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Turning Around A Ghost Ship Team

In this month’s post Gameweek 38 Community Round Up, it was mentioned that the team that I have been managing for my nephew, Sam, won Red Lightning’s FFScout January/May league. This article shares some of the experiences I learned from the challenge of turning around a failing Fantasy Premier League team mid-season.

The back story is that Sam and I went to the Chelsea v Bournemouth game together (Gameweek 15) and amongst other things we chatted about his FPL team, which was very much last (by around 150 points) in our family league and had an overall ranking below 3 million. Basically he had given up on it and it was a ghost ship. To cut a long story short, I told him it could be recovered and he challenged me to show him. So I took over managing the team from Gameweek 17.

The team had a very low transfer value of 96.7 when I took it over, budget not far off 10.0 less than my own team at that time. In addition, the triple captaincy had already been played in Gameweek 1 and Sam hadn’t made a single transfer in 16 weeks. He did still have his two Wildcards, so I immediately used one of them and took things from there. Over the first 19 Gameweeks his team had amassed just 750 points. Over the second 19 weeks it scored 1,290 points, which compares well with top 50- ranked team performance over that time. His ghost ship team also managed to score 100 points more than my own team over the second half of the season.

Turning It Around

Strikers 

The team’s low budget turned out to be a key advantage. I opted for three big strikers (Manchester City’s Sergio Aguero, Spurs man Harry Kane and Everton’s Romelu Lukaku) to be my key captaincy contenders.

Midfield

This meant I had to look for budget in midfield, opting for four 6.0 to 8.0-priced players and one cheap fifth option. With the likes of Alexis Sanchez and Kevin De Bruyne out of my price range I opted for Riyad Mahrez (LEI), Georginio Wijnaldum (NEW), Philip Coutinho (LIV), Yannick Bolasie (CPL) and Junior Stanislas (BOU) as my Gameweek 17 midfielders.

Defence

Money was even tighter in defence so I opted for five below-5.0 players that could be rotated around fixtures. I like rotating defenders anyway and doing it purely on the basis of fixtures made it quite simple. My Gameweek 17 defenders were Danny Simpson (LEI), James Tomkins (WHU), Philipp Wollscheid (STK), Jonny Evans (WBA) and Joel Ward (CPL). Wollscheid was basically there to cover the popular Jack Butland’s clean sheets.

Goalkeepers

In goal I took Spurs’ Hugo Lloris and Crystal Palace’s Wayne Hennessey.  I wouldn’t usually spend so much on a goalkeeper, but Lloris looked the cheapest way into the Spurs defence and I planned to play him most weeks.

Transfers and Wildcard

The above selections worked amazingly well. Apart from one red arrow I gained greens every week until the end of the season. Between Gameweek 17 and Gameweek 34 (when I took the second Wildcard in the double Gameweek itself) the majority of transfers made were to rotate well priced midfielders with the prospect of strong returns such as Marko Arnautovic (STK), Dimitri Payet (WHU), Roberto Firmino (LIV), Gylfi Sigurdsson (SWA) and Andros Townsend (NEW).  I used a few free transfers to keep my defensive rotation tweaked as well, with Swansea captain Ashley Williams and Bournemouth’s penalty-taking defender Charlie Daniels also coming in.

The low budget forced me to look far more closely at midrange and lower midrange midfielders, to pick fixture runs and jump on improving performance trends.  If I had been able to upgrade a couple of them to Sanchez and De Bruyne as with my own team then I simply wouldn’t have done that.  Transferring Sanchez out for Sigurdsson and leaving 4.0 in the bank unused is so counter-intuitive that you’d never do it voluntarily.  And yet it would have been the right call. From Gameweek 20 to 31 (roughly the time I had Sigurdsson), Sanchez didn’t get a single score of seven points or better, while the Swansea midfielder did it seven times.

Navigating the Doubles 

The other disadvantage that ended up being an advantage was that the triple captaincy chip had already been played.

This meant that I didn’t need to fuss with playing the second wildcard a week before a double Gameweek. With no bench boost or triple captaincy the double Gameweek 34 Wildcard brought in 119 points that week.

Not wildcarding, as many did, in Gameweek 33 also meant I kept key single Gameweek assets that did well, most notably Jamie Vardy who scored 13 points that week.  In addition, as my Wildcard was not focused around a bench boost, my Gameweek 36 team was also in good shape, unlike many other teams that had wildcarded in Gameweek 33.

Gameweek 37 was another big lift. I took only the second hit of my tenure of Sam’s team to get the most of the bench boost Chip that week. Norwich’s high-scoring Nathan Redmond came in that week and saw the team achieve a Gameweek rank of around 3,000. By Gameweek 38 Sam’s 3.1 million-ranked ghost ship was ranked 445,000 overall.

Conclusion

So, what are the lessons to take from this? Well, one is that the second wildcard is the most important tool we have and it should never be compromised to support any other Chip. Another is that if I am going to do really well in FPL I have to get over the degree to which I am swayed by the comfort blanket of price. And the third is to be daring. I wouldn’t have thought that going without Sanchez and Mesut Özil (or the likes) for half a season was feasible.  But it is. Yes, they scored some good points in the second half of the season. But their points weren’t worth any more those gained by the likes of Sigurdsson or Townsend.

16 Comments Post a Comment
  1. J0E
    • Fantasy Football Scout Member
    • Has Moderation Rights
    • 14 Years
    7 years, 9 months ago

    Thanks for this. Sounds like a fun challenge.

  2. PurpleCobras
    • 9 Years
    7 years, 9 months ago

    Good article Ruth, and nice to see you back.

    When it comes to it, how much do you think you will take on board these lessons for your own team? Next season there's bound to be a lot of very expensive midfielders and forwards around, from the old guard (Sanchez, Hazard, Aguero), those due a price hike (Mahrez, Kane, Vardy) and some shiny new additions (Ibrahimovic, Griezmann, Gundogan). It's going to be so difficult to resist spending every penny...

    1. Ruth_NZ
      • 9 Years
      7 years, 9 months ago

      Thanks. My ability to post was restored (I think by accident when the site was updated) so I am using it. 🙂 But I'm not intending to besiege Jonty with articles or put up a lot of tl;dr posts if I can help it.

      Have a look at Lee Byron's team. He wildcarded in GW36 and left (as I recall) something like 5.4m budget unused. With that voluntarily cheap team he achieved a GW rank of 48k in GW36 and 1k in GW37. He then made a couple of upgrades (including Giroud for Defoe) in GW38 with his 2 FTs.

      From GW32 to GW38 Lee's team rose in rank from 8,688 to 74. Now that's what I call owning the wildcard season. Brilliant.

      http://fantasy.premierleague.com/entry/121/history/

      I hope I can emulate that and see past a player's ticket value next season. I will certainly try to anyway.

      1. Ziro Becomes One
        • 9 Years
        7 years, 9 months ago

        You call the WC+BB combo a strategic failure and then hope to emulate someone who did just that. Am slightly confused.

        1. Ziro Becomes One
          • 9 Years
          7 years, 9 months ago

          You might counter saying it was his price-strategy you are referring to, but then, that is intrinsically linked to his BB strategy. Is it not?

          1. Ruth_NZ
            • 9 Years
            7 years, 9 months ago

            It was. And it isn't.

  3. mentoz
    • 9 Years
    7 years, 9 months ago

    My team had a similar story. Due to inactivity (and bad decisions) I was below 3M after 3 weeks. After I used my WC in GW4 I had almost only green arrows and ended up with a rank around 100k.

  4. Rhinos
    • 10 Years
    7 years, 9 months ago

    I need to temporarily unfollow ffs on twitter. Everytime there's a new article up its about how someone did better than me 😛

    1. J0E
      • Fantasy Football Scout Member
      • Has Moderation Rights
      • 14 Years
      7 years, 9 months ago

      I'll see if I can rustle up an article on my first 19 GWKs of the season horror show to make you feel better. 😉

  5. Wimmer winner chicken dinne…
    • 8 Years
    7 years, 9 months ago

    Interesting read, I agree I won't be using my second wildcard next year to facilitate my bench boost! Although saying that it was fun going into the DGWK with 15 possible game week players, it transpired that like most not all 15 played both games.

    Price and value of players made a big difference to my transfer decisions this year, although like you say there were a number of value mids who could do the business,, but I think next year we'll see the rise again of a big hitter you cannot do without.

    Congratulations on the turn around, sounded like you had fun doing it!

    1. Ruth_NZ
      • 9 Years
      7 years, 9 months ago

      I really did actually.

      I guess it helped that it wasn't my own team and had all the cards stacked against it. Because of that I didn't fret about anything and just made positive decisions without anxiety. They weren't all correct by any means - captaining Smalling for 13 points when I could have chosen Aguero in DGW34 wasn't my finest hour - but I wasn't worrying about anyone else or 2nd guessing myself.

      If I can put some of that freedom into my own team it will be good. The problem is that I don't want to look an idiot with a low final ranking. As a result of which I make compromises that I wouldn't if nobody but me knew I was playing FPL. Men and their ego sensitivities, eh?

  6. Suarezista
    • 10 Years
    7 years, 9 months ago

    Very well done.
    Finally found the guy who beat me in the January to May league 😉
    Liked the way you used the chips, and always like rotating cheap defenders as I don't care much about team value.

  7. Woeisme
    • 11 Years
    7 years, 9 months ago

    Good article Ruth and I agree, its good to have you back,

  8. John t penguin
    • 9 Years
    7 years, 9 months ago

    timothy 3:1-2

    1. RedLightning
      • Fantasy Football Scout Member
      • Has Moderation Rights
      • 13 Years
      7 years, 9 months ago

      First or Second Letter?
      Is he aspiring to the office of bishop or suffering from stress in the last days?

      1. La Vida Latte
        • 14 Years
        7 years, 9 months ago

        Who knows. Maybe both. Being a bishop in the last days sounds pretty stressful 😉