Life without FPL hasn’t meant life without football

We. Miss. Football. Oh so much more than we ever realised that we would.

When Manchester City v Arsenal was cancelled all those weeks ago, the world at large (the Premier League and FPL included) seemed to be slowly moving away from the regular routine and into what is now starting to become the new normal. 

That new normal is so far away from the Gameweek deadlines, VAR debates and the ‘what transfers should I make this week’ conversations that we are all used to that it is now hard to remember what day of the week it is, never mind what time the next Gameweek deadline is – especially when those deadlines never see a football kicked.

For us, weekends mean family time, which in turn usually means football – whether that be live streams, watching matches, tinkering with our FPL teams, checking on our Sam v Lee Gameweek picks, making transfers or indeed taking our little ones to play football on Sunday mornings.

Without football, the FPL Family is just “family” – which is, indeed, what we all need right now. But of course, that doesn’t stop our love of the beautiful game and it doesn’t stop us filling our time with football-related activities.

Homeschooling has involved designing new season kits for our children’s favourite team (Spurs, naturally), playing football in the garden and of course, constantly debating when we might get to see a football kicked again.  

But there have been some good football-related things to come from the lockdown. One of these is having the time and space to watch old matches.

In normal times, with so much live football, we never really rewatch old games – they happen, we live them and then they are gone and we are on to the next.

But with the lockdown and no new matches being played, there is time to enjoy some old classics again.

A few Sundays ago we found ourselves caught up once again in the drama of Manchester City v QPR from the final day of the 2011/12 season; that ‘AGUEROOOOOOO’ moment will remain in the memories of football fans for a generation. We remember owning the Argentine that weekend and the thrill of the last-minute Fantasy points.

Without the lockdown, we would never have sat and rewatched that match in its entirety. The same is true of the live watch-along that Spurs did of the second leg of their Champions League quarter-final clash with Manchester City from last season. These are all moments which would never have been relived in this way and just deepen our love for the game.

We also spent an evening recording a video with James from Planet FPL looking back at the Road to the Madrid, following both Spurs and Liverpool through the different rounds and culminating in the final.

This break in the Premier League season has given space for reflection on our own teams and our FPL squads (now and of old) as well as on the sport at large. Football is so much part of our everyday lives now that it’s only at this point where the world has been forced to stop and take a breath that we have truly appreciated the beautiful game. The passion, the commitment, the heartbreak – all the emotions and the connections that football brings out.

Apart from rewatching and reminiscing on old games, what have we in the FPL Family been doing with our time? Well, most of the days are spent homeschooling our little ones – given that Sam is a trained teacher, most of this is falling to her. However, she is used to working at secondary school level, so it’s a change teaching a four and six-year-old.

We have been doing PE with Joe Wicks every morning and especially enjoying Fancy Dress Fridays, growing a variety of different fruits and vegetables, making all sorts of different pieces of art and, of course, trying to keep up the reading, writing and spelling.

For Lee, the days are spent working from home and even missing those daily commutes into London. It’s a strange new normal with online pubs and the occasional interruptions to work meetings from kids, pets and significant others – both from our house as well as in his colleagues’ homes.

But we have found some things to do which help to fill a bit of the void. Those of you who know us well will know that one of Sam’s passions is baking and cake decorating – there have been a number of football ones over the years, most recently Chelsea and Liverpool. The additional time means she has also taken to baking bread.

Our little boy is Pokemon-obsessed and so Lee and he are constantly opening Pokemon cards and building a huge collection – if our little one completes all his schoolwork, of course. We have been playing games of Zoom bingo with our families, too – who knew that could be so competitive! And like the rest of the world, we binge-watched Tiger King (as well as a variety of other shows on Netflix).

The days in lockdown are certainly different and we miss the freedom to do the things we normally do, especially the FPL Show, FPL FYI and the Official FPL Podcast, but we know that they will restart when the world is safe.

Looking ahead to a time where leaving the house isn’t limited to a few set reasons, football is on our TV almost every day, our FPL commitments have recommenced and the world is less scary may feel like a lifetime away right now, but it will come. While the FPL Family might be quieter than we are used to, our own family is noisier while the children are home with us all the time and this is something that we appreciate all the more as a result.

Normally at the end of a season, in that short period of time where all domestic and European trophies have been decided, we have time to reflect on our FPL campaigns, the pros and cons, the highs the lows, the players who brought us glory and those who didn’t last long in our teams. We never, apart from brief spells for international breaks, have time to contemplate the journey that the season has taken before the end.

This, therefore, is a golden opportunity for us to help save the world by sitting on our sofas and reflect on how to improve our teams before the Premier League and FPL gear up once more for the restart of the beautiful game.

By Lee and Sam