Happy New Year from Fantasy Football Scout

A very, very happy New Year to all of our readers and site users.

There’ll be plenty of us seeing in 2019 with one eye on the Gameweek 21 deadline, which passes at 11:30 GMT tomorrow.

I’ll personally be glad to see the back of this festive fixture period and the brutal turnaround time between Gameweeks, which leaves precious little time for meaningful analysis as both a writer and Fantasy manager.

And let’s not get started on those Yuletide pressers, which are variously embargoed, delayed until after a deadline or simply not held at all.

Bah, humbug.

As a long-term frequenter of these pages (the badge might say “1” but I’ve been a loiterer since the days of Puffinboy) I never quite understood the levels of work that Mark, Paul, Joe and the legions of freelance writers put into Fantasy Football Scout before I came on board and I have a new-found appreciation for the toil and time it must have taken to get this site to where it is now.

And where would be we without the mods (insert your own gag here) and tireless tech guys (Ed and Mat) who keep these pages working and swear word-free, round the clock, 365 days a year. I thank you all for your fantastic contributions and for making my life so much easier.

It’s been a mad old first seven months in the job and a steep learning curve but it’s an absolute thrill to be on board, doing something I enjoy and hopefully not completely undoing a decade of graft put in by Mark and co.

Most of all, I thank you the site users for first making myself and David feel welcome upon joining in May and for your suggestions and feedback (mostly constructive) ever since.

Without you, there is no Fantasy Football Scout, and there is no deputy editor’s job. I am massively privileged and fortunate to have ended up doing this as a vocation but I never forget that without someone to read the drivel I put out on a daily basis, I’m out of employment.

One of the things I’ve been most frustrated with so far is simply not having the time to be more hands-on with the community and responding to you more directly, due to the hours required to take care of the bread and butter of the site. Other than retweets and the odd Simpsons reference, I am not particularly active on Twitter either and both things are something I’m hoping to address in 2019.

I don’t want you to feel that any complaints and concerns about the site are falling on deaf ears (hopefully Geoff catches most of them – top work, that man) and I’m hoping that in the pre-season of 2019/20, if not before, we can really give a lot more attention to whatever irks you.

Here’s to a year of green arrows and top 1k finishes.

All the best, folks.

Neale