Why Am I So Bad At Fantasy Football?

I’d never considered myself particularly bad at picking and managing a Fantasy Premier League (FPL) squad and I usually compete well with my friends and colleagues. But in reality my performance is pretty poor, especially when comparing my decisions to those with significantly higher overall ranks. This season, though, I want to do a lot better and I have decided to compare my 2014/15 season with those of the FPL champion Simon March and a player I will call Mr 10K. The aim is to see what I can learn and how I can improve on 2014/15’s lowly FPL rank of 207,517.

Points differences

Here are the total scores in 2014/15  of our three protagonists in this analysis.

• Champion – 2,470
• Mr 10k – 2,197
• Me – 2,002

And here are the average scores per week for each.

• Champion – 65
• Mr 10k – 57.8
• Me – 52.7

This looks like quite a big difference and shows that Simon March’s consistency shone through over the course of the season, with him rarely having a bad week. This consistency is clearly an area I need to improve on. Here, I outline the three key areas which show the main differences between a poor-scoring Fantasy manager like myself, the champion and the good managers who regularly finish in the top 10K in the overall rankings.

Poor Transfers

In terms of the game’s four-point hit, which is the FPL price of an extra transfer, my research shows the jury is still out as to whether lots of hits are a good or bad thing. Simon March took no hits all season. Mr 10K  spent a whopping 68pts on his 17 hits. Meanwhile, I spent 32 on my eight-points hits. What is clear from Mr 10K’s season is that strategic, well planned hit-taking can prevail.

In contrast, my hit-taking was more random than calculated and is an area I need to improve on. Sometimes I’d go for a while without any transfers and then I’d spend weeks making changes, chasing points from previous weeks. Over the season a key lesson I learned the hard way was that players who score an unexpected goal, such as defenders and cheap midfielders, are rarely likely to repeat this feat in subsequent weeks. Gut instinct rarely helps either. I remember a particularly disastrous transfer of Fernando Torres a few seasons back, who I made captain only for him to get sent off. Most savvy managers would not have picked him at that time in his Chelsea career due to lack of starts. My gut told me otherwise.

Poor Team Balance

I’ve often ignored the rotation tactic of drafting in budget players and rotating them around good fixtures. This is likely to have cost me. Too often I’ve drafted in a 4.0 defender who rarely starts instead of using that spot for a good-quality cheap defender at around 4.5 who will start and has good fixtures every now and again. A key lesson to learn in defence is to ensure that each player is able to play and has a role when called upon. Instead, my defence was woefully unbalanced, often dominated by a single good premium-priced defender with the rest a random selection of cheap players.

Not Acting Quickly Enough

Last year’s key trends were consistent and high-scoring cheap players. Tottenham’s Harry Kane, who finished the season at a reasonable 6.0 was a stand-out pick in attack, while Sunderland’s Costel Pantilimon was a superb goalkeeper option at an initial price of just 4.5. There were others as well, such as QPR’s Charlie Austin, West Ham’s Stewart Downing and Everton’s bonus-point-gathering defender Phil Jagielka. I failed to profit from any of these players’ goals or consistent form and therefore missed out on key FPL points. Take Pantillimon, for example: while I was busy looking at Sunderland’s failure to keep clean sheets at the start of the season I failed to notice his 111 saves, the third best in FPL last season. In addition, Sunderland ended the season with a respectable 11 clean sheets, with new manager Dick Advocaat’s tightening of the Black Cats’ defence another trend that passed me by.

Too often I kept players that were dropping off in form as well, with Angel Di Maria a key example from 2014/15. And even when I began to realise a trend, such as Downing’s prolific early-season run of goals and assists, I pontificated and decided to stick with poor performers instead. Keeping pace with player form is key to success and something last season’s champion and Mr 10K clearly did.

I will return a better Fantasy manager – well that’s the plan, anyway.