Early drafters serve ONE useful purpose

 

Yesterday, I pilloried the pointless, self-destructive practice of drafting multiple versions of your first squad (starting weeks before the season even kicks off, when you just have no idea what opening day lineups are going to be at any club!).

There is, however, one useful thing you can sometimes glean from watching other people doing this. (Apart from taking encouragement that you're almost certainly going to do better this season than all of these poor fools!)

Because most of these folks are complete IDIOTS (not all of them; some are just sorely misguided, in having allowed themselves to fall into this bad habit.,... and then having somehow persuaded themselves that it is a good thing), there is a strange kind of collective unwisdom in their decisions - and thus, you can fairly reasonably assume that anyone a lot of them are choosing is probably A BAD SELECTION. (Any slightly more improbable, left-field sort of pick, anyway, especially at the budget end. Wirtz is obviously a strong prospect; De Cuyper isn't.)

I generally recommend not looking at what anyone else is doing - especially in pre-season! But if you do sneak an occasional peek at some of the FPL forums, and see them logjammed with people eagerly sharing these daft 'provisional squads', keep an eye out for the very common picks: they're probably best avoided.

"Measure twice, cut once..."

 

The old woodworker's adage is a proverb of universal relevance.

In the realm of Fantasy Football, it reminds us that we must always begin by gathering all the relevant information to guide a decision. Then, we should doublecheck everything and reconsider, just to be on the safe side. 

After that.... we can finally take swift, confident, decisive action.

For FPL managers now, the 'measuring' is watching the pre-season unfold, slowly assessing all the new information coming in about possible lineup and formation changes at the Premier League clubs, weighing up the possible implications of all of this. The 'cutting' is finally using all of that information to choose the initial squad.

I have said many times that beginning 'drafting' possible squads weeks before the season begins is worse than merely a waste of time, it is positively harmful to your final selection. The landscape of relative player values is constantly changing over the last few weeks before the first kick-off, and you simply don't know which players are playing for which clubs, who's fit, who seems likely to be a preferred starter etc. until right before the first FPL deadline. (Actually, you don't really know until a few weeks into the season! But you have almost no idea at all until the day of the first kick-off.)

If you're going to 'draft' at all, you should do it only in your head. That way it remains more fluid and provisional, less likely to solidify into obstinate prejudices. It's also good mental training, sharpening up your mind to constantly juggle with points and pounds alternatives. (Chess players don't map out every conceivable progression of moves on a board; they can visualize them in their mind's eye. It's not actually that difficult a skill to develop; you just have to practise it a bit.)

Moreover, you should do that only at the very last minute, as you're actually compiling your initial squad for the season. That way, it shouldn't gum up your thinking with dumb, outdated choices - as early drafting inevitably does.

Draft only one squad, on deadline day. Restrict any preliminary work on it to mental rumination in the last hour or so before you finalise it. That's it.

Starting to even think about a squad NOW is stupid, self-harming. Going through multiple draft versions serves no useful purpose at all. 

AWAY with all of that nonsense!!

Now we are ONE

 

Gosh, yes - it is ONE YEAR AGO TODAY since I started this blog!

I wasn't at all sure back then that I would persist with it this long. (And I don't know how much longer I'll continue with it. But at the moment, I'm still having fun with it. And I still don't have a proper job....)

It does seem I am starting to build something of a following. According to Google statistics, at least, most of my posts are racking up 10 or so 'unique page views' within a day or two (although I suspect a lot of this is just Web spider-bots rather than genuine traffic...), and overall I'm drawing in 400 or so visits per week (with a sharp rise during the recent Club World Cup).

I haven't yet identified any 'regular readers' - but it would seem likely that there are at least a few such out there now. My THANKS to you for your time. I hope I am - at least occasionally - making it worth your while to come here.

And I think I'll probably be soldiering on with this for at least one more year.....

What can we DO....

... to prepare for the new FPL season??

Well, the best advice is really..... to do NOTHING.

I, for one, will be spending at least the next two weeks or so enjoying a beach view, a cold beer, and a good book. (Figuratively, at least! The scene above was reality for me a couple of months back; but now I just have to rely on my imagination.)

 

I wouldn't pay any attention to the constant swirl of transfer 'news'. So much of it is unfounded speculation, wishful thinking.... It's only likely to frustrate you. And confuse you as to who's playing for which club next season!

And I certainly wouldn't waste any time 'drafting' possible squads. Too much can and will change before the Big Kick-Off: transfers, injuries, players falling out with their managers, surprising new formations/tactics/team selections emerging in the last of the warm-up games....  We just don't have a complete picture of the selection landscape yet; and we won't until Friday the 15th of August. Making 'preliminary' selections now is way premature: it only clouds your thinking and locks you into poor decisions. It is a very bad idea, harmful to your eventual squad selection.

All you can reasonably do to start getting ready for the new season is:

Check out the League fixtures (and FPL's preliminary - probably not very helpful! - estimation of their relative 'difficulty').

Make a mental note of the FA Cup and League Cup schedules too (this lets you know where the Blank and Double Gameweeks are set to occur later in the season).  And perhaps take a gander at the schedule for the European competitions (though this UEFA official page is a bit of a mess; there's probably an easier-to-read resource out there somewhere; the Sky Sports summary of the Champion League situation, for example).

Also, note the dates of the international breaks this season, and of the African Cup of Nations, which will take a lot of players away from the Premier League in December/January.

And while I warned just above against obssessively following transfer 'news', I think it's OK to check in occasionally on the emerging landscape of confirmed transfers. I find Fantasy Football Scout's Transfer Updates page the best resource for this.

Be aware of the unfolding schedule of pre-season friendly matches - and try to watch as many as you can (at least, those involving the teams you're most interested in).

And although there's such a gulf in class these days between the Championship and the top flight that the performance of the newly promoted sides last season is of little or no relevance to how they might get along this year,.... well, those teams do generally offer up one or two handy budget options for FPL (especially early in the season, when your squad finances are very tight!), so it might be worth doing a bit of research on them, digging out highlights of some of their games on Youtube.

But that's it - that's all you can usefully do at this stage,.... all you should do.  NO 'drafting'!!

Take it easy for another couple of weeks!!

Wooing the masses

I said in my first  - no, the second - of a series of bitter posts over the past week about the new changes in FPL this season that I assumed the overlords of the game were motivated by a desire to increase its reach and appeal - to draw in more participants.

Now, unfortunately, making the game easier and adding lots of shiny new gimmicks to it probably will entice in a lot of new players. But they will probably be players with fairly low levels of engagement, the sort who might easily become bored and drift away again.

I think there are some better ways to achieve a lasting growth in participating numbers. (After all, even the 10 million+ level achieved over the last few years is still pretty tiny compared to the Premier League's global following. According to this survey from the start of last season, the number of online followers [these days, usually preferred to official fan club enrolment as a gauge of 'popularity'] for all 20 EPL clubs was nearly 360 miillion. And of course, a lot of football fans around the world enjoy watching the League without necessarily supporting one particular team, or without choosing to 'follow' that team... So, the actual number of interested viewers is far, far higher. The League's 'potential viewership' is often rated at over 2 billion!)

Here are my suggestions:

1)  More effective promotion

Apart from a few short TV shows and podcasts, there's really very little other effective outreach to make people more aware of the game. As I noted the other day, FPL has only just got itself a Whatsapp account (at least a decade after the rest of the world started going mad for the platform). Its Facebook page is LAME beyond belief. And I don't think they even have their own Instagram account.

Actual advertisements would be a good idea. The Premier League could probably lean on clubs to provide some adverts on pitchside hoardings cheap or free. Doing a few roadshow events could be a huge help too; that would then get them a lot of free local media coverage, as well as some 'social media' buzz.

And FPL could surely do more to work with media partners to promote the game. Major national/regional broadcasters, in particular, have a vested interest in creating more excitement around their EPL coverage (because it keeps their viewership up, and thus enhances their revenue returns from the sport), and enccouraging more participation in FPL should help with that.

And yes, doing this sometimes in other languages, and making some targeted initiatives to increase awareness in countries with big Premier League fanbases, might also give a massive boost to the game's enrolment - which leads to my next point...

2)  Multi-lingual content

Does FPL even provide subtitled versions of its TV shows/podcasts (I've never seen any sign of such)?? Or translated versions of its website and Facebook page (and tweets and whatever)?? Let alone any original content in languages other than English?!  The EPL has an enormous following in Malaysia and Indonesia; but FPL doesn't seem to do much if anything to build its following in those constituencies. The EPL has an enormous following in China; but, last time I looked, that country had scarely any FPL players. (According to this survey, fewer than 10,000; although I have no idea how authoritative this might be - there isn't even a date on it, but the figures quoted for other countries suggest it's fairly recent).

3)  More and better prizes

I already mentioned this point in my '5 Wishes' for the new FPL season a couple of months back. With millions of pairs of eyes on the game every week, it really ought to be capable of generating enough revenue to provide a very substantial prize fund. At the moment, the season's Global Champion wins a weekend break in London; most of the other prizes (not even that many in total!) are little more than a 'lucky bag'. It's pathetic, ludicrous. 

Five or six-figure cash prizes (in US dollars/euros/pounds) ought to be possible. Although, rather than have really huge prizes for a few top achievers (I think low five-figures ought to be enough!), I'd prefer to see lots and lots of more modest prizes: monthly jackpots for winners and at least a few runners-up in all the country leagues, and perhaps some of the larger 'public' leagues as well (broadcasters could surely be persuaded to put up their own prize funds for leagues run in their name?).

Simple stuff.  But do we see any sign of this from the FPL organisation? NO. Only a deluge of more bloody silly GIMMICKS every year!

A failure of UNDERSTANDING

 

The thing that has annoyed me most about the welter of - mostly dumb, pointless, inept - changes that FPL suddenly rolled out last weekend, was this irritating little slogan they appended to some of them... in apparent justification or celebration.

More points. More choice. More fun.

This, to me, suggests a fundamental failure to understand the essence of the Fantasy Premier League game - by the very people who preside over it!   God help us.....

Making more points available is not automatically an improvement. 

In fact, making additional points easily available for everyone is exactly the reverse: it undermines the purpose of the game. The game is supposed to be HARD; points are only supposed to be earned by detailed knowledge and shrewd judgement, hard work and perseverance. The fewer points there are available, the fiercer the competition for them becomes.

Games like this become more skillful - and more satisfying - if choice is constrained. If you only have an initial budget of 100 million, you have to make some very tough choices about which of the top players you can afford. If you only get one Free Transfer per week, you're forced to make compromises about players you hanker to swap out. If you only have one Wildcard or Triple Captain chip, you have to think very carefully about the optimum gameweek in which to play them; but if you add in a Free Hit, a Bench Boost, a second Wildcard,... and then a second one of each of those 'chips',... those choices are devalued, trivialised by becoming too frequent an option.

And it's not supposed to be 'FUN'. This game is a long hard slog through frustration and injustice; it is not to be enjoyed, it is to be survived.

Sadly, it appears that not only do the Lords of FPL Towers not know what they're doing, they don't know WHY they're doing it.

If there isn't a big shake-up in the management of the FPL organisation this season, I fear I'm going to have to quit the game. These idiots are threatening to run it into the ground.

#NoMoreChanges

A little bit of Zen (52)

 

"I can think. I can fast. And I can wait."

Siddhartha - character in the book of the same name by Herman Hesse

"If you can wait, and not grow tired of waiting...."

Rudyard Kipling (from his poem, 'If')

"When there's nothing else that you can do, all you can do is wait. And accept the waiting with equanimity."

GW

People have been getting so uptight about the delayed relaunch of the Fantasy Premier League game this year. Vain and foolish, a waste of emotional energy.

Ungrateful children! Every day without FPL is a precious gift from heaven - and you spurn it, resent it!

[Even now that FPL's been relaunched, we still have three glorious weeks of indolence to enjoy before the Premier League season kicks off again....]

(In Hesse's novel, the protagonist Siddhartha is an Indian nobleman and younger contemporary of the Buddha, who embarks on a lifelong quest for spiritual enlightenment, mirroring key elements of Buddhist belief, but striving to attain these insights independently, rather than being guided by external teachings.

The wealthy merchant Kamaswami, when a young, itinerant Siddhartha seeks employment with him, challenges him to list his capablilities or accomplishments that might be useful to him; and he replies with the line above - which I've always thought was rather cool.

There's a very good - rather oneiric - 1972 film adaptation, starring the great Indian actor Shashi Kapoor in the title role.

The pithy triplet is repeated online in different orders, so my rendition above may not be canonical. I'm probably recalling - or misrecalling! - the version in the film. )

Everything WRONG with 'defensive points'

 

I ran through the other big changes to FPL this season a couple of days ago, but this is the really HUGE one, and I thought it needed a post of its own.

In the first change to the basic scoring system since the game's inception 20-odd years ago, FPL is all-of-a-sudden proposing to give additional points for defensive actions: players will now earn 2 points if they register 10 or more clearances, blocks, interceptions, or tackles in a game. (Midfielders and forwards are eligible for these points too, but very unlikely to qualify [apart from your ball-winning monsters like Caicedo and Rodri!] - even with the token lift of gaining credit also for ball recoveries.)

There are more than a few things wrong with this.....

1)  All change is unwelcome, because it disrupts continuity

Especially changes to the fundamental points structure of the game! We like to have ready comparability of data - for ourselves and for players - between the current season and previous ones. That goes out of the window as soon as you start tinkering with points allocations. (This was a principal objection to the introduction of the 'Assistant Manager' option last season - a three-week 'bonus chip' that offered the prospect of perhaps 80 or more additional points in the season.)  Whatever 'flaws' it might have, the scoring system essentially has to remain sacrosanct: if you change the scoring system, you're making it a different game.

2)  All change is unwelcome, because it confounds predictability

Tinkering with the points system skews the fundamental dynamics of the game. FPL has suddenly realised that the game's points structure is 'unfair' to defensive players?! But it - and every other similar game - has had this 'problem' for decades now, and it has shaped our entire approach to Fantasy management. This is why defenders (and defensive midfielders) are priced so much lower than other outfield players, why we don't allocate so much of our budget to them, why we usually only ever start three of them, why we're content to have one or two weak (occasionally even non-starting) defenders on our bench at the start of the season to stretch the budget....  Is all of this now going to change?? If it is, we need more information about the possible impact of the changes,... and more warning of their implementation. [See further below]

3)  'Cumulative' actions as a basis for points are clunky

At present, all direct points awards are made for single - obvious, relatively straightforward - game events (well, apart from goalkeeper 'saves', where the counting is highly dubious, and you only get 1 point for every 3 'saves' credited). There may occasionally be problems of attribution (especially with 'assists' and 'own goals'), but essentially you know when one of your players has scored direct points (rather than 'bonus points', which are vexingly opaque). Awarding points on a ticker, where your guy only qualifies for them after reaching an arbitrary total of (multiple different) game actions is going to be a completely opaque process: we won't often have any idea when our players have earned these points - we're just going to have to take it entirely on trust from FPL (and Opta, or whoever). That in itself is fundamentally unsatisfying. But it is also rife with the potential for controversy over 'miscounting': how vexing will it be if your star centreback or midfield stopper is only credited with 8 or 9 'defensive actions' when you feel quite sure he racked up substantially more than that?  Even more vexing, perhaps, when a powderpuff player owned by one of your arch-rivals gets credited with 10 'defensive actions' out of nowhere, while your much more robust defensive choice is unaccountably spurned... (We have far too much of this already with the impenetrable eccentricities of the Bonus Points System!!)

4)  Completely unclear how this is going to be tallied

No definitions are offered for any of these actions (much less illustrative examples); so, many of them are inevitably going to be ambiguous, contentious. There is a lot of scope for overlap between the four (five) different varieties of eligible action: is a player to receive double, or even triple credit if an action falls into more than one category - if, for example, a 'tackle' also results in a 'clearance'; or where an 'interception' leads to a 'ball recovery'?  At the moment, we have no clue. (And one suspects the FPL bigwigs haven't even thought about this...)  Do you suppose they'll even share with us the 'defensive contributions' total for every player in the Gameweek (fully itemised for the different eligible categories)? They bloody well ought to, but I fear they might not...

5)  A perverse points structure

Why is the threshold for earning these points set so high? Why do we immediately move from 0 points to 2 points, making that threshold even more crucial?  Why is the 'defensive points' award capped at ONE per game??  (A player who registers 22 eligible actions in a game is only going to get the same reward as someone who dubiously scrapes over the line with a supposed count of 10? How is that fair??)  Surely - if we were going to start acknowledging defensive contributions in this way - it would have made far more sense to offer 1 extra point for every so many elgiible actions (6 or 8, perhaps)?

6)  Uncertain impact

From similar experiments in other tournaments (points were awarded for 'ball recoveries' in Fantasy Euros last summer, for instance), it had appeared that very few players were ever managing to register more than 3 'defensive actions' (as mysteriously 'defined' by the game's rulers) in a single game, and it thus seemed that achieving a game total of 10 - even for a broad range of such actions - might be nearly impossible. However, FPL has revealed that a few players, at least, managed to do it 20 times last season! That could represent a seismic shift for FPL. But, so far, the game's authorities have only shared with us token 'top ten' lists of the defenders and midfielders who would have performed best under this points regime last season. We need far more information than this to guide our selections this season: we need to know every player's projected performance for last year (and, ideally, for a few years further back than that - maybe even for every season that they've played in the Premier League). Where this change is likely to have most impact is with cheaper defenders who score particularly well on this metric, and may possibly have a 10-15 point advantage on it over some of their more expensive colleagues, or at least over their same-priced peers. But we have no idea who those players might be!  [I had thought for one giddy moment that at least they were going to show us a global total of 'defensive points' for every player for last season on the 'Stats' page,  if not a breakdown of how they'd fared on each particular elgible action. But, alas, NO: they've added that category to the 'Stats' page for the coming season, but have not provided any historical data on this metric for previous seasons. And it's not yet clear what they'll be adding - if anything - about 'defensive points' to the individual 'Player Information' screens...]

7)  Abrupt introduction, lack of adequate preparation (consultation, trials!)

As I mentioned in my post on the other new changes this season, FPL really ought not to introduce any changes - certainly not one as major and as massively disruptive as this - without careful pre-planning. Ideally, that should include extensive consultation with its community, and also some public trialling of the new points rules. It is not enough to provide a few gobbets of selective information about their impact for a handful of players; we need to have been able to watch those potential impacts unfolding in real time, for every player - over at least the second half of last season.

8)  No thought given to the knock-on effects through the rest of the game?!

If this change is really going to mean that substantial numbers of defenders and defensive midfielders (30 or 40 of them, maybe more?) might be capable of earning at least 30-40 additional points per season, that is a very substantial change to the dynamics of the game - and it ought to be reflected in the pricing. Thus far, it appears not to have been. [Actually, it does appear that prices have been tweaked a bit. I haven't been able to attempt a thorough survey, but it looks very much as though a lot of defenders have been bumped up in price by 0.5 million this year (so, there aren't nearly as many at the base level of 4.5 million as you'd usually expect); and there may have been some compensating suppression of prices for certain midfielders, to try to balance things up and keep the overall budget manageable. This seems like a bit of a half-arsed and inadequate treatment of the problem.] This could be an unmerited windfall for FPL managers this season, offering us unexpected value in some players we'd usually spurn (but FPL hasn't given us enough information to make shrewd choices about this in our initial squads; we're going to have to keep our eyes peeled in the opening weeks of the season, to see where the most appealing bargains might be). But I don't think that can be sustainable going forward. Player prices - and the points potential represented by your squad budget - are inextricably tied to the total points potential in the game. If you increase the points potential by changing the scoring system, that must have an inflationary impact on player values. And unless you can pull off some chicanery with 'resetting' the relative values of players, pruning prices elsewhere to compensate for the rise in value of top defenders and defensive midfielders (though that too is likely to be value-distorting, making some players exaggeratedly more attractive because 'underpriced'), you're going to have to increase the budget cap too. FPL doesn't seem to have given any thought to any of this yet.

My hunch is that these new 'defensive points' will, for the most part, prove to be nothing but a costly distraction. The main drawback in them is that players are likely to score highest on these new metrics in games where their team is under the cosh - and thus they're very unlikely to pick up clean sheets (or any attacking contributions) at the same time. That trade-off means that, over any short run of games, they probably won't in fact score better than the players you would more likely have selected in the past. 

They might, however, represent 'better value' - for the last one or two spots in your starting eleven, especially early in the season when budget is tight - over an extended run of games, if they can chip in these extra points with a dependable regularity. Strong performers like this seem likely to become the top value-for-money defensive choice, appealing options at least for the squad-filler places; those might well be not the highest total points-producers, but cheaper, generally quite unfancied players who unexpectedly pick up 10 or 20 points more than most of their defensive peers from the new rule.

But, in the midfield, regular goalscorers are certainly going to continue to offer far more points. And even in defence, despite the sharp shift in the past couple of seasons away from having full-backs link up with the wide attackers and make frequent overlapping runs into the final third, players who pick up frequent clean sheets and/or offer a significantly higher chance of occasional attacking contributions are still likely to be higher points producers.

These new 'defensive points' might ultimately prove to be just a bothersome irrelevance. But it's the uncertainty I can't stand. There was NO NEED to introduce a change like this. It's just thrown a spanner in the works!

#NoMoreChanges

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-CHANGES

 

Dear, oh dear - over this past weekend FPL Towers suddenly unleashed a deluge of announcements about changes to the game for the coming season: all completely unnecessary - and at best, ill thought-out, at worst, likely to be highly detrimental.

I said last year, amid the dismay and horror induced by the introduction of the vile 'Assistant Manager' chip,  that I feared even worse things might follow on from it in succeeding seasons. And such now is indeed happening. The folks in charge of our game seem to be desperately pursuing 'innovation' - presumably just to grab more attention for the game, to try to attract new players to join it,.... but evidently without giving any proper consideration to whether these changes are needed or useful.

They fail to appreciate that continuity is perhaps the chiefest virtue in a game like this: continuity, clarity, consistency,.. and hence predictability.

A wise man said, "If it ain't broke, don't break it."

FPL's executives need to take that message onboard. 

So, what are these changes?? Well, I'll try to briefly run through each of them, and explain why I'm unhappy with them.

1)  Multiple Extra Transfers for AFCON

We are apparently to receive a gift of extra Free Transfers (bringing us up to a maximum of 5) ahead of GW16 in mid-December, to make it easier to cope with members of our squads departing for the African Cup of Nations tournament. 

Completely unnecessary. It's only in every other cycle of AFCON that it more or less coincides with the Asian Cup, potentially depriving us of talents like Salah and Marmoush and Mitoma and Son at the same time. This is not one of those years: we only have to worry about African players. You're unlikely to ever have more than 4 or 5 of those at a time, probably far fewer; and it's really not difficult to move them out of your squad in advance - so long as you remember the African competition is happening! (With one or two top players, like Salah, it can be better to just leave them on your bench anyway - if they've gained a lot in value since you bought them, and you don't want to run the risk of losing that if you sell with a heavy hit from 'transfer tax', and then maybe have to buy back at more than you sold them for.)  And since the introduction last year of the rule allowing us now to save up to 5 Free Transfers (a rare - thus far, unique - example of an FPL rules tweak that actually makes sense and is an improvement to the game!), we could easily have dealt with this minor speedbump by saving up some of our regular transfers over the month or so preceding. All this new transfer allowance does is.... compel us to use up every one of our available transfers in GW15, so that we can feel we're fully taking advantage of it. Utterly bloody pointless!

This is a rule-change that is plainly just pandering to the more incompetent FPL managers - who couldn't remember to wipe their own bottoms if you didn't hand them the toilet-paper and a set of instructions on how to use it.

2)  TWO sets of chips

Yes, FPL is now giving us TWO of everything: 2 x Wildcards, 2 x Free Hits, 2 x Bench Boosts, 2 x Triple Captains - one of each for each half of the season.

Again, completely unnecessary.  We have generally only needed a Wildcard and Free Hit to deal with major fixture disruptions caused by the Cup competitions in the final third of the season; and there is a strong argument that even those aren't so necessary any more, since the really big Blank/Double Gameweek problem used to arise as a result of the FA Cup Quarter-Finals weekend - which no longer clashes with the Premier League schedule. Similarly, most people prefer to use their two bonus chips later in the season, particularly if one of the Double Gameweeks that happen then looks especially favourable. Extra chips in the first half of the season have comparatively little value, and there's certainly no pressing need for them.

And again, it's pandering to the less thoughtful, more superficial FPL managers, especially those who enjoy the game mainly for the thrill of gambling - taking silly chances on risks they haven't properly assessed. Those people would like to have a bonus chip in play EVERY WEEK.  And the way things are going,... FPL might soon make that wish come true for them. I - and most serious players of the game - will have quit long before that happens.

3)  Revision to the definition of 'assists'

Now, in principle, I'm not against this rule adjustment. I have complained many times about how players often seem to be denied an 'assist' purely because a lunging defender has got a toe-end to the pass they've played, even though that intervention sometimes does not drastically deflect the ball, and obviously does not prevent it from reaching the teammate who's going to score from it. Kaoru Mitoma seemed to be particularly hard done-by in this way: I think he's probably been unjustly denied at least 3 or 4 assists a season.

FPL has at least recognised that the core of this problem is the wildly subjective element of interpreting whether the eventual goalscorer was the originally 'intended recipient' of a partially intercepted pass, and are seeking to introduce more clarity and simplicity into the awarding of assists by scrapping this part of the definition.

However, this adjustment doesn't go nearly far enough. And probably only one or two freak cases like Mitoma may derive any noticeable benefit from it; otherwise, there will be just a handful of isolated instances through the year where it comes into play, for a different player each time. There are so many other problems with the concept of 'assists' - such as the fact that a player can receive credit for simply laying the ball off a mere foot or two, and indeed even for an unintended play such as an accidental deflection or a complete miskick. And I've long railed against the unfairness that the 'pre-assist' - the penultimate pass, which, far more often than the actual 'assist', is the one that really creates the goalscoring chance - gets no recognition at all, either in direct points or under the BPS (Cole Palmer might have a 400-point season in him if it did!!).

Moreover, FPL seem to have wilfully shot themselves in the foot even over this simple and uncontroversial enhancement to the rules - by introducing an arbitrary distinction between goal attempts inside and outside the penalty area; for some unfathomable reason, 'assisting' players will not get the benefit of this definition tweak if the goal is scored from outside the area. Now, probably this will crop up rarely, if ever; but whenever it does, it will create a new - and quite justified - sense of grievance,... as well as giving the potential for additional controversy as to where exactly the scoring player received the ball. Just completely NUTS!

4)  Tweaks to the BPS

Again, I'm in sympathy with the idea - but here it's been done in such an inept and half-arsed way that it's really just an annoyance rather than an improvement. These changes are utterly superficial, they barely even scratch the surface of the problems with the BPS.

All players are now to get the same BPS credits for scoring a penalty, which seems fair and reasonable; but it's still far too many credits, compared to the BPS rewards for most other game actions. And the fact that forwards still get way more BPS credit for scoring a non-penalty goal than other positions really makes no sense at all. Likewise, keepers are now getting 1 additional BPS credit for saving an attempt from inside the penalty box: again, it's still far too few points, given that a save - at least a really top-class one - is as valuable to a team as a goal at the other end; and creating the potential for controversy over whether shots from the very edge of the box were 'inside' or 'outside' (there is no need to make things more complicated, rather than less so). Goalkeepers are having their BPS credit for a 'penalty save' trimmed ever so slightly (too little to have any impact!); but they're still getting additional credit for a regular 'shot stopped' too - WHY???  Plus, of course, they already earn a massive direct points lift from a penalty save; and there seems to be no published definition of what constitutes a 'save' - do they still get those points and BPS credits if the opponent just skies it over the bar (because the keeper put him off...)?? It should now be a little bit easier for defensive players to get into bonus points contention if they make a lot of tackles, because their BPS score on that is now to be determined by 'successful' tackles rather than 'net' tackles (the surplus of tackles 'won' over tackles 'lost'); it's a bit more difficult to gauge how much of an impact this change might have, and it would seem fair and appropriate to tilt the balance of the BPS a little more towards defenders, since they mostly get close-to-zero recognition from it - but again, the number of credits awarded for a successful tackle is so small that a defensive player is really going to need to have a monster of a game to overhaul another player who's scored even one goal. The best tweak of the bunch is a substantial lift in the number of BPS credits given for a goalmouth clearance - but again, it's nowhere near as many as is given for a goal (and again, no definition is offered as to how close to the goal the clearance needs to be, or if it has to be a clearly deliberate action rather than just being-fortuitously-in-the-way of a shot).

I discussed the shortcomings of the BPS in some detail at the end of last season. As I see it, an effective overhaul of the system needs to reduce or eliminate 'double recovery' (at present, the BPS massively favours major game actions - goals, assists, saves - that are already rewarded with direct points,... while completely overlooking almost every other aspect of play. The BPS should cover a far greater variety of game actions, should drastically reduce the weight given to game actions that directly earn points, and should increase the weighting of other important actions - in both attack and defence - that do not directly earn points. That shouldn't be too difficult to sort out.

5)  New 'Elite' Leagues

This season, special leagues have been created for the 'Top 1%' and the 'Top 10%', on last season's performance.

Reasonable enough (for once...); in fact, long overdue (I'd always kind of assumed that leagues like this existed already!). The problem here is a dangerous lack of specificity: it hasn't been stated how those rankings are going to be calculated. I fear it's going to be done on the 'Overall' League - which might invite very ambitious folks who find themselves only a little outside eligibility to fire up some bot-farms to create hundreds - possibly even hundreds of thousands, or millions - of dummy accounts in the closing weeks of the season: accounts that serve no other  purpose than to inflate the total number of 'participants' and so increase the size of these 'elite' leagues for the following season. (Of course, this could be - and might be - done from the very start of the season, but I think the prospect of qualifying is going to be too remote and uncertain for anyone to think it's worth the trouble that far ahead.)

It would have made far more sense for FPL to specify that eligibility was going to be decided by standings in the 'Week 1' League - because all serious players make sure they're signed up before the start of the season; and anyone who does manage to get into the upper reaches of the rankings despite having missed out one or two whole weeks must necessarily have been absurdly lucky (even more absurdly lucky than all the people who managed it over 38 weeks; you just can't get anywhere near the top 1% in this game without being extraordinarily, outrageously lucky).

Or indeed, it might have been safer to go with a rigid cap on the number of enrants for these two new leagues: 100,000 and 1 million. That way, we wouldn't have to worry about the thresholds for qualification being artificially raised by the number of dummy accounts.

6)  Lots of new AI bells-and-whistles

We haven't seen yet what this is going to entail (apart from the silly gimmick of offering you the option of an AI-generated 'team badge' - and, really, who gives a flying fuck about that?!), but apparently it's going to be kind of an automating of 'The Scout' to give managers 'customized advice' every week.

More help for the clueless 'casual' player is really not what we want in the game; it just undermines the advantages that should reasonably be enjoyed by people who give their selections a bit more attention. I've seen a number of folks on the forums recently who've griped - not unreasonably - that 'The Scout' is already quite bad enough, reminding folks of stuff they really shouldn't need to be reminded of, and highlighting players who've come into top form. The only thing I console myself with is that - at the moment - people who lean heavily on 'The Scout's advice probably aren't doing all that well from it, because 'he' tends to throw up a mixture of mediocre and often outright terrible tips along with the good ones, and even on the good ones, 'he's usually rather late-to-the-party. And I don't suppose the full AI 'Scout' experience will be any better; at least, not at first. In another two or three years, perhaps the whole game of FPL will have just become computers playing against other computers. I'm sure there are already a lot of idiots out there asking ChatGPT to pick their squads.

7)  And.... ah, bless, they're on Whatsapp now

This may be an appealing development for those who live their lives on their smartphones. I resolutely abjure that lifestyle, so being able to receive content through Whatsapp is of zero interest to me.

This, I fear, is just a sign of how out of touch the folks at FPL are. Whatsapp has been a thing for, what, getting on for 15 years now; and increasingly ubiquitous over the last 7 or 8 years at least, as Facebook has progressively run itself into the ground. And they're only just establishing a Whatsapp account NOW? Heck, even I, the King of the Luddites, considered getting Whatsapp (and rejected the idea) several years ago....

8)  Some changes to the appearance too...

I haven't really spent any time on the site yet, but it looks as though the changes are all trivial, superficial, worthless: for the most part, they seem as though they're trying to make the web version look more like the mobile app - which may bring some 'improvement' for mobile users, but actually just makes things that little bit more irritating when you're logging in via a computer. 

I briefly entertained hopes that they might have done something to improve the godawful 'Player Info' screen (the leading recommendation for changes to the interface among many that I compiled at the end of the season); but in fact, they've made it even harder to navigate by making it SMALLER, rather than BIGGER (and it's still got those bloody - fiddly, hidden - slider bars!!! Aaaargh!!!). The only very small positive I've been able to find so far is that the 'Fixture Difficulty Rating' list now includes 9 gameweeks in its visible field rather than just 7 (though I very much doubt if they're going to allow you to scan back through previous weeks as well as future ones; we'll have to wait and see on that - another one of my many recommendations).

And, oh, I missed one..... yep, they're introducing a potentially HUGE & DISRUPTIVE change to the basic points system too. But that one will need a whole post of its own - in another day or two.

So, to my mind, really none of these changes has been unequivocally positive. Even the few that were seeking to address genuine issues of concern have done so in a frustratingly incomplete, inept manner. The larger ones, I would say, seem harmful rather than beneficial.

But even if these changes were better thought-out, I still wouldn't want to see so many of them launched upon us all together - and so suddenly, with no advance warning.

We really want stability in this game of ours: we want to see as few changes as possible.

I'd say, ideally, we don't want to see any kind of MAJOR CHANGE more than about once every 3-5 years. 

And that quota's been filled for a good long way ahead by the introduction of the '5 Free Transfers' rule (a rare good innovation!) last year. We could do without any more tinkering until towards the end of the decade now, at the very least.

And good grief, if you are going to introduce MAJOR CHANGES (like the doubled chips and extra AFCON transfers and the defensive points), that sort of thing ought only to be done after public consultation with your community and, with innovations that affect points awards (whether directly, or indirectly through the BPS) with extensive - public - trialling (show us examples of the changes in action, live, during the preceding season).

The information overload FPL visited on us this weekend was just a complete dog's breakfast. It made our FPL overlords look as if they shouldn't be left in charge of a village fete.

#NoMoreChanges

TOO MUCH of a BAD THING!!

The first few announcements about this season's player price changes finally started to drop on Sunday evening (obviously the ideal time to publish important notices!!). Usually, FPL likes to spin this process out over at least one week, sometimes more like two. And this year they are trying to boost 'user engagement' by supposedly running polls on their new Whatsapp account to determine whose price will be revealed next. This suggests that we might yet have to wait quite a while for the game to be relaunched.

The hold-up this year is likely due to an advertised incorporation of a bunch of new AI bells-and-whistles into the game (essentially automating 'The Scout' to give personalized player recommendations.... so that no-one has to pick their own teams any more??). I think that is something we could really live without. The headlong stampede towards the premature adoption of AI in every facet of online life has already RUINED Google, and Youtube (where at least half of new content, and just about 100% of the ads now seem to be entirely AI-generated). That kind of new software integration really needs a lot of testing (if it is to be done right; sadly, I suspect it won't be!), and that is almost certainly why the relaunch is already a week or so later than it has been in most recent years, and looks like it might still be another week or so away.

[Well, at least they did get the game live again on Monday evening! I suspect FPL Towers felt pressured into doing so more quickly than they had wanted because the intensity of the backlash from their community had been getting too much for them: every one of their inane new teaser posts - or announcements of yet another unnecessary change to the game dynamics - over the past few days had met with a torrent of scorn and derision and mounting wrathful impatience online.

Of course, the relaunch didn't go entirely smoothly. They still haven't cured the longstanding glitch that your password gets 'forgotten' every year, and you start off being apparently locked out of your account, having to go through a vexing password reset procedure (just to restore your original password...). Then, only the app version of the game appeared to be working, the web version still frozen in a perpetual 'update'; and many were reporting functionality problems on the app too. By Tuesday morning (still barely after midnight, UTC) things seemed to have got straightened out; but it was an inauspicious start to the new season.]

Oh, but wait - THERE'S MORE. Much, much MORE!!!

Over this past weekend, FPL has started up a fair old barrage of information-drops on other topics, a veritable TSUNAMI OF SHIT. There are to be major CHANGES to the game this season. And not just 1 or 2,..... but 3 or 4 or 5..... or??  Honestly, I've lost count. And it seems we might not be done yet! Even my planet-sized brain is overwhelmed, struggling to process all of this.

I will try to put out brief posts analysing - and criticising - each of the new changes at some point over the next few days. But first, we'd better wait for them to stop with this sensory overload.

One FPL commentator I occasionally follow has aptly summed up this MESS thus: "It's as if they asked ChatGPT for suggestions to improve the game, and then just ran with every single answer."

GOD HELP US! The folks at FPL Towers, the ones in charge of the game's design, are obviously a bunch of incompetent morons who are intent on destroying the game we so love. I am seriously tempted to abandon the official Fantasy Premier League for one of the rival versions run by newspapers and broadcasters and so on.

#NoMoreChanges

One last word on the Club World Cup

 

One slight variation on the common complaints against the Club World Cup (petty jibes which I further castigated at the start of this week) seemed to become even more prevalent in the days following the Final. It's really just a riff on the selfish resentment that 'my team wasn't in it'; this time that gripe is expanded - so as to try to dodge charges of parochial self-interest - into a more general claim that the competition was 'worthless' because so many of the world's top teams were not taking part in it. One commenter I saw particularly amused me with the absurd assertion that fully 'half' of the world's best teams were missing from the tournament!

OK, we have to grant that the absences of Barcelona and Liverpool were regrettable. (If FIFA was willing to bend over backwards to contrive the participation of Leo Messi, could they not have performed similar contortions to include Mo Salah and Lamine Yamal??)  And one might perhaps add Ajax to that list - consistently the best Dutch team, although their great side of a few years ago is, sadly, almost entirely broken up. But aside from that, can you name even one or two teams, let alone half a dozen or more remotely as good as PSG or Bayern Munich or Real Madrid or Manchester City or Inter Milan - or, yes indeed, the suddenly renascent Chelsea? [Manchester United fans, let it go. You're just making yourselves look ridiculous and pathetic. You haven't even been a force in English football for a dozen years now.] And let us not forget the high standard of competitors we saw from the rest of the world: Inzaghi's Al-Hilal and the Brazilian teams, in particular, produced some outstanding football, and were worthy opponents for Europe's best.

And then you get down to the 'second tier' of European entrants - mostly rather disappointing in the tournament, but still 'big' names, and with a significant enough record in European competitions to justify their inclusion: Juventus, Dortmund, Atletico Madrid, Benfica, Salzburg. It's pretty difficult to name any omitted clubs better than those. Doing well in your domestic league last season clearly isn't enough: this selection is based on a four-year timeframe, and you need to have established some consistency in continental competitions over that period. Atalanta are probably the strongest contender among the omitted Italian sides on that basis (AC Milan have fallen on hard times in recent years, and haven't made much impact in Europe for a long time; Napoli's renascence is too recent...). Leverkusen and Leipzig from the Bundesliga might feel a little hard done-by, but, despite recent successes, they're not really yet unseating Germany's 'big two'. Arsenal clearly look to have the quality to stand alongside the best participants in this competition - but they've still achieved nothing in Europe, so they haven't earned the place yet.  Anyone else???  NO.

It is, in any event, fatuous to question a tournament's worth because some of the teams you'd like to see in it - some of the 'best' teams - are absent, or don't progress very far. That's always going to happen in any tournament. Some teams hit a run of bad form and/or terrible luck and don't even get through a qualifying competition. Others run into those problems early in the tournament itself - perhaps undone by a solitary bizarre mistake, or a terrible refereeing decision to their detriment, or an uncharacteristic, one-off playing-their-socks-off performance by a 'lesser' opponent. Some suffer - or benefit - from a ridiculously lop-sided draw (if we're honest with ourselves, that was probably the single biggest factor in Gareth Southgate's extraordinary run of 'success' with the England team). The World Cup - and the various continental tournaments for national teams - is rarely won by the best team in it; sometimes, the best team won't even reach the semi-finals. Hopefully the eventual champ will be a worthy winner, clearly one of the best three or four or five contenders - but they're seldom the actual No.1. That's just the way it goes.

This new Club World Cup is an unusual and unfamiliar format for club competition: it's the only one I can think of that's only going to be held once-every-four-years rather than annually. So, the selection criteria have to look at the whole period since the last iteration of the tournament, not just last season. [There is, I think, a case for significantly increasing the weighting for the current season, and, to a lesser extent, for the season before, as it clearly seems unfair that an isolated good performance two or three years ago should carry anywhere near as much weight as one this year or last.]

It's focused on continents rather than countries, on the elite continental competitions rather than the national leagues. Sorry, Arsenal (Newcastle, Spurs, et al) - you've got to win the Champions League (or at least get to the semis a couple of times...) before you get a sniff at this. Might never happen? Tough luck!

Above all, this new competition is looking to be inclusive and representative - seeking to bring together a similar number of competitors from every region, and from as many different countries as possible within the regions. 

Now, clearly, with the current state of the world game, the 10 (or 20....?) best teams might all be from Europe. But that's not the point, is it? We don't want a new competition only for European teams (we already have that!). We're creating a tournament that pits a strong representative sample of Europe's finest teams against similar groups of clubs from Africa, Asia, and the Americas. If we admit that it is reasonable - essential - to limit Europe to 12 entries in total, you can't really make much of an argument that at least the vast majority of the 12 European teams taking part this time didn't deserve to be there. The fact that some excellent teams are going to miss out each time is inevitable - and nothing to cry over.

 

Sure, in this first iteration of the new tournament, the selection criteria might have been somewhat flawed; and there was a lack of transparency in FIFA's process. (Chelsea were particularly fortunate to be included, since they haven't actually done anything domestically or in Europe within the last four years. They were presumably getting credit for their out-of-nowhere Champions League win under Thomas Tuchel - but that was five seasons ago!! Too long ago to be accorded that much weight; and not properly within the eligible timeframe anyway - WTF??)  

And of course, the modest subterfuge involved in crowbarring Messi's Inter Miami into the tournament also undermined FIFA's 'credibility' (not that they have an awful lot of that left anyway; though at least they're still some distance behind the International Olympic Committee in the 'risibly corrupt' stakes!). Having Messi participate in the tournament was a reasonable enough objective, and FIFA would have looked less ridiculous and dishonest if they'd just allowed themselves ONE 'Wildcard Entry' that was entirely discretionary - rather than attempting to 'justify' their decision with a post facto invention of criteria.

These problems certainly need to be ironed out for the next tournament in 2029. But, apart from these two unfortunate blips in the selection process (where the only objection would be as to the rationality and transparency of the methodology, rather than the results - which weren't wildly unjust, and did serve to enhance the tournament), there weren't really any egregiously unfair inclusions or omissions. And within the framework of this tournament's intentions - to provide a truly global competition, not a parochially Europe-dominated one - the selection process worked out pretty well. Enough with all the 'My team wasn't in it' whining!

A little bit of Zen (51)

 

"I know I ain't doin' much. But doin' nothing means a lot to me."

Bon Scott  (from the AC/DC song 'Downpayment Blues')

We have barely a month to enjoy our leisure before the new Premier League season kicks off. We should make the least of it!

One of my favourite AC/DC tracks, a rare dive into pure blues....

Always fun to see Angus live, but... unfortunately, this isn't a great video or recording. And this is a 1980s performance with Brian Johnson on vocals; for the original album version by Bon, you'll have to go here. Enjoy!

Still WAITING...

Nope, no sign of a relaunch for the FPL website yet.

Yes, it is a little bit late this year.

DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT.  Chill.

A cracking game indeed!!

We don't often get the greatest football in a tournament final, as fatigue and nerves (or cumulative injuries and suspensions) get the better of the teams, or fear of failure comes to dominate, and the game ends up being mostly an edgy, cagey stalemate. Approaching Sunday's climax of the first Club World Cup in New Jersey, we were all hoping for the best - bur rather fearing the possibility of the worst.

Or indeed, many people - probably a significant majority - were expecting a rather drably one-sided contest. Paris St Germain had simply been so good over the last several months, and in most of this competition, while Chelsea, coming off a turbulent and inconsistent season, appeared to be still mired in the midst of a difficult rebuild - well, very few people gave the London team much of a chance, and it was widely anticipated that PSG might prevail over them as easily as they had in their semi-final against Real Madrid. Some of the bookies were offering more than 2-1 against Chelsea lifting the trophy, and although those odds shortened slightly in the last 24 hours or so before kick-off, really not many were seriously fancying the Chelsea win. 

Now, I try never to talk myself up on here, but.... I will allow myself to occasionally acknowledge when I've got a big call right. And I did indeed predict a Chelsea win - in my last post on here before the Final, and even before the start of the tournament. [That foresight enabled me to enjoy a strong MatchDay 7 in the Fantasy game, as well as a nice little return from the bookmaker!]

PSG didn't do themselves any favours: perhaps being guilty of a little over-confidence, they persisted with their usual open attacking style, pushing both full-backs up the field as often as possible. I had really thought that they would appreciate the potential danger posed by players like Neto and Gusto (and Palmer and Cucurella and Pedro) in the wide areas, and try to hold Nuno Mendes and/or Hakimi much deeper most of the time. Perhaps they just dismissed this threat because they hadn't expected that Robert Sanchez, so long derided for his sloppy distribution, would suddenly have figured out how to ping accurate long balls into those inviting spaces on the flanks behind the over-advanced full-backs. Chelsea were perfectly set up to exploit this weakness, and Sanchez created a dangerous counter-attack with almost every long clearance from his box. But they were impeccable in their defensive set-up too, with their effcient pressing and fluid positional rotations completely stifling PSG in the middle of the pitch. 'Tactical masterclass' is becoming a bit of an overused cliché, but it might be justified here: Maresca's gameplan was exemplary. And every single one of his men absolutely played their socks off! It was pretty much the perfect team performance. Well done, lads!

And then of course, we ended the day with that wonderful comedy moment when a bumbling Donald Trump refused to leave the stage after the trophy presentation. (Who could have foreseen that?? Oh, wait.......)

Alas, a lot of people are refusing to share in the joy of having been able to watch a fine game of football, to witness a superb achievement from a new coach and a renascent club (and yes, English fans should be allowed - should be expected - to indulge in a little bit of a patriotic buzz about one of our country's teams having come out on top, even if it's a team we revile and root against in domestic competition...). Instead, they're still bitching about the tournament and its winners, yet again rehashing the ridiculous argument that the tournament really has no value, isn't respected by anybody, and doesn't mean anything, that it isn't a true 'world championship'.

I have some hard news for those people: your opinion doesn't matter. FIFA is the world governing body of our game, and - for better or worse - only they get decide on the status of a tournament. This IS the definitive 'world championship' for clubs - because they say it is.

Moreover, now that it's all over - only Chelsea fans any longer have the right to make legitimate criticisms about the tournament and its perceived status in the game. If you voiced those criticisms before it started, and if you managed to frame them within a genuinely broad view of the world game, untainted by personal resentments about whether your favourite team was going to be involved (most gripers were not thus reasonable), then fair enough. But most of the criticisms - the standard of football is going to be poor, none of the big teams are going to take it seriously, nobody's going to go to the games, nobody's going to watch, nobody's going to care about the outcome - have now been emphatically disproved by events. It has been a very successful, very entertaining tournament, with every participating team looking fully committed to trying to win it.

And now, if you continue to whinge like this, it just sounds like sour grapes - not reasoned criticism, but surly resentment that a team you like better than Chelsea didn't win it. 

If Chelsea fans, despite the euphoria of such an impressive victory, and the pride of having such an impressive-looking trophy to add to their cabinet, still want to voice doubts about the tournament's worth - they would deserve to be listened to. But everybody else should just shut the f*** up!

However, Chelsea fans shouldn't get too big for their boots. Being the official 'Club World Champions' doesn't necessarily make them the best team in the world. They'll have to sustain this sort of performance level for a full year, beat a bunch more top sides, and, ideally, claim another big trophy - the Premier League or Champions League title - at the end of the coming season before they can be in that conversation. They're off to a flying start with this magnificent win; but they'll need to build on that....

PS: I'm glad to see that my two favourite Youtube tactical analysts, Adam Clery (who has his 'own' channel now, bless him) and Cormac of Football Meta, were both quick to put out videos breaking down Chelsea's success this weekend: worth a look.

[And finally..... I generally rather like the Irish commentator, Conor McNamara; but recently it has started to grate on me a little that he always seems to pronounce the French champions as Barry St Germain. I suddenly find myself growing obsessed with the idea of trying to write a novel around this fascinating character.]