Ex-FPL winner Simon March: How to avoid getting carried away with your GW1 picks

I’ll start with a short story. This time last season, Chelsea were spending money like they were Disney and, as a fan (of Chelsea, though I do like Disney too), it was hard not to get caught up in that excitement and to want to be part of it in every way possible. Of course, for me, this included picking as many as possible in my Fantasy Premier League team and, as a result, I tripled up on Chelsea assets with Timo Werner (£9.0m), Kai Havertz (£8.5m) and Reece James (£5.5m) all featuring in my Gameweek 1 team.

Of course, Chelsea went on to become champions of Europe, thus proving me 100% correct in my beliefs and to be a person of quite unnatural foresight and wisdom. So, thanks for reading, and tune in next time when I’ll be talking ab-

Okay, while Chelsea did indeed become champions of Europe, this eventual success was not necessarily reflected in their early-season performances or the output of their players from an FPL perspective. Don’t get me wrong, they weren’t terrible by any means, even the much-maligned Timo Werner was averaging about 5.0 points per game up until Gameweek 10. The problem was, they didn’t deliver consistently, sustainably and, crucially, as much as more established players (Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah (£12.5m) was kind enough to make this point early on and immediately punish me for not picking him with a Gameweek 1 hat-trick).

Even then, I held on to my Chelsea assets, despite their declining output and emerging line-up uncertainties. I justified this to myself by their good run of fixtures which, surely, would get them back on track. When that didn’t happen, I convinced myself that, since other people were ditching their Chelsea players, the best thing for me to do ‘strategically’ would be to hold on to them so that, when they did eventually burst into life, they would offer the best possible source of differential points, thus propelling me up the table.

Of course, the opposite happened, Chelsea assets declined further, both in terms of points output and in value, which in turn reduced my options for transferring them out. The net effect was that I’d set the foundation for what was to become my worst ever fantasy football season. 

So what happened here and what can we learn from it?