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.
7 years, 9 months ago
Thanks for this. Sounds like a fun challenge.