Fantasy Premier League, a once humble competition amongst friends and peer groups, is now very serious business. The days of logging on and sorting your line-up on the eve of the league restart and hoping for the best are long over.
From that point, you’d check in of a Friday afternoon in a quick dodge from work to sort your team for that gameweek and you were relatively golden. Who’s yellow, who’s red, who let me down with the captain’s armband last weekend? It was simple, with little to no barriers to entry that even football luddites among us could participate in with relative ease.
That was the before. Now, fantasy football has transformed into an entire industry of its own that requires diligent homework and an immense amount of effort to stay the course. Thousands of podcasts have sprouted from the concept, YouTube channels aplenty and deadline livestreams from fantasy gurus who share the high level of their knowledge for free and welcome in paid subscribers for the dirty details of their analysis and last minute tips and tricks to stay ahead of the pack.
Something once very familiar is now a bastardised version of itself. Chips have proliferated the game, once as basic as a treble captain, have now become league winning tools that requires months of advanced preparation to seek out the best time to strike. Last season’s truly terrible addition of manager chips, where you could pick a manager for the first time, has quickly been scrapped in favour of doubling the remaining chips - one set for each half of the season, before and after Gameweek 19.
In an increasing effort to spoon feed both the fantasy elite and the part-timers that tend to drop off after Gameweek 3, they are now doling out five free transfers in advance of this year’s African Cup of Nations. Truly, the game is gone.
xG has seeped not only into the real life sport but the virtual version too and is essential to your selection analysis. Free transfers now roll beyond the previously capped two, making it a never ending stream of content. There’s always changes to make, with it being more flexible and engaging than ever, no doubt in an effort to retain as many stragglers for as deep into the season as possible.
This season, the addition of defensive contribution points will mean no longer are defensive midfielders a fantasy leper, they are now a viable candidate for selection. Tackles, blocks and defensive activity will be rewarded meaning the likes of Moises Caicedo could be as beneficial to your line-up as Cole Palmer.
Take a glance at Twitter and TikTok in advance of a gameweek and be faceplanted into streams of never ending fantasy content. Self-titled gurus prophesising the value of picking Jean-Philippe Mateta over Joao Pedro and why Josko Gvardiol is at risk of a Pepping, or why Martin Dubravka simply has to be your cheap 4.0mil backup goalkeeper even though he is in every other team in the planet.
Colour-coded spreadsheets and Excel wizards wave their hands over their crystal balls trying to predict when the long awaited Double Gameweeks might occur. More recently, Artificial Intelligence has become a tool to rate your team and suggest transfers. It’s just as much a data analytical and technological juggernaut as it is a friendly free-to-play game engineered to have a bit of craic with your mates over a pint.
It’s even seeping into traditional coverage, widely mentioned on Sky Sports coverage and getting it’s own 30 minute segments on the News channel ahead of gameweek deadlines. It’s totally and utterly infiltrated how people think about the game - the frustration when a player is substituted before the 60th minute, getting needlessly upset when Nottingham Forest concede a 92nd minute goal, dirtying their clean sheet and your four point haul from goalkeeper Matz Sels.
And what’s it all for? To maybe scratch into the top 100,000 in the world rather than last year’s measly top 1,000,000 finish? Or, God forbid losing to that bore in the finance department who you spot has the Fantasy Premier League site up on his screen most of the week.
I’m not sure if fantasy football is as fun as it once was, it’s certainly more engaging as they throw more variability and ideas at the wall. But at the end of the day everyone will pick Mo Salah. Plenty will pick Cole Palmer. A strong minority will opt for Erling Haaland. And the rest is sheer and utter luck. You might invest a few euros in a subscription to one of the aforementioned gurus but they won’t change your fortunes - it’s all luck, remembering to change your team ahead of the deadline and, this year, reminding yourself you’ve a batch of chips you need to use before they expire.
If anything, the whole thing has become more stressful than it ought to be. Despite it’s free-to-play offering, it’s pull is akin to a gambling addiction. Points are money, the efforts of players from teams you don’t support are making or breaking your weekends.
Yeah, no longer is it the game of Friday keyboard warriors. It’s an industry, a sizeable community of nerds and experts that hang onto the words of Friday manager press conferences in hope of getting the inside line on a player who might have that dreaded yellow sticker over his name. The dream of seeking out and being brave enough to buy that big differentiator that will rocket you up the leaderboard.
And you better believe I signed up again this year. See you in Double Gameweek 34.
Awesome work as always! At the end of the day, I have and always will play FPL for fun. I don't feel bad about losing to people who spend hours a day researching or pay for premium guides. I know if I did those things, it would no longer be fun to me and defeat the whole purpose. I think the main issue with FPL is that it interferes with watching the games, you get so focused on the little "fantasy" things that you often missed out on the "real" big things.
I stopped playing when I lost top spot on the final day of 2017/18 and let it ruin the last 2 days of my holiday. When the fun stops stop!
Great post🙂