The much maligned ‘casual’ Fantasy Football player is the one we all fear being stuck below in our mini-leagues with colleagues and friends.
As dedicated Fantasy Football managers spend their Wednesdays analysing average positions and debating rotation pairs, the casual switches off and has other things to do, only to tinker for two minutes with their team an hour before deadline. It is this difference in dedication that makes it all the more heart-breaking when, come Monday, Steve from work’s Fantasy Premier League team – a classic 4-4-2 including, Thibaut Courtois and Jack ‘triffic player’ Wilshere – is inexplicably above us. How did this happen? We had two our of position midfielders playing as striker and yet Ross Barkley has got Steve more points than our carefully selected options combined.
From Gameweek 1 onwards the casual follows a simple method in determining transfers in and out. Players who have scored the previous Gameweek are brought in, and those who have failed to register above three FPL points are discarded. In some respects we can learn a lot from the casual. They possess the FPL equivalent of a child’s innocence; they have not been corrupted by stats tables or made cynical by the likes of Mauro Boselli, the former Wigan striker who failed to carry his strong pre-season form into the Premier League, or Adel Taarabt, whose impressive underlying statistics never translated into real life goals.
The casuals were the first to jump on bandwagons amongst central and defensive midfielders, who surprisingly bucked the trend for these positions and brought in the points, most notably Yaya Toure and Aaron Ramsey in 2013. They saw points and they followed.
Some FPL players go through phases of such great form that statistical analysis, positions or common sense becomes almost irrelevant and these players are labelled essential. These are rare however and FPL points are normally based on a foundation of good statistics.
Take Dusan Tadic for example. While casual players will abandon him due to netting just two points in Gameweek 1, dedicated FPL managers will hold firm, full of optimism due to his impressive underlying statistics showing he was the round’s most creative player.
Alvaro Negredo is set to herald another battleground between casual and dedicated Fantasy managers. With a goal and bonus points in Gameweek 1, casual managers are flocking to him like a moth around a flame. They also know his name, from his Manchester City days, and so far 150,000 have snapped him up this week. But for the dedicated manager his woeful form over the last two years and rotation threat from Jordan Rhodes loom large and prevent them from drafting him in.
Over the coming weeks many dedicated FPL manages may well be keeping a low profile at work as they languish in the middle of the mini-league, which they themselves created. The jibes from Steve in accounts will hurt, more than he ever knows, as Roberto Firmino blanks again and Negredo continues to roll back the years with more goals. But, remember that all the hours spent on this very website researching and analysing are not in vain. Come May 2017 the dedicated managers will be at the top of the league. By then Steve probably won’t care.
