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 begins a series that analyses what traits are needed to win FPL, starting with composure.

I was ‘fortunate’ enough to be at Wembley a week ago to witness my team, Chelsea, lose our sixth successive Wembley final. Since then, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about exactly what it takes to be a winner. We talk a lot on these pages about skill, strategy and data but ‘winning’, as a discipline, often seems like a separate thing altogether.

It’s almost that point of the season where the champions of mini-leagues and, of course, FPL itself will be decided, so it seems like a good time to consider what are the qualities that might distinguish a winner.

Each of my next few articles will focus on a particular factor that I believe is crucial for winning in FPL. The first of these is being able to stay calm.

COMPOSURE

This is certainly one thing you can accuse Chelsea of lacking at Wembley, especially in front of goal given they had 19 shots and nine on target. Yet the Blues managed to score exactly zero goals, an anomaly all too familiar to us FPL managers.

Composure, or the ability to remain in control – particularly under pressure – is vital for winning in all forms of competition, including FPL. In fact, if you can maintain your composure for long enough, it becomes a powerful weapon to use against your rivals.

“It’s not your flying, it’s your attitude.”

To explain the power of composure over time, we can draw from a culturally aligned example; the 1986 movie ‘Top Gun’. The plot sees elite US Navy fighter pilots compete to be top of their class at the Naval Fighter Weapons School, also known as ‘Top Gun’. The two best pilots in the class are Maverick, played by Tom Cruise, and Iceman, played by Val Kilmer. Each pilot has a dramatically different style of flying and attitude toward competing. Indeed, the nature of these contrasting philosophies constitutes a major subtext within the movie.

Iceman is patient, methodical and makes no mistakes. He wears his opponents down until they themselves make a mistake, at which point he strikes and defeats them. On the other hand, Maverick relies much more on improvisation, risk-taking and his raw skill as a pilot. He constantly makes mistakes but an ability to score big wins ensures that he remains competitive.

The movie leaves little doubt that Maverick is the more skilful of the two pilots yet – spoiler alert – when it comes to competing, Iceman is demonstrably more effective and eventually goes on to win the Top Gun competition. Of course, anyone who has seen the movie knows that there were some extenuating circumstances involved.

The point of this example is not to say that high-risk strategies have no place in FPL, or are inherently worse than more conservative, ‘composed’ strategies. But over a long enough time period, the law of averages dictates that the latter will almost always outperform the former.

Thus, if you can remain composed in your decision-making for long enough and, even better, force others to take bigger risks, you’ll give yourself a significant advantage. Such discipline can be crucial as we enter the final stretch of this FPL season.

HOW COMPOSURE HELPED ME WIN FPL