Should we always stick to the plan in FPL?

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Here, former FPL champion Simon March looks at the phenomenon of ‘plan continuation bias’.

Founding Father of the United States of America and keen FPL enthusiast Benjamin Franklin once said, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail” – and it is indeed true that planning is a vital aspect of success in FPL.

But having a plan is not a guarantee that it will succeed and, as heavyweight world champion boxer Mike Tyson once said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

So what do we do when our plans start to fail? Do we adapt? Do we scrap them altogether? Or do we stick with it and continue to be proverbially punched in the proverbial face? Often we FPL managers do the latter and we do it to our detriment. This article will focus on why this is the case, and what we might do to avoid this negative tendency.

Plan Continuation Bias

From the outset, it’s worth stating that demonstrating some patience with a plan is generally a good thing. Not every move pays off immediately and the resources required to change a plan completely can sometimes make amending it unfeasible or overly detrimental, even if it isn’t quite living up to our expectations right now.

But there is a common scenario in FPL in which we managers stick with a plan despite conditions changing to the point that it becomes evidently unlikely to succeed. 

For example, we may hold our chips for too long into a season, despite a better short-term opportunity emerging, or persist with our plans to use them during specific Gameweeks, despite the viability of that strategy having changed for the worse due to the emergence of earlier-unforeseeable factors.

Alternatively, we may base our plan on the assumption that a certain player or team might do well but find that this player has unexpectedly become a rotation risk or that team has suddenly lost form or made a fundamental change to the way they play that undermines our strategy. 

In such circumstances, the logical course of action might be to move our plans away from this player or team yet, often, we do not and persist anyway. One reason for this tendency is a cognitive bias known as ‘plan continuation bias’.

Plan continuation bias occurs when a person chooses to continue with their existing plan despite conditions changing. It is a bias commonly observed among airline pilots who (somewhat alarmingly now I come to think about it) are commonly observed to demonstrate a tendency to ‘just go for it’ when landing a plane, despite the emergence of factors that might indicate that this is a bad idea, like strong winds, for example.

Similarly, if you enjoy rugby, you’ve probably heard the term ‘white-line fever’ used to describe the situation where a player, sensing an opportunity to score a try, loses all awareness of what is around him and, again, just goes for it. Sometimes it pays off, of course, but often white-line fever will blind the player to a better opportunity (passing to another player, for example) and end in them not scoring and/or nearly getting decapitated by a seven-foot lock.

Common factors in both cases of plan adherence bias are the reduced awareness of threats or better alternative options and the greater urge to ‘just go for it’ the closer the person in question gets to their objective.

FPL Deadline Fever

So why would this cause us problems in FPL? Well, part of the problem is the close proximity of each upcoming Gameweek. Once we’ve perhaps seen evidence that our current plan is not working, we may have only a few days until the next deadline comes around and, with this in mind, we’re often tempted to ignore the problems and hope that they’re somehow just resolved by the next Gameweek. But if the issues are chronic, we’re compounding their negative impact by leaving them unaddressed.

But there is another issue that feeds into plan adherence bias and it has to do with another cognitive bias; the sunk cost fallacy. I’ve spoken about this bias before on these pages but, to summarise, when we’ve invested something into something, be it time, budget or even our belief, we’re prone to persist with that thing rather than to acknowledge our error, even when the fact that we’ve made an error has become manifestly obvious.

A personal example of this might be the fact that, since Gameweek 17, I’ve carried Chelsea’s Reece James (£5.8m) through injuries, multiple 59-minute substitutions and a series of ‘scores’ that could easily be mistaken for binary code. There are many times I could have resolved this problem but, at this point, I actually feel like I’m owed something for my patience. If I were to move James out before I receive that pay-off, I’d have to acknowledge that the whole thing has been a prolonged and protracted mistake. Yet, as a result of my inaction, my mistake becomes more damaging with every Gameweek.

As a result of the sunk cost fallacy, we often let previous decisions influence future ones, even if conditions have changed. For example, you regularly hear people in FPL circles say, ‘What is the point in owning ‘Player X’ if you don’t captain him?’. The argument here is that Player X is using so much of your budget that to not captain is to essentially admit that you made a mistake by purchasing him in the first place.

However, the decision to own Player X was made in the past and, thus, was made without the information that has become available since. Thus, to captain Player X simply because you own him, and in spite of the fact that alternative players now appear to be better captaincy options, is another example of plan adherence bias.

These kinds of logical fallacies crop up a lot in FPL; we made a decision that turned out to have negative consequences but, instead of treating every subsequent decision as a new, independent event, we limit our opportunities based on a need to justify that earlier decision, inevitably leading to yet more negative consequences.

Summary

A good plan is detailed, flexible and easily scrapped. Whether we’re landing a plane or doing something important like executing a Double Gameweek chip strategy, it’s important for us to stay conscious of what’s going on around us and be willing to acknowledge when a plan isn’t working or is unlikely to work as, not only does this limit the potential negative effects of persisting with it, it opens up opportunities to pursue a new, and perhaps better plan.

It’s very easy in FPL, especially at this stage of the season, to feel like previous decisions have become baggage, weighing us down. But, if we allow it to be, each decision we make can be an entirely new, independent event with the potential for a more positive outcome. The more we see the coming Gameweek as a fresh new horizon, unencumbered by past decisions, the more flexible our strategies can be, and the greater our opportunity for achieving better future results will become.