In praise of FPL

So the Premier League season has started, and even though I won’t be going to any PL matches this season, I’ll be keeping an eye on it through the lens of my Fantasy Premier League (FPL) team, a mostly harmless diversion I joined millions of others in playing a few seasons ago. I think it might actually be better playing FPL not being a supporter of a PL team, since there will be no temptation to pick a player from my team out of sentimentality or blind hope (emotions that are not unknown amongst football fans). This season I will instead be able to be sternly objective and dispassionate about my FPL choices, though I am not convinced that will make any difference (and I could have done worse than buying ex-Leicester players Maddison, Barnes and Chilwell for the first week, since they all contributed to goals). I will, though, no longer have that ambivalent feeling of seeing an opposition player score against us and, as they wheel away in celebration, realise they are in my FPL team so at least I’m going to get some points for that annoying defensive error by our ever-porous back-line.

FPL is quite straightforward in principle: buy a squad of Premier League players at the start of the season, then get points for good things each of those players do in real life as they play actual games (and lose points when they do really bad things like getting sent off) with double points for a captain, and try to maximise points over the season, evolving your team with a transfer or two each week. Mini-leagues allow players to compete against friends, family, colleagues and random others.

There are inevitably layers of detail to the game which real enthusiasts can delve into - indeed, one of the intriguing things about FPL is that it is possible to take it very seriously, and spend a lot of time assessing upcoming fixtures and planning transfers, or even pay for expert advice. Conversely it is of course possible to take it not particularly seriously at all, and spend five minutes a week unsystemtatically changing a team vaguely based on who did well last week. FPL is a nice balance of luck and skill - it’s possible to have the odd lucky week by sticking a pin into a list of available players, but over the course of a season the serious players will tend to navigate the unexpected and unlucky results more effectively, and come out on top.

I’m probably one level up from ‘not particularly seriously’: I can’t help getting mildly frustrated if I have a bad week, and I will be disappointed if I don’t finish the season in the top 10% of players this season (my best finish was in the top 2%, a few seasons ago, when I thought I’d cracked FPL, but then inevitably proceeded to have one of my worst ever seasons). But not too deep down, I know that of course it doesn’t really matter at all, and in any case I am not patient/committed/obsessive enough to want to spend hours studying stats and upcoming fixtures to plan my transfers. Each week I’ll skim a few advice articles, see who did and didn’t do well last week, and then go with my gut instinct on which players to transfer and who to captain. Sometimes it works.

So here is a starting XI of reflections on FPL:

• The game is huge: there were 11.4 million players by the end of last season, most of them from outside the UK (there are apparently 253 different country leagues, and last season’s winner came from Azerbaijan).

• With such a large number of players, a good proportion of whom probably don’t take it that seriously or don’t really know what they’re doing, there will inevitably be some unexpected and strange decisions, which will occasionally turn out to be brilliant: when a little-known player in an unfancied team gets an unexpected hat-trick out of nowhere, the chances are that someone somewhere in the world will have randomly triple-captained them and earned lots of points, and we are invited to admire their perspicacity. That’s a good example of outcome bias: what we don’t see is all the millions of such almost inexplicable decisions which don’t pay off.

• The experience of players in other countries must be quite different from that of those of us who regularly attend football matches in England, and goodness knows what they make of some of the oddities of the English game. I once found myself on social media (a big source of FPL debate, tips, intel, injury rumours and general nonsense) patiently explaining double gameweeks to someone from Ghana (which is apparently one of the top 15 FPL playing countries in the world). It’s intriguing and slightly flattering that people around the world want to share English football with us, and I realise I’m lucky to be able to experience it first hand on a regular basis, unlike the vast majority of FPL players.

• I assume lots of FPL players have never eventhought about this, but one thing that doesn’t earn a player any points in FPL is whether or not their team wins. Of course, on average a player is more likely to score and get clean sheet points if their team is generally winning, but it’s not necessary: Teemu Pukki was a good budget forward option a few seasons ago despite playing in a Norwich team that was consistently terrible all season - he continued to score goals even as all around him fell apart, and as a forward he wasn’t penalised in FPL for goals being scored against his team.

• More generally, FPL is a different game from football, and rewards different things. Most obviously, it is not a team game - each player scores points individually. In particular, it undervalues 6s, those deep-lying midfielders who are so crucial to many teams, providing a defensive shield for their back line and/or getting the ball forward. These players don’t often score and don’t get much FPL credit for clean sheets, so however good they are in real life (typically ‘the heartbeats of their teams’) they’re rarely worth considering in FPL: N’golo Kanté, for example, was a great player for both Leicester and Chelsea but was never a great Fantasy option.

• By contrast, some players who are misclassified by the FPL administrators, or who have flexible roles, can be particularly good value - defenders get more points for goals than midfielders, so someone who is allegedly a defender but actually plays in midfield is often worth looking at. There is currently a tactical trend for defenders to move into midfield when their team is in possession (which is why I bought John Stones, thinking I was being clever, but he’s injured). A few seasons ago, John Lundstram, then a Sheffield United player, started the season as one of the cheapest players in the game and went on to be one of the highest scoring defenders that season, playing in midfield; he probably earned more fame for his popularity with FPL players than he will ever do for any of his achievements on the pitch (he now plays for Rangers).

• FOMO is definitely a factor in FPL: there are lots of players who might do well next week, but we can’t afford or fit them all into our teams, so who can we take the risk of being without? I don’t have Mo Salah at the moment, but I’m not sure that’s wise. And I spent a few minutes before the start of the season wondering which of Arsenal’s trio of attacking midfielders (who were all in the top ten scorers last season) I dare ignore? It’s as disproportionately satisfying when such a judgement goes well as it is annoying when it doesn’t.

• It doesn’t really matter if one player dominates the game (and the Premier League), as Erling Haaland did last season (and looks likely to for the next few seasons). If almost everyone captains the great Norwegian (he is apparently now the first player to be owned by over 90% of players, and I don’t know what the other 10% are thinking) then the skill/luck of the game is choosing the players to fit round him.

• Following FPL means you find yourself invested in otherwise dull-sounding games which normally few outside their fanbases would care about: Bournemouth v Burnley can suddenly matter even if it’s only in the hope of some clean sheet points, so you find yourself in the final minutes willing a team not to score or a substitute not to come on; and the classic FPL-er’s reaction on seeing a goal notification is to wonder who got the assist. This is of course the point - the Premier League aren’t stupid in making this impressively-honed game available for free. (And though I’m sad for de Bruyne that he’s going to be out injured for a few months, and happy for Kane that he’s got his move to Germany, secretly when I heard both bits of news my first thought was relief because neither were in my team…)

• …my team, which for reasons that are too tedious to explain, is called Clammphrey City.

• Like football itself, FPL has developed its own language - which is technically a dialect of footballese. Like its mother language, it has captains, assists and midfielders, but it introduces new terms too - wildcards, differentials, bench boosting, double gameweeks and triple captains. Once you find yourself using these terms unselfconsciously, you know you’re hooked.

The big reveal: here was my 2023/24 Gameweek 1 team, much polished and tweaked in idle moments over the summer. There’s nothing eccentric here (it’s probably very similar to a large number of other teams), but it earned me 81 points (compared to an average of 64 points) last week, and I’m now ranked about 570,000 out of 8.7 million, and in the top 7% of players worldwide. I am happy with that, though I fear it may well be as good as it gets this season.

And it means I have a standard to live up to now - so forgive me, I have to go and find out what happened to John Stones, assess whether I can afford to be without any Newcastle players any longer, and make a call on whether I should buy James Maddison after all. The Gameweek 2 deadline is 6.15 on Friday evening, and I can’t afford to miss it…