Our team of Hall of Famers and guest writers are offering regular contributions throughout the 2023/24 Fantasy Premier League (FPL) campaign. Here, former champion Simon March discusses how FPL managers’ behaviours can be affected by the public nature of the game.

Do you ever feel like you’re being watched? As an FPL manager, it’s one of those things you come to expect. Perhaps not in real life (or, if it is, probably best to call the police) but it’s very normal for you and your rivals to anticipate and analyse the moves you make each week. This is especially the case if you’re good at FPL and even more so if you create content or are active within the Fantasy community.

But this attention may come at a price as it can affect the way we play the game, and not necessarily for the better. This article focuses on why this might be the case, why we should be wary and what we might be able to do about it.

The Hawthorne Effect

The Hawthorne Effect (named after a 1920s study that took place in Hawthorne, Chicago) describes the tendency among subjects of an experiment to alter or improve their normal behaviour when they are aware they are being observed. Broadly speaking, people will adapt their behaviour toward whatever is considered most ‘socially acceptable’ within their particular environment.

The study itself is considered quite controversial but the principle derived from it is observable in daily life. In just about every facet of society, from military forces in the field to pupils in a classroom, we will see different behaviour among those who know they are being watched versus those who don’t.

In FPL, we generally make our moves in private but with the knowledge that they will become public once the deadline has passed and the game has updated. In practice, ‘public’ can mean anything from available to your mini-league rivals to available to thousands of interested managers, the latter often being the case for FPL content creators.

I would assert that the Hawthorne Effect has some influence whatever the level of publicity; anticipation of how our moves will be received will have some influence on our decisions in making those moves, but it is logical to assume that the influence will be greater when the audience is bigger.

The Downside of FPL Fame

Most content creators gain our attention because they are either good at FPL, good at creating FPL content, or both. All of them, however, were, at one point, regular Fantasy managers, playing their own brand of FPL in relative obscurity.

It is a common theme among content creators that playing their own game becomes more difficult when they know there is an audience anticipating and analysing their moves. Many have spoken about how they find themselves second-guessing their decisions, knowing that any move away from the template will likely be ridiculed if it backfires. Consequently, the urge becomes to make safer or, at least, more easily explainable moves, even if this means sacrificing an upside that they would normally pursue in other circumstances.

Speaking from my own experience of going from a situation where there was essentially no interest in what I did as an Fantasy manager one day to, the next day, my transfers suddenly being discussed on podcasts and in FPL forums, I can attest first-hand that the feeling is very different and you immediately feel a pressure to make moves that are objectively the ‘safest’. 

Luckily for everyone, this level of interest and scrutiny in my team was fairly short-lived but it still took me several seasons before I felt like I was playing ‘my game’ again. Most people probably believe that ‘FPL fame’ wouldn’t change their playing style at all, but it honestly happens without you even realising it. In fact, I would argue that winning your mini-league, and the added scrutiny you might receive from your rivals the following season, might be enough to influence your moves, at least to some extent.

Of course, while the Hawthorne Effect in FPL tends to move managers towards the template, it can also have the opposite effect. If a Fantasy manager knows that their moves are being watched, they might decide to do something ‘radical’, maybe out of frustration or defiance, or maybe with the goal of ratcheting up attention further. However, whether they homogenise or radicalise their playing style in response to being watched, the FPL manager is still diverging from rational decision-making behaviour. It may well pay off at times, but decisions driven by external forces are rarely the best decisions in the long run.

The Bigger Picture

Does the Hawthorne Effect actually matter if it mostly affects FPL content creators? I would argue that it does because, whether we like it or not, these people have a large and growing influence on what Fantasy managers in general do. Again, many of us think they probably don’t, but the FPL content we consume always influences us, whether we are aware of it or not, and even if they are not influencing us directly, they are influencing other people, and that still has an effect on us.

If FPL content creators are themselves being pulled towards the template by an invisible performance bias, then it is little wonder that the templatization of Fantasy teams gets stronger and stronger with each passing season.

What Can We Do?

It feels both banal and obtuse to now state that everyone should ‘just play their own game’ but, were that to occur, FPL would likely be a more varied and interesting game. Short of doing that though, it is useful to at least be aware of the Hawthorne Effect and how it affects both our own decisions and the decisions of those people whose Fantasy content we consume, two things that may be inextricably linked for many of us.

With respect to content creators, I’ve long thought that judging them primarily by their FPL performance is a bit fallacious since it does not, necessarily, correlate with good content and because everyone, even the very best Fantasy managers, has both good and bad seasons. I would, personally, much prefer to consume FPL content featuring managers with distinct or contrasting styles than content that is primarily geared around the highest performers, results-wise.

More broadly, I think an environment where everyone feels like they can take risks and unapologetically play their own brand of FPL without fear of ridicule or undermining their own credibility if it doesn’t pay off is something that will ultimately benefit all of us within the community and is something we should actively seek to encourage.