As most middle-aged bores (like this writer) will be at pains to tell you, football was just better back in the day.

Stripy nets, huge shirt typefaces, innocent kit sponsors you could take home to meet your parents (Chupa Chups, TDK… Norwich and Peterborough). You could even leave your door defence unlocked and still nearly win the title.

There’s nostalgia around Fantasy Premier League (FPL), too, now that the game is over 20 years old.

An article that we put out in March, chronicling the story of FPL’s chaotic debut season of 2002/03, really seemed to strike a chord. Given how well that went down, we thought we’d follow it up with some more shameless sentimentality.

In this piece, which can very much be filed under ‘break glass for emergency summer filler’, we look back at some FPL features that have been consigned to the dustbin of history – for better or worse.

ALL OUT ATTACK

Throwback to when @OfficialFPL had the all out attack chip which let you play the 2-5-3 formation. Many disliked the chip but ngl I always benefited from it and want it back#FPL #TBT #ThrowbackThursday pic.twitter.com/hdmwMP1riW

— FPLHINTS  (@FPLHints) April 21, 2022

With debate raging about whether the Assistant Manager should be abandoned after one (half) season, there was a previous chip that was unceremoniously dumped quite quickly.

The All Out Attack was introduced, along with the Bench Boost and Triple Captain, almost 10 years ago to the day. Not everyone was a fan…

Bench Boost and Triple Captain, as you well know, survive to this day.

But in summer 2017, two years after its introduction, All Out Attack got the boot. In came the Free Hit, which has remained in place since.

While there were some fans of it (see above), the All Out Attack wasn’t much mourned when it was disposed of. “Much maligned” and “unloved” captured the prevailing mood after its demise.

For the uninitiated, the All Out Attack gave managers the option to play a 2-5-3 formation (something you could do every week back when FPL first started!) for one Gameweek only.

Effectively, all it did was give you one extra midfielder or forward at the expense of a defender. If said attacker missed out, in came one of your defenders off the bench – meaning you were back to a 3-4-3/3-5-2 and had frittered away a chip.

There hasn’t been much clamour for its return…

• VERDICT: Not missed

WINTER WILDCARD

In the same summer that FPL unleashed the three chips, there was also a significant tweak to the Wildcard rules.

It was at this point, in July 2015, that FPL gave us more free rein. One Wildcard for the first half of the season, one for the second half of the season.

In the five preceding years, however, we had what became known as ‘the winter Wildcard’.

This could only be used in and around the January transfer window.

As Mark said upon its introduction in 2010, however, there were other reasons beyond the winter transfer window to hand FPL managers a second Wildcard for the season…

There would have been FPL managers against the introduction of a second Wildcard in 2010. There was even a time when we had no Wildcard at all, in the first few years of FPL.

But for many of us, that period from 2010-2015 was a bit of a golden era in FPL. Yes, the winter Wildcard may have been a ploy to keep more managers engaged and active. But the scales were still very much tipped in favour of the planners and meticulous thinkers.

There was no rolling of more than one transfer. There were no chips beyond the Wildcards. Once your second Wildcard was played, generally by no later than around Gameweek 23/24, you had to navigate the blanks, doubles and dead rubbers later in the campaign using transfers and only transfers. No Wildcard to bail you out, no Triple Captain to salvage a season in one fell swoop.

Perhaps it’s more the lack of other chips than the winter Wildcard per se but it felt like these were the years when there were fewer avenues for the *spit* casuals to make instant regains that the long-term strategists had laboured to carve out over months.

• VERDICT: Missed (by the traditionalists)

GUESSING OTHER MANAGERS’ TRANSFERS

One long-lost, devious feature of FPL was being able to suss out what transfer your mini-league rivals had made before the Gameweek deadline passed!

In the FPL equivalent of flying a drone over your opponents’ training ground pre-game, you could make a very educated guess as to what move(s) your nearest foes had made. If you were chasing, you’d maybe go differential off the back of it. If you were defending a mini-league lead, the temptation would be to make the same move and block your rival.

So, how did you crack the code?

The trick was to load up your rival’s team page and look at a) the transfers made in the current Gameweek and b) the money they had in the bank compared to what they had the previous week. Both are highlighted in red in the image above.

You never knew for sure who they were bringing in, of course. But if, say, there was a fixture swing/Double Gameweek happening and/or one of their existing players was red flagged, you could make a decent stab at guessing who was going in and who was going out.

Once FPL made it impossible to see how many transfers your opponent had made in the upcoming Gameweek, the jig was up.

And, you’d have to say, fair enough.

But in the same way that shunting your opponents off a kitchen table in Micro Machines made it a much better game, you can’t help but feel that something was lost when it happened.

• VERDICT: Missed (by the Machiavellians)

THE MAN IN THE STAND

Bonus points have been around since FPL started, in different guises.

In 2005/06, there was a two-year flirtation with a stat-based bonus system with the introduction of the Actim Index bonus.

But on either side of that, and until 2011/12 when we lurched back towards performance-rating numbers, it was gloriously/maddeningly subjective: decided by the infamous ‘man in the stand’.

In the early days, players were arbitrarily awarded three points by the Press Association “for being judged to have made an excellent performance”. As we discussed in our 2002/03 article, that resulted in 10 players getting three bonus points in some games, and none in others!

Eventually, the ‘3, 2, 1’ allocation for every game came into being – but the subjectivity remained.

Barry Ferguson is a name synonymous with this feather-ruffling era. Zero goals and zero assists in 2009/10 but 31 bonus points!

Charlie Adam was another darling of the press, racking up 45 bonus points in 2010/11.

The successes of Chris Eagles and David Luiz in garnering bonus led some to question whether floppy hair was all that was needed to catch the attention of the match assessor…

In pretty much every other Scout Notes from that era, you can find Mark struggling to make sense of the “strange decisions” from the watching adjudicator.

While the current Bonus Points System isn’t perfect, at least there is some method behind the madness. That wasn’t always the case in FPL’s first decade.

• VERDICT: Not missed

ULTIMATE FPL

Finally, arguably the binned feature most pined for by the hardcore of the Fantasy community.

In July 2013, out of nowhere, ‘Ultimate Fantasy Premier League’ popped its head above the parapet. And then swiftly disappeared again.

After that aborted debut, a beta version of the game emerged the following February before launching properly ahead of 2014/15.

And what a departure from the bread and butter of FPL.

There was a 25-man squad, 18 of whom had to be nominated for matchday duty every Gameweek. There were manual substitutions, where you could remove underperformers from, say, Saturday and bring in a player who was yet to play on Sunday. That also applied to switching captains, UCL Fantasy style.

There were small designated transfer windows, outside of which you could only use an emergency loan. Even then, you were penalised with points hits for every week you had a temporary fix.

Most bonkers of all: the “Home Grown Player” (HGP) rule…

With points awarded for things like clearances, blocks and interceptions (CBIs), crosses, recoveries and key passes, it also brought a lot more players into selection contention than has ever been the case in FPL.

Best of all, serious money to play for. Thanks to the £5 entry fee, there was a £25k first prize and monthly prizes of £1,000.

Who could not love this format?

As it turns out, quite a lot of people. The hands-on element likely deterred all but the diehards over time, while the punitive transfer/loan system meant you could be up the Swannee with injuries, even with a 25-man squad (on a £160m budget, quite a lot of your players were not doozies).

Interest dropped by 40% after the first year, and by 2016/17, Ultimate FPL was on the scrapheap.

Are we viewing the short-lived spin-off game through rose-tinted specs, then? This excellent article from Jamie Reeves at FPL Tips is worth a read and is of that opinion, with lukewarm testimonies even from Fantasy managers who finished as high as fifth.

We’re of the opposite viewpoint, however. As Jamie says in his article, maybe it was merely “a bit ahead of its time”.

FPL, if you’re reading this, get that license back from the Gambling Commission and unleash the beast again…

• VERDICT: Missed