What’s needed to win in FPL? Part 3: Beating your opponents

Our team of Hall of Famers and guest writers are offering regular contributions throughout the 2023/24 Fantasy Premier League (FPL) campaign. Here, former champion Simon March continues his series that analyses what traits are needed to win in FPL.

“You don’t play the cards in front of you, you play the man across from you.” – James Bond, Casino Royale

To state that ‘you’ll need to beat your opponents’ to win your mini-league or FPL overall seems more than a little tautological. However, most of us operate on the assumption that, if we seek to maximise our score, we will give ourselves the best chance of outperforming our rivals whoever they are and whatever they do. While this is often true, it is not always true.

Beating an opponent in FPL can require a very different approach to simply scoring the most points possible and, in fact, it might even require us to sacrifice our maximum point-scoring potential in order to maximise our chances of winning whichever prize is most important to us.

Having examined the roles that composure and luck have to play in winning at FPL, part three of this series will focus on exactly what it might take to beat your opponents.

Know your Enemy

As we enter the final Gameweeks of the season, your rivals are essentially anybody currently standing between you and your goal. Or, they are anybody with the potential to prevent you from achieving that goal.

Identifying who these people are is step one. If there are a lot of them, you’ll likely need to apply some method of prioritisation to narrow the list down to the key challengers.

Step two is to get to know them as FPL managers. Maybe you know them in real life. Maybe, to you, they are just names in a mini-league. But it can help to build a profile of how they approach the game; are they aggressive or conservative when it comes to transfers? Do they take frequent hits or do they tend to save their transfers? When do they usually make their transfers? Do they have particular biases or preferences (the team they support, for example) that might affect their decisions going forward?

Next, pay attention to their current status and track this over the final Gameweeks. Ideally, you’d do this before and immediately after each Gameweek. By ‘status’ I mean how many transfers they have available to them as they approach each round, which chips they’ve used, how much money they have in the bank and how many transfers they have used to date. All this information can be strategically valuable. Provided that you are monitoring it closely enough, it can sometimes even give you some clues as to what your rival’s transfers might have been.

It can help to record this information in spreadsheet form and update it after each round. I’ve included an image of the spreadsheet (click to expand) I used to track my competitors in the run-in for my own winning season in 2014/15. You might recognise a few of the names!

You don’t have to make the tracking document overly complicated. The idea is to know, at a glance, the key information regarding where you are in relation to your competitors, allowing you to easily assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of your squads.

It is worth remembering that, as I discovered back then, people may also be paying this kind of attention to your team. Therefore, it is in your interest to avoid leaving too many clues as to what your moves might be. A transfer made later in the Gameweek, for example, gives your opponent less of an opportunity to figure out your game plan than one made earlier on.

Mind Games

If you used to listen to The Scoutcast in the Mark and Granville days, you might recall that it often offered a masterclass in good-natured mind games and how to successfully psych out an FPL rival, with each host usually giving as good as they got.

Mind games may perhaps fall into the ‘darker arts’ category of FPL tactics but they do say that all’s fair in love, war and FPL. The ability to get inside the head of your opponent can present all sorts of advantages, particularly if it causes them to overthink their decisions or to make a mistake. There are many ways in which you can gain a psychological edge over your rival, and we will discuss some of the more common FPL-oriented mind games in this section.

Firstly, questioning your opponent’s style of play, even in a mildly pejorative fashion, can provoke a response from your rival that might prove detrimental to them. For example, you might suggest that they are too boring or conservative and that they don’t take enough risks or have enough fun when it comes to FPL. 

Nobody likes to be considered ‘boring’. The mere suggestion that they are can sometimes cause an opponent to chance a higher risk move than they might normally take, simply in an effort to prove you wrong.

Equally, if your key opponent tends to take a lot of risks and this represents a threat to you, you can seed the idea that the player they might have in mind is too risky and that their tendency to go for these kinds of high-risk, high-reward moves is detrimental to them. This approach can work particularly well if they’ve been burned by a high-risk move recently or in the past. If this is the case, be sure to remind them of it.

Another common mind game involves convincing your opponent that a particular player is ‘essential’. This is all the more beneficial to you if that player is awkward for them to get in as it might encourage them to take hits or use their Wildcard or Free Hit chips.

Lastly, for now, if you want to prevent a differential player from being covered, you might ‘jokingly’ suggest that your rival is ‘copying’ you if they bring them in or question why they didn’t go for this player earlier. This works even better if they’ve criticised or dismissed that player as an option in the past.

People are particularly resistant to accusations of unoriginality and we, as humans, find inconsistencies within our own opinions psychologically uncomfortable to deal with, even when they are entirely rational (players, as we know, frequently go in and out of form). Often, we will go so far as to act against their own best interests rather than accept such inconsistencies.

You can wage psychological FPL warfare in person or online, particularly if you and your rival(s) are active on FPL forums or social media. But remember, however much we might think otherwise, few of us are impervious to the influence of mind games. Their effects on us can be subtle, even subconscious, yet still be enough to throw us off our game.

If, like me, you enjoy the idea of mind games in theory but feel like you’d probably be rubbish at them in practice, your best bet when it comes to the business end of an FPL season might be to avoid engaging with your rivals on the topic of FPL altogether and to keep as quiet as possible about your plans. Don’t give anything away in your personal interactions and definitely do be careful what you post about your team online.

Defending a Lead

Your ideal strategy for winning in the final Gameweeks may be heavily influenced by whether you are chasing or defending a lead.

When defending a lead, your best strategy might actually not be to try and extend your lead further but, instead, you may be better off focusing on maximising the benefit of the lead that you currently have.

To illustrate the distinction, an analogy I like can be found in competitive yachting. At a certain point in a race, the leading boat will stop pursuing their own strategy and start trying to replicate the moves of the closest boat(s) chasing them. This may mean that they don’t finish the race as quickly as they could have done but it reduces the strategic options of their pursuers, thus increasing their own chances of winning the race.

Ensuring a win in a mini-league scenario (and at some point, all of FPL effectively becomes a mini-league) may require you to sacrifice some of your potential points total maximum in order to cover the key threats in the squads chasing you. In order to pull this off, however, you will need to accurately assess those threats and effectively time your moves to cover them. 

The calculation determining exactly when to do this can be tricky to formulate as it depends a great deal on how big your lead is, how many Gameweeks are left and how many of your rivals can realistically catch you. However, if you execute it correctly, you can significantly limit their options for overtaking you. It can also potentially force them to make ever more risky moves to try and close the gap. 

Chasing a lead

In some respect, chasing a lead is essentially doing the above in reverse but without taking the bait and falling into the trap of making your moves too early or too risky. As I mentioned in part one of this series, composure in these moments is key. You ideally want all the pressure to be on the leader. This is most effectively achieved when you wear their lead down slowly and methodically.

If you are studying the FPL team(s) you are trying to catch closely, it should be possible for you to identify the weaknesses in their squad and find opportunities that you can exploit. In many respects, the odds are against you here and it is important to recognise that fact, but you also have greater freedom to be creative when chasing a lead and to make the kinds of moves that somebody defending a lead might not think of or might not want to risk. 

As I mentioned in part two of this series, the ideal move for this scenario is one with a low risk and a high reward. These moves are easier to describe than to find, but they are usually out there somewhere. 

The challenge of identifying and exploiting the right move at the right moment, especially under pressure, is one of the reasons we love playing FPL. So, whether you ultimately achieve your goal or not, try to enjoy the challenge of overcoming the odds whenever you can.