This has, so far, been a really topsy-turvy season. Very few players have been consistent scorers, with huge scores often preceding a string of blanks, defences drifting in and out of form, and more volatility and unpredictability than I can remember in many years. In short, a lot of people will have caught the wrong end of some bad luck so far despite making perfectly sensible moves – and last week will have caught many, many players cold.
That was me, earlier this season. No sooner had I followed my own advice to move in on the Arsenal defence than they stopped keeping clean sheets and now William Saliba’s gone and got himself sent off. I’ve been consistently captaining Erling Haaland only for him to hit an ice-cold spell in front of goal. Decisions that seemed sensible were punished, while alternative options thrived. I’m currently following a Top 2,000 worldwide finish up with a score that puts me outside the top three million. I know I’m not the only experienced player who’s suffering.
But this column isn’t a chance for me to moan, and that doesn’t get anybody anywhere. We’re all entitled to gripe in our WhatsApp groups and grumble when another decision goes awry, but what we really need to do is query whether we’re making the right calls. Are we really getting so unlucky? Or did we have the wrong decision-making process in the first place?
I’ve been playing this game long and enough, and well enough, to feel pretty confident in my ability to analyse trends and make good moves accordingly. Was I wrong to buy two Arsenal defenders ahead of a run of games against Leicester City, Southampton and Bournemouth? Even though it went badly, I don’t think I was. The Arsenal defence was the best last season and was keeping clean sheets this year too. That they failed to do so three times in a row and chucked a red card in as a cherry on top doesn’t mean that I didn’t make a reasoned, sensible decision – it means I got on the wrong end of variance.
Which doesn’t mean that I haven’t made mistakes. For instance, I started this season with Jordan Pickford in goal and promptly dropped him just as Everton’s defence sorted itself out. The Toffees had the second best defence for clean sheets last year, but I hadn’t factored in the fact that Sean Dyche teams almost always start badly – in fact, in the last five years, he’s only won a game in the first month of a campaign once. With that decision, I simply didn’t factor in all of the available data, and cost myself a chance at some points. At least Matz Sels has proven to be a solid alternative.
Equally, I don’t think it was unreasonable to have opened the season with Alexander Isak up front. Based on his performance last year, he had the potential to be the very best points-per-game asset in FPL. Instead, a combination of injuries and poor form from both himself and his team rendered him unselectable. Had I twigged that Chris Wood was a much better asset than I realised, I could have had points all over the place not just up front but wherever else I spent the £2.5m I would have saved – but while missing on starting with Wood was a whiff, starting with Isak was a perfectly valid plan which followed the data but turned out bad.
This is how you need to look at your own decisions – when did I ignore the data and track records and make mistakes? And when did I make entirely reasonable transfers that went badly? It’s surprisingly hard for us to tell sometimes, partly because we often want to see results which aren’t actually supported by the information we have.
There are two psychological concepts that come into it here. Bear with me, I’m not going that deep. The first is ‘results-oriented thinking’, as gamers in other areas call it. This is the bad habit of thinking that just because a decision ended up being a success or failure, that it must have been good or bad in the first place.
I’d say that if I made the equivalent move to adding two Arsenal defenders in over the course of ten seasons, it would come good in maybe eight of them. This just happened to be one that it didn’t – the outcome doesn’t mean that it was a mistake, and if I decided that it was then I might make bad plays in future gameweeks off the back of a false conclusion. Separating process from results and accepting that good plans don’t always come to fruition (and vice versa!) will help you to become a better player.
The second concept to bear in mind is ‘confirmation bias’. This is when you want your moves to be right, and so look for evidence that they were even if it isn’t there. For instance, if you chose not to sign Saliba over the past few weeks, you might think that it makes you a genius – but that’s only the case if the alternative move you made instead could have been credibly predicted beforehand and was backed up not just by the eventual result, but by the data available in advance.
This is where we need to separate our own ego from the results we get. Good players are having bad seasons right now despite doing the right things. Bad players are flourishing despite making what should have been mistakes. Over the course of the season, or several seasons, these things will even out, but we need to make sure that we don’t let unusual results trick us into thinking that we need to do (or not do) certain things.
Ultimately, when a transfer or captaincy decision goes wrong, we shouldn’t assume we made a mistake. We should look back at the data and see if we could have predicted that it would go wrong, and look at the more successful option and see if we should have known that would be better – and if so, why. That’s how we learn to follow data and trends the right way, and not join the crowd that sign bad assets on occasional hot streaks or the players who get put off from signing good players because of a few bad games. Luck helps, but it’s amazing how much luckier you’ll feel like you’re getting if you consistently make smart moves.
Self-analysis isn’t the only thing we need to do when we hit a rough run of gameweeks, of course. There’s one more thing to remember - don’t panic. If you keep making good decisions, growing your team value and avoid chasing losses by making risky transfers, then you will most likely climb the ranks steadily. If you’re trailing in your mini-league late in the season, then it’s time to gamble. But it’s too early right now, so keep it smart and sensible and you’ll likely be better off.
Captaincy calls and 3 Added Minutes FC
OK, that’s the last of the pop psychology for now. Normally I talk a little more about specific transfer ideas and to make up for that, I’m going to show you my example team, 3 Added Minutes FC, and talk about the moves I’ve already made and why in a little more detail.
Normally, I’m a big advocate of waiting for as long as possible before making changes in order to benefit from information from the managers’ press conferences and so on, but this week I saw some price changes coming early and moved accordingly on Monday in order to avoid long-term damage to my team.
So there have been three changes from the team you’ll see below, which picked up a respectable 44 points in what proved to be a very tough week for many. I’ve changed out Bukayo Saka, Luis Díaz and the suspended Saliba for Son Heung-Min, Jarrod Bowen and Joško Gvardiol, and ‘made’ (added to my team value or avoided losing) £0.5m as a result of making those moves early. Keeping across price changes really is important, and that’s money I may be very grateful for down the line.
Signing Díaz was another mistake I should have known better on. He’s always had short and explosive streaks of form without being a consistent scorer, and I ended up chasing one of those good runs after it had happened and just before some rougher fixtures. My process was off there, and I’ll bear that in mind going forward. Still, all I can do is make the right moves for the rest of the season, and I think I’ve moved on to players with better fixtures (and fitness) and added to my team value along the way, which will help later in the season
Fantasy Premier League
Bowen may surprise some people as West Ham United have been pretty awful so far, but he should become the attacking focal point with Mohammed Kudus suspended, is a proven and consistent scorer, and as a player whose price already fell, will go up in value if he hits a purple patch. Besides, West Ham’s fixtures ease off a little now. I think that signing him is good process, just as signing Díaz wasn’t.
As for the captain’s armband, I’m handing it to Haaland again this week. He may have blanked a few times in a row but he’s the best goalscorer (and points scorer, perhaps barring Cole Palmer) in the entire game, and has what should be a pretty soft home fixture against Southampton. I think any other choice is indefensible this week. Don’t let a few blanks trick you into ignoring the stats.
If you don’t have Haaland for some reason, then Son Heung-Min, Ollie Watkins and Cole Palmer are all reasonable alternatives, in roughly that order. Anyway, that’s all for this week – I’ll be back (minus the cheap Fraser Crane impression) next Thursday and in the meantime, I hope all of you draw the right conclusions from your success and failures. Good luck.
0 Comments