Notes on Fantasy Premier League
Some of the people reading this may not be so unlucky as to be fans of the team sport known as football (soccer for those from across the pond, but I'm going to just say football from now on, it's what I know). Central to modern English football is theYou may or may not also be familiar with the concept of fantasy sports. In a "fantasy league", players select real players, whose real-life performances inform some points score for that player in the fantasy game. A fantasy player can select a full team of players, subject to restrictions, and compete with others to get the most points in a season.
Fantasy Premier League specifically has been running for over 20 years. It's available here in case you care to learn more (note that it won't be available to play until next July/August, after the offseason finishes), because I'm going to be using FPL jargon from here on out without necessarily explaining what it means. If you're not a football/FPL person, don't worry, we will return to electronics/technology business as usual shortly.
Releasing my team ID here would go a reasonably long way to doxxing me, so please forgive me for not being fully open with my stats. Let's just say I barely made the top 5 million, which is a disastrous result, even for a first season of FPL. There's a lot to be learned. This blog post is an attempt to write down exactly what went wrong and what to do next season.
Transfers, Free Transfers, and Hits
I made more than 70 transfers this season. In a season, you get 38 free transfers plus 2 Wildcards and a Free Hit (FH). As far as I know, those don't come into the big End Of Season Transfer Number, so it's safe so say that I took something like 4 * (70 - 38) = about 130 points in hits. That's quite a few points just gone, more than enough to win my ML and to gain a lot of OR. A lot of these transfers were one-week punts, or trying to bandwagon onto players who had a week or two of good form, then fell off the face of the Earth for the rest of the season (damn you, Sessegnon).How does one address this then? Well the answer is simple, obvious, and easy to implement: make less transfers. Even going more specific shouldn't make things too hard. I need to think about transfers in a longer-term sense. I took on a lot of players because they played a promoted team and then had something like Liverpool (A), City (H), Arsenal (A) immediately thereafter, making them effectively useless as a long-term transfer. It's not like FPL hide this stat, it's right there. Using it would go a long way.
Bandwagons
Within a few gameweeks (GWs), the good players for the season have usually started to become established. There's no harm in getting in on a talismanic player on good form if he's looking like he might return a lot for the next while. The most obvious version of this this season has to be nobody else but the Egyptian King himself, Mohamed Salah (LIV, Midfielder). For £12 million at the start of the season, you got a player who, if permacapped (never get fancy etc.), would have given you 688 points. That's ridiculous. It's absurd. And it's something I need to spot early and immediately get in on. There's no shame in owning the guy who's got 70% ownership.Conversely, a lot of players get a lot of hype. This ties into the previous point, but I had about 80 players in my team at some point. The average, mind you, was less than 65. Never pick the person who's just popped up out of nowhere unless you've got a FT sitting in your back pocket, and whoever is the target of everyone's attention on r/FantasyPL this week has either a really solid run of games coming up, or is at least guaranteed to get minutes.
Pep Roulette can give you a lot of rewards if you get it right - Manchester City can give G/A to any player at any time if they're playing like the team that won 4 titles on the bounce - but you're also risking that whoever you bought won't play at all. The only players who started more than 30 games for City this year were Haaland (who cost £15m and was out for over a month) and Gvardiol, who was, to be fair, an extremely solid premium defensive option. Conversely, Mbeumo and Guimaraes started literally every game for Brentford and Newcastle respectively. Minutes are 2 points in and of themselves, and it's not a good idea to overlook that.
Captaincy
Never get fancy, always captain Salah
It's age-old advice, but getting fancy is always a risk. If someone really it that popular as a captaincy choice, going against the grain probably isn't a good idea. The worst case is that you lose a few OR to the people who gambled correctly, but losing out on 10 points for getting fancy is probably more embarrassing.