On Mini-Seasons

If your strategy is about starting with a grand plan for large parts of the season and then filling in the details as the season unfolds, as mine is, then the highest level of dividing up the season is into mini-seasons. A mini-season is just a part of a season demarcated by wildcard(s) or the start or end of a season. That means the season is divided into three mini-seasons: 1) Start of the season to just before the first wildcard; 2) The first wildcard to just before the second wildcard; 3) The second wildcard to the end. Arguably, there is a fourth one-week mini-season that can interrupt one of the other mini-seasons: the week you play your Free Hit. We won’t talk further about the Free Hit here, since it’s such a special case. The rest of the article will concentrate on the three normal mini-seasons.

Each mini-season is mostly self-contained. The only things that carry over from one mini-season to the next are your overall team value, and the buying value of players that you keep from one mini-season to the next. Technically, chips also count, but most people will play them in the final mini-season, so it’s not a major issue.

The nice thing about this is that going into the first mini-season, where you have the most limited information about players, you don’t have to plan beyond the first mini-season. If you can find a good time to plan for the first wildcard, then you don’t have to worry about fixtures beyond that time. You don’t have to worry about players who might lose their place at some time after the planned wildcard. You also don’t have to worry about the captaincy beyond this period – ideally, you can just start with all the players you plan to captain in the first mini-season, such as Mohamed Salah, Bruno Fernandes, and Son Heung-min in the 2021-22 season. I find this gives me a lot of peace of mind and confidence that people who constantly talk about “having a wildcard in my back pocket” actually lack. (Ironically, the same people often say it’s liberating once they have spent the first wildcard.)

In the first mini-season, you can expect to get quite a few things wrong at the start, just because of the lack of information you start the season with. If the first mini-season lasts, say, just six weeks, then you have only five transfers to fix any problems before the wildcard. Therefore, I hope to get the premium assets correct and get some budget defenders that I don’t really need to move around, even if they don’t perform especially well. I figure in most years, the transfers in this period will probably be spent mainly on the cheaper attackers, who are hard to get right from the start. Ideally, no restructuring at all would be needed during this mini-season, but unfortunately, the transfer window remains open for a while and might produce events that I need to react to. I won’t feel too bad if the odd hit is required during this mini-season, but will strive to have a team flexible enough to get most of the players I want with just one transfer.

The second mini-season then starts with the first wildcard, which you hopefully schedule for a time when you have enough information to set up the team long-term without having to spend a lot of transfers dumping “dud” picks. Assuming the second wildcard is to be played fairly late to take advantage of double gameweeks, the second mini-season is likely by far the longest. In theory, I’m not actually opposed to pencilling in a tentative captain for, say, Gameweek 7 all the way to 32, as much as it may sound ridiculous to some. Obviously, this captaincy will not be set in stone, but it will help me understand which premiums are going to be needed frequently for the captaincy in which periods. I can see whether it’s best to set up with two premium midfielders and one premium forward, or one premium midfielder and two premium forwards, or three premium midfielders and no premium forwards. If this aspect of my structure needs to be changed at some point, I can pre-plan that and make sure I have two free transfers the week that the change needs to be made.

Some managers think that because the second mini-season is so long and it’s hard to plan months in advance, the latter part of it must necessarily involve quite a few hits. I mostly disagree and while it’s somewhat season-dependent, I normally strive to completely avoid hits unless they gain me more fixtures (e.g. replacing a single gameweek player with a double gameweek player, or a blank gameweek player with a player who does not blank). In 2020-21, I took only one hit in the second mini-season, which was in Blank Gameweek 18 when I did not have a full XI. Short of a serious injury crisis, I feel like the only time I could justify taking hits that do not gain me fixtures is in the first mini-season, when there is so little information that I will likely make quite a few mistakes with the initial team. On the other hand, I prefer to play the first wildcard late enough that the team can be constructed with good knowledge of who are reliable “glue guys”, as Lateriser calls them, and shouldn’t contain many mistakes needing to be corrected.

If you’re a long-term planner like me, you should like the second mini-season the most, because it’s the hardest for people who don’t plan or take the wrong approach to planning – making an excessively specific plan that will be ruined if certain players rise or fall in price at the wrong time. The only specific transfers written into my plan are premium transfers, which I make sure to record mentally as straight swaps or double moves, where the latter requires saving a free transfer to be able to shift funds around. For example, if I want to switch from a premium midfielder to a premium forward in the middle of a mini-season, then I must record that as a double move that will have to occur at that time. For the most part, I feel that if I cannot remember the plan without writing it down in a spreadsheet or team planner, then it’s too complicated and detailed. Non-premium transfers shouldn’t require much advance planning. Advance planning can even be detrimental if, for example, you lock yourself into the idea that you will load up on a mid-table team to capitalise on a run of fixtures, and then that team is not actually as good as expected.

The third mini-season is generally short and fairly straightforward, although occasionally complicated by late announcements of fixture rescheduling. Decisions are dictated by chips and the schedule of double and blank gameweeks. Hits are likely to gain you more fixtures, so they’re more easily justified, especially when double gameweeks are announced with very little advance notice. In years where this mini-season is a bit longer, a special concern for this part of the season is setting up a Bench Boost team, and then having a lot of money stuck on the bench for many weeks afterwards. I haven’t found any clever solutions for this issue; some would say to play Bench Boost in Gameweek 1, but there are always concerns with low team value, the unpredictability of Gameweek 1 line-ups, and how soon to wildcard afterwards, so I haven’t felt seriously tempted to try this. Normally people who like this strategy like to play their first wildcard very early no matter what, so they feel like a Gameweek 1 Bench Boost can still avoid letting the Bench Boost tail wag the wildcard dog.

To sum up, thinking of the season in terms of self-contained mini-seasons can help take some of the stress out of planning. Each mini-season has its unique characteristics which may favour different types of managers. I’m looking forward to embarking on the second mini-season soon – how about you?