Whether statistical acumen or football knowledge is the better indicator of success in Fantasy Football has been the source of considerable debate in recent years. In light of that, I thought I’d share my story as a fan of statistics who has absolutely no clue about football.
I have never seen a football match before in my life and until playing the Fantasy Premier League (FPL) game I had zero football knowledge and even thought that Christiano Ronaldo and Ronaldinho were the same person. I had never heard of Sergio Aguero or Eden Hazard. Wayne Rooney was the only Premier League player I had heard of but I still couldn’t have told you a thing about the type of player he is. As an Australian this doesn’t even exclude me from many conversations as none of my friendship circle are interested in football. Last year though I decided to take part in an experiment and play a Fantasy sport I know nothing about and see how well I could go.
The results have been much better than I expected as I go into Gameweek 34 with an overall rank of 1,261. Here is a link to my team to see how I have progressed in my debut season.
But how did I get to this point? The answer is simple. It is because of the Fantasy Football Scout community. You are my football knowledge.
For the start of the season, I decided I would just read every article that was posted on Fantasy Football Scout and try and read all of the comments. I ended up with a half decent squad (or so I thought) which realistically was just a mash up of the most common players suggested on here. You could basically call it the FFS community team.
My Gameweek 1 side looked like this:
Begovic (Elliot)
Cahill – Ferdinand – Jones (Chester, Wisdom)
Hazard – Henderson – Ramsey – Mata (Marney)
Costa – Rooney – Diouf
Let me explain something, I panicked like a lot of people about the fitness of Swansea’s Gylfi Sigurdsson right before Gameweek 1 was starting and transferred him to Burnley’s Dean Marney. As you can see, it wasn’t a pretty start. I even benched Hull’s James Chester for his 15-point Gameweek 1 haul (and played him for the -2 the next week). But at the end of Gameweek 1, I was left with something I could work with — stats!
I just looked at players’ stats to decide who to bring in each week. Still did not watch games, but purely used stats. Finally my team started to improve in ranking slightly, and then more significantly until I rocketed into the top 100k then top 20k. I then stagnated.
After about two months, I was now able to actually understand who people were talking about in their discussions on FFScout. It was very hard at first having to learn all the team names (I’m still not great at nicknames), then player names, then formation and then roles. My football knowledge was coming purely from FFScout, its community and statistics. I had not read anything else from any other websites (and till haven’t). And guess what? My ranking started to improve again.
It became very very clear to me that there is an answer to the question of what contributes more to a higher overall rank, statistics or football knowledge. I could give you the boring answer of “both” but it is more specific than that. Stats can get you a top 20-30k finish. Minimal to no knowledge needed. I know that because that is what would have happened if I still didn’t understand what you were all talking about and discussing. From Gameweek 8 to Gameweek 20, I moved 900 spots and had eight red arrows and five green ones. When I started understanding the discussions that were taking place about certain players on FFScout, which is roughly from Gameweek 21 to Gameweek 33, I had had two red arrows and 11 green.
Stats can only get you so far (let’s say top 1%), but knowledge helps you push out into that top 0.1% region. I do believe though, if you had one person fully using stats and one only using their knowledge, then stats would lead to a higher overall rank.
I know this will seem obvious to a lot of you, but I think my situation is the closest sort of “evidence” that you will ever get. Good luck for the rest of the season and thanks for reading.
