Life without FPL: Missing the beautiful game or not?

Another Fantasy Premier League deadline is about to pass with little fanfare and without a ball being kicked.

We’ve already had three such ‘blank’ Gameweeks since COVID-19 stopped play in mid-March and it’ll be a long time yet until we’re again bemoaning FPL’s definition of an assist and how in God’s name they could possibly know what the intended destination of Serge Aurier’s hit-and-hope cross was.

Reading some of your comments on the site over the last month, there’s been a bit of a split on whether FPL, and football in general, is being missed.

Some are glad to see the back of it, appreciative of the temporary respite or (correctly) highlighting how irrelevant it is at present, while others are clearly yearning for the beautiful game’s return: see the volume of “Pope or Henderson”-type posts and the demand for a Frisking the Fixtures article last week.

Personally, I’ve probably got a foot in each camp.

I have always relished the downtime at the end of a season and am not one who has looked to fill the void left by FPL either with a summertime Fantasy game (e.g. the Tour de France) or by watching football from further afield.

Like a clapped-out midfielder retiring from international duty in order to prolong his club career, I tend to swerve any kind of Fantasy-related involvement between May and August in order to maintain my fervent interest in the game I have played for over 15 years.

Given that we may not get much of a pre-season between 2019/20 and 2020/21, I’m acting on the assumption that the period we are in now will be the longest breather of this calendar year.

Still, FPL represents normality for some of us with its weekly cycle of deadlines, disappointment and occasional delirium, and its absence is a reminder (as if we needed one) that these are unusual, unique days we’re all living through right now.

In the grand scheme of things, with a deadly virus tightening its grip, being deprived of football for a relatively short period of time should be about as inconvenient as being unable to make a trip to B&Q for metal fence paint.

Thousands are succumbing to this illness across the world every day and key workers are carrying out unimaginable acts of heroism in hospitals and elsewhere, risking their own lives to save others.

It’s these people that our hearts are with but we are human and thus flawed, so it’s OK to simultaneously miss physical contact with your loved ones, a pint down the pub and, yes, a daft old game like FPL.

Such is the world we now live in, keeping your own business private is evidently not the done thing any more.

Everybody’s a somebody (even though they are mostly nobodies) and we simply must tell the world what we have been watching, eating, exercising to or painting.

So here’s what I’ve been up to during the downtime.

In some respects, little has changed.

I’ve been a home-worker anyway for the best part of a decade and I realise how exceptionally fortunate I am to still be in some form of employment at present, with furloughing and lay-offs happening elsewhere.

What is different is that the job is no longer all-consuming, as it can be during the season, and I’m able to clock off around 6-7pm most nights.

Suddenly there is an abundance of free time in the evenings and at weekends, which has to be spent almost exclusively indoors.

My extracurricular activities are straight from the lockdown textbook: picking up books abandoned years ago, ploughing through the backed-up Now TV watchlist, baking, heavy drinking, purchasing electrical goods I don’t need, “working out” in front of the TV; it’s difficult to know where the emergency home entertainment stops and the premature midlife crisis starts.

I caught sight of myself, a manchild with the leg muscles of a juvenile heron, in the mirror the other day, midway through failing one of those “INSANE 7-MINUTE CALF AND QUAD WORKOUT” YouTube videos, and immediately thought of Lester Burnham in American Beauty.

Despite trying to kid myself that I’m a well-rounded individual with a broad range of interests, I’ve inevitably boomeranged back to football on more than one occasion: Newcastle United’s 5-0 win over Manchester United in 1996 was watched in its entirety, along with a couple of Sky Sports Years, Euro 96: The Summer Football Came Home and even the Match of the Day fillers on Saturday evening.

The likelihood of me turning to a long-dormant Football Manager save, in which I’m steering Berwick Rangers up the Scottish pyramid, also increases by the day.

While I’ve got a platform, I’d like to thank everyone who continues to visit the site (and read this pound shop Pre-Match Preamble) even during the suspension of Premier League football – it’s not often I’m writing as ‘myself’ instead of the house-style Scout, so I’ll take the opportunity when I can.

Happily, Lateriser will be around next week to write a similar, almost certainly better, piece to this and let us know what he has been up to of late.

Paul will be studying Everton and Arsenal under their new managers, too, while I’ll be bringing you premium asset analysis and a 2017/18 FPL quiz over the weekend.

We’ll continue to provide articles and videos over the coming weeks and we’ll try to cater to as many tastes as possible: a lot of what we have produced already, from coverage of FPL-style management games to long-read Members articles, has come from suggestions you have made. So keep them coming in via the form on that above link.

And continue to suggest books, TV shows, films and anything else in the comments section below (I’ll throw Shoplifters into the mix from what I have watched in the last seven days), as you did last week following David’s piece – I’ll certainly be following up a number of those recommendations.