Why even struggling FPL managers should have cause for optimism

As we head towards the midpoint of the season, we’re getting near that time when a lot of Fantasy Premier League (FPL) managers will lose interest and give up. Even if you’re the type of person who will keep toiling away whether you’re ranked 8th or eight millionth, it’s easy to feel pessimistic about your prospects, particularly if the effort you are putting in has not paid off to date and, especially, if people who you know take the game less seriously than you do are somehow way ahead of you in rank.

But there’s every reason to feel optimistic and to stick to the plan and this article will discuss some of the reasons why.

Windfalls and Wildcards

There’s a popular thought experiment that asks what would happen if all the world’s money was distributed evenly throughout its population, with one prominent hypothesis being that it would eventually end up in roughly the same pockets that it is currently in. While this is, of course, theoretical, there’s evidence to support it in the statistic that 70% of lottery winners go bankrupt within seven years of winning. The idea is that anyone can get lucky and receive a windfall but holding onto it or growing it requires knowledge, effort, discipline and a network.

In FPL, ‘windfalls’ come in many forms, perhaps the most obvious being a points haul. A haul is never entirely luck, but every haul involves a degree of luck. More significant for this discussion, however, are the chips, in particular the Wildcards.

While there are only two Wildcard chips, FPL managers really get three Wildcards in the season; one in either half and one before the season kicks off. Among the many benefits of playing a Wildcard is that it allows you to instantly undo many of the problems caused by poor planning. 

While, when planning a transfer, a serious manager might look five or six Gameweeks into the future to assess the fixtures of the player(s) they’re interested in and then consider questions such as; ‘how nailed on are they’ and ‘who they might transfer them out for further down the line when the fixtures change’, most managers don’t do this. Most managers take a very topline view of who is a good asset and will sleepwalk into a negative fixture swing or arrive late to a positive one because they don’t have the means or the inclination to plan for them. Or they might just have more important things to do, it’s a grey area.

Yet, very often, the line between the serious and casual manager is very fine at points throughout the season. Sometimes this is because of overthinking; a serious manager will spend all week analysing the form and the stats while the more casual manager sees Jamie Vardy (£10.6m) as the top-scoring forward and transfers him in, just before he scores a brace. 

Other times, though, it’s because the Wildcard acts like a sort of defibrillator for what might otherwise have been a dead-end team blighted by poor fixtures and rotation.

However, while a Wildcard might inject new life into a team, these effects will likely be temporary unless they are actively maintained. There is a literal limit to how many times a Wildcard can bail your team out, meaning that, if you don’t put the work in and actively manage your team, you will eventually fall behind. As a serious manager who puts this kind of effort in, you can reasonably expect the opposite to be true too; actively manage your team and you will eventually get ahead.

I’ll stress that this is not intended as some form of ‘FPL snobbery’ against those who do not schedule their lives around press conferences and price changes. I’ll be the first to admit that there are many positive things we FPL obsessives can learn from the more casual approach to the game. Hopefully, however, it will encourage those who are putting a lot of effort into their FPL team and yet are not currently seeing the results that they want, to trust the process.

Your rank, right now, is not necessarily an accurate reflection of where your efforts will take you over time and with consistency. In the 16 Gameweeks so far, most FPL managers have effectively been able to totally remodel their teams twice. But there are 22 Gameweeks to go and only one opportunity to do that again.

So, at the risk of sounding like an REM song; don’t give up, do keep applying the FPL skills you’ve acquired, keep putting in the effort when it comes to strategy and planning transfers, keep disciplined when it comes to your knee-jerk impulses and your biases and keep leveraging the network that you have access to in the FPL community. Over time, it will pay off.*

*Probably.