Fantasy Premier League: Observations for Successful FPL

Jul 12

For the month of July we typically open up FantasyYIRMA.com for guest posts from the FPL community on Twitter. Thanks to Saaquib Dawoodani for submitting his thoughts and lessons learned from last season where he had a strong top 2% finish overall.

If you are interested in featuring here on FantasyYIRMA.com drop me an email at Ryan@FantasyYIRMA.com

Fantasy Premier League: Lessons Learned

1. Don’t focus too much on Mini-leagues

One of the most important things I took from my 2016/17 FPL experience last season was that the focus on mini leagues should be minimal and the target should be to do your best in a particular GW. The observation was that a lot of people focused on the leader’s team and tried to copy them player to player. It’s fine to think tactically and bring in a couple of players your rival teams have in order to catch up/keep up but logically, you won’t really score more than them if you simply copy other’s teams. Hence, rather go with your instincts and analysis / statistics and you’ve a better shot at success.

Another thing I could never understand was how people only try to achieve top ranks in ML’s and be satisfied with that too. I agree it feels amazing to beat your friends at your favourite game and is a key motivation for many! However, aren’t we underachieving at the same time, too?

I’ll be honest, I never checked which players were my opponents getting in every week, how many points away am I from them, etc. You focus on your own team and your strategy. Do it right and you’ll not even notice when you fly past them! (Just FYI – I finished at the top of *almost* all of my Mini-leagues).

2. Evaluate the options

Take time before you pick one out of 3/4 good options for one position from the same team. We’ve all been in the scenario where we’ve had a selection dilemma – picked one player over another only for the player not picked to score, assist and pick up bonus points! We’d all be lying if we said it was always an easy pick and there lies the beauty of FPL.

There are difficult selections ahead for each of the Top 6 Teams from last season.

LIVERPOOL: Salah, Coutinho, Mane, and Firmino from Liverpool (although there’s a strong chance Firmino won’t be re-classified as a forward)

MANCHESTER CITY: KDB, Bernardo Silva, David Silva, Sane, and Sterling from City (although I really doubt if Sterling would even get a place on the bench now that City has such great depth in the squad).

MANCHESTER UNITED: Pogba, Pogba, Herrera, Mata, Mkhitaryan, and Lingard from United (although I don’t think even Lingard would buy himself in FPL)

ARSENAL: Ozil, Ramsey, Walcott, and Sanchez from Arsenal (although there’s no way Alexis would stay at this club anymore :P)

CHELSEA: Pedro, Hazard, Fabregas, and Willian from Chelsea (although Chelsea is the club I hate and I can’t believe I had to stick with Alonso for almost the entire last season)

SPURS: Eriksen, Son, Alli, and probably Lamela from Spurs (although most of us stuck with Alli / Eriksen, it was Son who proved to be a great differential pick at a cheap rate).

(ED: Impressive you managed to offend multiple club supporters in one section!)

The point is that, right now, I would pick the most obvious picks and take my time before I finalize on which players I’d want from these top 6 clubs. As these are mostly premium midfielders, you may not be able to spend much / take hits very frequently, so my picks for premium midfielders from the Top 6 Would be as follows: Coutinho, KDB, Pogba, Ozil, Pedro, and Alli.

3. Full-backs over Centre-backs

A look at the top 10 defenders basis Total score in last season and you’ll know what I am talking about. 7 out of the top 10 defenders were full-backs and scored over 3.42 points on an average. (which basically translates to a goal / assist / clean sheet every alternate game).

The trend for teams to switch to a 3-5-2 system employing wingbacks has given many defenders more of an attacking emphasis and it could well be that we see more teams rolling out a similar system which can encourage defenders to push forward more.