Here’s Rob Reid with his fantasy premier league season review. He looks back at his 19/20 season and gives some thoughts to the upcoming season in 20/21
Fantasy premier league season review – Rob Reid looks back at 19/20 and some thoughts on 20/21
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Introduction
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Hi everyone and welcome to my end of season review. This is my 5th season providing content for the Fantasy Football Geek website and longer term readers will know that I am quite a reflective FPL manager, always looking at ways to adapt and evolve my FPL management style and despite all its complexities, I feel I should still treat season 2019-20 in the same vein. I’ll consider how the game may change next season and have a look at the promoted teams and what they could bring to FPL. I’ll also finish up this article by having a look forward to season 2020-21. I hope you enjoy – let’s start with a look at the final gameweek of 2019-20.
GW38+ Review – Gameweek points: 76 -4 points; Final Overall Rank 80k
Here was his GW38 non Free Hit points:
It was nice to finish the season with a green arrow, after such a frustrating restart period. I got my GW38 transfers kind of right in the end, though it did look like I’d messed up at deadline time. I was lucky enough to get an early leak on the Liverpool team at around 250pm which left me 10 minutes to make moves before the deadline. Sadly I hadn’t planned for this as I was hoping for the Man City news, but all thoughts for this evaporated on Sunday morning when our sources revealed they wouldn’t be able to leak the news.
I therefore made a scrambled double transfer for a -4. Salah was benched and I sold Trent Alexander Arnold for Tarkowksi to free up the funds to change Phil Foden for a higher value City asset. The choices were Silva or Mahrez and I went for the latter as a gamble and chucked the armband on him. At 3pm, disaster – Mahrez was benched. Nightmare. Oh well you win some you lose some. As it happened it wasn’t such as disaster as Mahrez came on at half-time and promptly outscored everyone else bar De Bruyne leaving me with a reasonable 18 points from my Captain. Sadly my other move didn’t work out as Tarkowski lost his clean sheet fairly early. Indeed it was a bad week for my defenders with them and Pope contributing a grand total of 3 points to my score with again the indignity of a parting goal from Lord Lundstrum left on the bench.
It worked out well from everyone else though with only Greenwood failing to return and my Overall Rank being boosted by returns from Martial and Fernandes when many on Free Hits had decided to jettison them in favour of more differential midfield options. In the end then a 6k green is ok but it left me 3 points short of the top 1% – 1.03% it is then! Still, an improvement on last season and plenty to be positive about overall. Let’s have a look at the story of my season and see what lessons I learned this year!
Pre-season Targets
My targets for this season were as follows:
Win my main mini-league – achieved (first win since 2015-16!)
Finish in the top 1% – missed by 3 points
Finish in the top half of the FFG Contributors League – missed; 16th out of 23
Reach 3rd round of the Cup – achieved (knocked out in 4th round)
What Went Well
Consistency
I don’t think I’ve had a season where my team had had such consistent GW ranks. There’s positives and negatives to this, but I only had 5 gameweeks where I was ranked over 4 million for the week and I had a gameweek rank of under 1 million no less than 13 times – over a third of all gameweeks. I’m pretty pleased with that. It helped that things started out well. My first 2 gameweeks were both under 250k for gameweek rank, meaning that I seemed to hit on the right combination of players pretty early. For example KDB was in my team all season, meaning I benefited from the lowest starting price for him and I also hit lucky on Lundstram in the first few weeks.
Triple Captain and other Chips
For the second year in a row, this chip served me well. Last season it was an Aguero hat-trick, this year I picked the right Pool option in GW24, Salah rewarding me with 48 points. It’s always nice to nail this chip as I’ve had some bad experiences in the past! Bench Boost also went ok with 16 points added here and both my Wildcards were resoundingly successful this year seeing a few weeks of steady gains. We’ll not talk about the Free Hit (!)
Minimal Hits
I only took 7 hits all season and 5 of these were in the restart period, with 3 in the last 3 weeks as I changed my focus between trying to hold a high rank and simply having a bit of fun as my season fizzled out. All in all I think not taking hits worked out well for me. I wouldn’t classify myself as a particularly risk averse player and I wouldn’t say I’m particularly gung-ho either, but where I did take hits later on it didn’t massively help my overall rank.
Room for Improvement
Mediocrity
While I was consistent in terms of having few bad weeks this season, I didn’t have many truly outstanding ones. I had no 100+ point gameweeks and I had no 5 figure GW ranks, with my best GW rank being 145k in GW11 – the week of ‘Lundstrum 21!’ What that suggests to me is that while I mostly matched the template, my differential picks didn’t pay off. I think this was also reflected in a relatively low ‘Immediate Gains from transfers’ stat.
Captaincy
A bit of mixed bag here. 504 points made up 22.1% of my returns which when I first looked at it I though was pretty disappointing. However, Geek’s ‘deep dive’ into the stats put me 6/22 of the contributors and 9 points above the FFG contributors average so maybe it wasn’t as bad as I thought. Reading between the lines, the tale here for me isn’t picking non-returners – 24/38 Captain picks returned (this is ok) but it’s more not hitting the big ones. Of my Captain returns, I only got over 25 on 4 occasions including my Triple Captain week, with half of my returning captains scoring 15 or less. For next season, I need to look for the explosions more carefully.
Another factor here I think is my choices. I used 12 different Captains – my top 4 were Salah (13x), Vardy (7x), KDB (5x) and Sterling (4x). It’s no coincidence that many of my best weeks were on Salah and when Vardy was on his run after the 9-0 Southampton game and it’s probably no surprise when looking at my lack of explosive hauls that City players feature much further down my list. I definitely missed a trick here. I think for next season, I’m certainly going to target City, United and Pool more heavily in this respect as these are the teams who look more likely to rack up the big wins and therefore big individual points hauls.
Missed Points and Poor Selection of Attacking players
This I think is what has hurt me most. First up defence – would you believe that this season my team kept 70 clean sheets and I left 13 of these on the bench – 42 points (plus associated bonus) down the swanny! Traditionally I’m a manager who fares well defensively and uses this area for differential games, but it’s no good when you leave these points on the bench. This probably slightly explains a bit my point in the ‘mediocrity’ section about differentials not working for me.
The other notable feature I noticed on Geek’s Contributors Deep Dive was my total goals number was 8 worse than the FFG league average, even if I was 8 better on the assist front (only Scott scored more form assists than me this season – possibly a factor here was having De Bruyne through every gameweeks.) Goals more often mean bonus points and of course are worth more than assists so one of the key changes for me next season will be how I pick my attacking players. I’ve relied on the eye test quite a lot with these over the last few season, but I’ll be honest with my family commitments I watch less live football than I used to so I will probably have to look more now at things like Shots in the Box and Big Chances on the stats pages. I’ve also not been very good at spotting players coming into form. I got Vardy right this season, but missed the mark on players like Ings, Martial and Sterling at the back end of the season – food for thought here for the next campaign.
Looking forward to 2020-21
We’ve not long to wait until the new season starts again and we’ve the cushion of Champions League and Europa League football in between. Indeed this could throw up some interesting blank gameweeks early in the new campaign if the likes of City, United or Wolves for example go deep into any of these tournaments. Is there anything I think will change in 2020-21 FPL?
Scoring System
I don’t think we’ll see any radical changes here, but I wouldn’t mind seeing the bonus points system tweaked a bit. The top 10 bonus scorers last season were all forwards and midfielders – I’d like to see defenders get more of a look-in. Many managers don’t like the system, but it has to be as objective as possible as using the Opta data is a logical way of doing this. Perhaps the BPS system could reward successful tackles, clearances and recoveries more?
Positional Changes
I think Lundstrum’s days as a defender are numbered and I wonder if Martial will get reclassified back to striker again with Greenwood and maybe even Rashford becoming midfielders. I also still find it strange that Mane and Salah are midfielders aren’t strikers. What I do know is that there is a huge amount of choice in the midfield department and it’s going to be tough to pick here!
Move the Deadline
Living in the UK is practical advantage and I as much as any has benefited from early team news leaks on Twitter appearing 10-15 minutes before the deadline. Is this fair? I personally don’t think so and think they deadline should be moved back 30 minutes each gameweek so it’s 2 hours before kick-off. Make it a more level playing field in this respect!
New Players
Chelsea have already set the stall out here and have some really exciting prospects coming in. Hakim Ziyech has been in double figures for the last 4 years for assists in the Eredivisie and was superb in Ajax’s UCL run last season. And Timo Werner looks a great signing to me – if you’ve not seen him play, he reminds me a lot of Sergio Aguero in his playing style; great at getting in goalscoring positions but also a good link player for bringing the attacking midfielders into the game. Added to this is blistering pace and acceleration over the first 10-20 yards – he could be an absolute menace next season.
There’s not been masses of other activity yet with the European competitions still to conclude but I expect a few more big changes. Jadon Sancho to United looks pretty close to completion – like Werner, he’s another with a fine Bundesliga record though the fear is that it means there more competition for places in United’s front 4, another headache for us managers. I suspect some of the relegated teams might be pillaged by the Premier League clubs as well – both Calum Wilson and Troy Deeney have already been linked with Spurs and City look close to snapping up Nathan Ake to add to young Ferran Torres who’s joined from Valencia. It will be interesting to see what kind of impact these players could have at their new clubs and if they are viable FPL assets or not.
Congratulations and Thank You
Finally a few words initially to say thank you to everyone who reads my ramblings, to John aka Geek for having me as Contributor again this season and also to all my fellow contributors who have made this season so entertaining, along with all the Patrons who interact with us on Slack. The What’s App group and Slack Forum has certainly been a bit quieter this last few days, but I’m sure that will change when the game relaunches soon. Congratulations also to Sergio for winning the Contributors League in a brilliant close finish with Ben and Yaniv – well done all and also big congrats to Yaniv for his 3rd consecutive top 10k finish, earning him a place in Geek’s 10 Top Managers for next season.
Other posts
Andrew Whitfield season review
Costas Chari end of season review
A deep dive on the FFGeek Contributors
Final wrap up of the 10 top FPL managers
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