The Scout Network weekly round-up

Each week as part of the Scout Network we will be providing a round-up of what our partners are doing.

Since the launch of the Scout Network last week we have brought on board a couple of new members – Fantasy Chat and Karam Tayser, as well as FPL Take The Hit.

The launch of the Scout Network, alongside the build-up of content in the run-up to Gameweek 1, has resulted in an explosion of activity.

This week we place the spotlight on FPL Partridge as well as taking a view of what some of our partners have been doing, along with a look at the Scout Academy.

FPL BlackBox

This week saw the launch of FPL BlackBox with Az and Mark Sutherns, who will be co-hosting for this season. The FPL BlackBox series goes out every Thursday evening and so far last week’s show has had over 9,000 views. Mark and Az use the first episode to reflect on the 2019/20 season and look ahead to the new campaign.

FPL Family

The FPL Family Twitter passed the 30k followers milestone! The last FPL Family live stream saw Lee and Sam give updates on their teams for Gameweek 1 as well as the always exciting predictions stream where Lee, Sam and their live stream community predict the top four, bottom three, Golden Glove, Golden Boot and top points-scoring defenders, midfielders and forwards in FPL.

This week, Lee and Sam released an FPLFamily X video with David from FPL InTheDugOut (who is also part of the Scout Academy) talking about the Dream Teams, how we can use them for FPL planning and having a go at predicting the Dream Team for the 2020/21 season. You can find the FPLFamily on YouTube here.

Ted Talks FPL

This week, Ted’s 60-second stats videos have had thousands of views on Twitter, while over on YouTube he’s smashed his target of 500 subscribers before Gameweek 1; now the drive for 1,000 begins…

His focus this week has been on budget, mid-priced and premium attacking players. Next week, following the start of the season, Ted’s focus will likely shift to ownership and captaincy. To subscribe to Ted’s YouTube channel use this link.

El Statto

El Statto had a massive response to his article about Jan Sienkiewicz, who scored the second-highest amount of points from his captain picks last year (he finished 67th in the world). The article achieved over 11,000 views in the first two days and even inspired another account to do a YouTube video based on it.

El Statto has also published three other articles this week and is currently working on an interview with Joshua Bull, who was last year’s winner, which should be published early next week. You can read the ever-popular captains pick article here.

FPL Poet  

FPL Poet spoke about FPL, his Fantasy Football journey and his involvement with the Scout Network on a live Facebook session hosted by Dhaka Tribune, a leading English daily in Bangladesh last week.

DreamSetGo

This week saw the launch of the FPL Wire Podcast featuring our very own Pro Pundits Lateriser12 and Zophar666, as well as BigManBakar. These experienced FPL managers will now be discussing FPL on a weekly basis to enable listeners to make justified and informed Fantasy decisions. In this pre-season podcast, they spoke about the top four, promoted teams and lots of other FPL relevant stuff. The FPL Wire podcasts will be recorded live on Tuesday evenings.

Fantasy Chat – Karam Tayser

This week, Fantasy Chat recorded nine interviews with FPL managers from the MENA region – seven of them secured a top 1k finish, including the 25th, 86th and 307th overall.

Fantasy Chat learned about their secrets for success as well as their strategies last season, with tips to take on-board for the next campaign. One of the interviews was with Rasheed from Kuwait, who discusses how he utilises stats and match commentary to overcome his blindness and inability to watch the matches. He finished just inside top 1% last season and he is looking forward to having a better campaign this time around. All interviews are available on Youtube here.

The Scout Academy

Meanwhile, the launch of the Scout Academy last week saw us introduce our newest wave of Fantasy creators and toolmakers into the FFScout family.

The Scout Network and Academy have already shown how successful they can be when they join forces: there was the aforementioned FPL Family x FPL InTheDugOut video, while The Scout Network’s El Statto and the Academy’s Footboxx, FPLHangover and Fantasy Football Focus produced an FPL creators team reveal video together. Check out the Scout Academy page for more details about which creators are part of this initiative.  

If you think that the Scout Network sounds like something you would like to be part of, then let us know here.

Spotlight: FPL Partridge

From as early as I can remember I’ve been a football fan. I was obsessed growing up. Like most kids, I wanted to be a professional footballer, and I had it all. The only thing holding me back was my ability, and apparently that’s one of the main things clubs look for in a player.

I also loved the management side of things. Me and a couple of friends would spend hours playing Championship Manager (now Football Manager) and I’d spend even longer editing the database to include my Sunday league team and all of my teammates.

I never played Fantasy Football as such at that time, but I always checked the newspaper and would put together a team from their Fantasy Football game. Usually full of Newcastle players, as that was my team and the Keegan era is still probably my favourite footballing period.

I also remember one year a friend and I (literally just two of us) created our own Fantasy game for the Scottish Premier League (no idea why we chose Scotland). We created a points system and then took turns to choose players. As I’m writing this I’m realising that we probably invented Fantasy Draft.

Fast forward a few years and I began competing in other sports which caused me to fall out of love with football.

I literally didn’t even check the scores, I’d fallen so far out of love with the game.

Eventually, after a few years, I started watching the odd game and enjoying it, but that buzz had gone. I could watch a game, but I couldn’t bring myself to care about the outcome enough to be emotionally invested in it.

Then I rediscovered Fantasy Football, in the form of FPL.

Suddenly I found myself cheering on a 0-0 draw between Burnley and Palace and shouting at the television when my player was given a yellow card.

I’d found context and meaning again in football and this led me to find ways of improving my FPL skills.

I headed to google and typed in “FPL tips”.

That google search was probably the most life-changing search I’d ever done. (Well, maybe second, to a homemade burger recipe I once found on Jamie Oliver’s website.)

That was the point I discovered the FPL Twitter community and Fantasy Football Scout and I headed down the rabbit hole.

After lurking for a while, on a whim, I created an FPL Twitter account and FPL Partridge was born.

FPLPartridge has written an article as part of Content Creator development for the Scout Academy entitled How To Create Social Media Content and Grow Your Following – you can read that here.

BEST PLAYERS BY POSITION:

• Goalkeepers: Budget
• Goalkeepers: Premium
• Defenders: Budget
• Defenders: Mid-Price and Premium
• Midfielders: Budget
• Midfielders: Mid-Price
• Midfielders: Premium
• Forwards: Budget
• Forwards: Mid-Price
• Forwards: Premium