to play one of your FPL chips in such a gameweek.

[I'm here trying to kick off a new series, where I aim to sum up a key idea about FPL rather more pithily than usual (though I don't have the knack of brevity, I know!), with the main point being stated in the post title. I realise at least some of the entries in my other attempt at a more concise series of posts, 'In a nutshell', may also qualify for this new category. I may have to ponder on whether there's any value in having two labels.]

How much is a Bench Boost worth?

I thought I'd better follow up on yesterday's post about calculating the value of the Triple Captain chip with a companion piece on its cousin, the other 'bonus chip', the Bench Boost.

As with the Triple Cap, FPL managers often like to self-deceive about the extent of their success in playing this chip. Because the points scored by all 15 squad players will be counted for the gameweek when this chip is in play, they will often protest that team selection "doesn't mattter" - and so contrive to accidentally-on-purpose leave some of their best players on the bench. If 'bench players' end up recording 2 or 3 - or even 4! - of their best individual scores of the week, then of course it will appear that their bench collectively produced enormous points,... and that can all be credited to a canny deployment of the Bench Boost chip, so these folks like to claim. But of course, that just ain't so.

Even if we go through the motions of trying to make a normal team selection, with the players who look likely to have the week's shakiest points prospects left on the bench, many of us may still fall prey to this idea that "it doesn't really matter" and be a bit lazy or hasty in deciding the starting eleven; even if we're not consciously stacking the bench with some of our more promising prospects, we might subconsciously be guilty of it. 

And even if, by a freak of good fortune, the 4 poorest prospects left on your bench have returned uncommonly well, contrary to your honest expectations - that isn't worth much if a lot of your starters have returned 'blanks'. The Bench Boost is indeed a reward for collective excellence, and you ought to evaluate it in terms of the overall return from all 15 players.

I follow two 'rules of thumb' for gauging the success of playing my Bench Boost:

1)  Decide my 'bench players' after the event, based on the lowest points returned from my squad (bearing in mind the 'formation rules' on eligible team selection): thus, I only count 4 of my lowest player scores as the value of the Bench Boost.

2)  Consider my squad total score against the gameweek's 'Global Average', to get an idea of how much bettter I did - if at all - than in a typical non-Bench Boost gameweek. (I typically manage around 10 points better than the 'Global Average'; in a 'good' week, around 15 or so better. So, I don't consider I've had a successful Bench Boost unless it's put me at least 25-30 points above the 'Global Average'. I'll make mental adjustments to that rough scale of comparison, based on how high-scoring or low-scoring a gameweek it was [and, of course, there will be some gameweeks where huge numbers of people are playing the Bench Boost, which complicates this calculation!]. But in most gameweeks, 15 points above 'Global Average' would probably still represent a very poor return on the Bench Boost, and 20-25 points barely adequate.)

Now, in practice, your Bench Boost is rarely going to be worth all that much - because, inevitably, you have your weakest players left on the bench. And, very often, you'll find that at least one of your squad doesn't play that week for some reason, so you'll only have 3 players (or sometimes even fewer....) contributing from your bench. Typically your bench consists of a back-up goalkeeper, a rarely-used (and perhaps ultra-cheap) 5th defender, and whoever your other 2 weakest players look likely to be on that week's fixtures. It's not a recipe for huge points!

That being the case, the Bench Boost can benefit significantly more from a Double Gameweek than the Triple Captain does: because these are players who are unlikely to produce any big returns, even minimum 'appearance points' from a second fixture will give a useful proportional boost to their total for the gameweek. However, if you follow my austere policy of only counting your lowest-returning players as comprising the value of your Bench Boost, you really need just about the entire squad to be enjoying a double-fixture (if only your usual bench players have double fixtures, they'd probably become preferred starters for that gameweek, and your 'true' bench, with only single fixtures. would probably not score quite as well) - and BIG Double Gameweeks like that don't happen any more. (The only week where we could sometimes see 12-16 Premier League teams enjoying a Double Gameweek at the same time was when FA Cup Quarter-Final participants would have their League games from that weekend all rescheduled to the same gameweek [and that didn't always happen; sometimes they were split...]. But since last season, the Premier League is suspending its match programme on the Quarter-Final weekend, so we don't get any postponements from that any more.)

This season, we've been given the novelty gimmick of a 2nd Bench Boost, only valid for the first half of the season - when there are no Double Gameweeks anyway! And as I observed in relation to the Triple Captain chip earlier in the season, now that Double Gameweeks are so few and so small, there's no reliable advantage in them any more (to be attractive possibilities for etiher type of Bonus Chip, at least one of the two fixtures for each of your players needs to be against a really easy opponent; and you have no idea if that is going to be the case until very shortly beforehand). 

It is a huge risk to wait until the last few weeks of the season on such a slim possibility of a slightly enhanced return for those chips; it's certainly not worth passing up favourable combinations of fixtures in gameweeks earlier in the season.

As I mentioned last week, it's best to stay agile and be prepared to play your Bench Boost opportunistically - any time when you feel really confident that all 15 of your squad players are going to start, and most of them, at least, are facing promising fixtures.

Of course, it also helps if you've managed to assemble a particularly strong squad, and one that is especially targeted towards the gameweek's weaker fixtures. In the past, we've generally liked to try to play the Bench Boost chip immediately following a Wildcard, so that our squad is fully optimized for form and fitness, and for the coming week's fixtures. 

Since last season, the new rule allowing us to bank up to 5 Free Transfers has effectively given us the theoretical opportunity of further 'mini-Wildcard' plays, where we could substantially remodel our squads if we've managed to save up extra transfers for a few weeks. In practice, it's incredibly difficult to save 5 FTs - and probably self-harming to try! - but being able to use even 2 or 3 transfers at once can be a significant advantage in optimizing the squad for a Bench Boost attempt. And, of course, remodelling this way, rather than with a Wildcard, enables you to make your changes right on the eve of the gameweek, thereby minimizing the risk of injuries removing some of your squad (a major hazard, if you're having to 'set up' for your Bench Boost using a Wildcard the week before).

Also, this season we have the further unnecessary gimmick of being given additional Free Transfers in Gameweek 16 (supposedly to ease the impact of players departing for AFCON; but at the moment, it's looking very unlikely that anyone will own any African players... apart from Bryan Mbeumo). The odd way this GIFT is being implemented - giving us extra Free Transfers, up to a maximum holding of 5 of them - means that, in order to best take advantage of this measure, we need to use up all of our existing Free Transfers by Gameweek 15. And if we've managed to save up quite a few of them, Gameweek 15 might then be a promising opportunity for the first Bench Boost. Or Gameweek 16, when we'll suddenly find ourselves magically in possession of another 5 Free Transfers. Or possibly even in Gameweeks 17 or 18, when we should still be reaping the advantages of those recent major rebuilds.  (FPL's needless largesse in Gameweek 16 could also be seen as giving us an additional 'mini' Free Hit in the preceding Gameweek: we could use saved Free Transfers to substantially recast our squad for one week only, undoing all of the changes again immediately with the extra transfers being given us for the start of AFCON.)   [I wrote a follow-up piece here - with a bit more detail on this issue of which gameweeks (in the first half of the current season) look most propitious for possibly playing the Bench Boost.]

However, even if you have managed to optimally 'set up' your squad to use this chip, you should consider 10-15 points - fairly counted - for your Bench Boost as adequate; anything around 20 is a very good return; and 25+ is absolutely outstanding.

But, again, as with the Triple Captain, you should temper your expectations, and realise that the chip can easily return little or nothing. If you have a dismal Bench Boost score this season,.... maybe you'll get a big one next time. That's how the game goes.