Former champion Simon March explains how ‘pre-mortems’ can make us better Fantasy Premier League (FPL) managers.

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In my previous article, I mentioned how a practice known as a ‘pre-mortem’ can help counteract confirmation bias when it comes to FPL decision-making. While the term ‘pre-mortem’ might sound like it’s referring to the exact feeling an FPL manager experiences at 10:59am on a Saturday morning, it is rather a planning method often used by project and risk managers to identify and avoid potential pitfalls before they occur.

While some readers of that article, not unreasonably, recoiled instinctively at the use of apparent corporate jargon on a Fantasy Football site, others asked to hear more about pre-mortems and how they might help FPL managers in their strategy and planning. Apologies, in advance, to the former.

What is a Pre-Mortem?

To recap, a pre-mortem asks participants to imagine that their plan has ended in failure and, from the point of view of this failure, to look back at their decision process and spot the mistakes which might have led to it. The idea is that if you can identify the potential pitfalls that might derail your plans ahead of time, you can take steps to avoid these pitfalls and all the heartache that goes along with them.

The concept for ‘pre-mortems’ was first introduced by psychologist Gary Klein in 2007. It has since been used to identify risks and reduce errors in a wide range of fields including medicine, the military, air travel, city planning, sports and financial investing.

How Pre-Mortems can help FPL Managers

As mentioned in my previous article, pre-mortems can help negate confirmation bias. To recap, this is a cognitive bias that causes us to look for, recall, interpret or favour information which supports an existing belief, value or preference. Because pre-mortems ask us to take the opposite view of our intended choices, it can help to counterbalance confirmation bias.

Countering confirmation bias, however, is not the only benefit that pre-mortems can offer to FPL managers. As with other disciplines such as those mentioned, pre-mortems used in the planning process can help avoid unwanted issues before they occur. 

It’s generally a good practice when making any FPL decision to look down the line and consider what negative ramifications or trade-offs the decision might have. However, I would suggest that pre-mortems, in the context of FPL, really come into their own when making the big decisions like your initial team selection, a Wildcard or, as of this season, a big multiple free transfer splurge.

Pre-Mortem Example

Here’s an example of how a pre-mortem might work in FPL.

Imagine you are playing a Wildcard. Take your draft and look forward 6-8 weeks (or whatever time horizon you tend to plan to) and consider the reasons why it might underperform, backfire, create problems or fail altogether. Reasons could include:

• I overinvested in my defence and this limited my flexibility and options for attacking players, ultimately costing me points.
• I tripled up on a single team but I picked the wrong player(s).
• I tripled up on a team, but they dipped in form.
• I relied too much on a few premium players and they underperformed.
• My transfer plan relied on player prices moving strictly in my favour but this didn’t happen. As a result, I had no money in the bank as a buffer.
• I focused too heavily on the immediate few Gameweeks and they didn’t pay off. Now my team has too many difficult fixtures going forward.
• I didn’t properly assess how nailed-on my players were and now I have too many rotation risks.
• I didn’t check whether my players were on the verge of suspension. Now I have red flags in key positions.
• I ‘booked in’ transfers but didn’t compensate for injuries/suspensions. Now I either have to take hits or miss out on good opportunities.
• I made it too difficult to switch between premium players which left me exposed to high-EO captaincy hauls working against me.

The pre-mortem list can, of course, go on for as long as you like. You might conclude, at the end of it, that you want to proceed with much/all of your draft anyway. The point of the process isn’t to generate decision paralysis or to turn us all into paranoid wrecks. Rather, it is to avoid as many of the potential pitfalls as possible or, at least, identify them ahead of time so they’re less of a surprise or problem if/when they do occur.

“Why do we fall, Bruce?”

It has often been said that the best way to learn is from our mistakes. FPL is, if nothing else, a school of hard knocks. The other big advantage of pre-mortems in FPL is that they allow us to gain experience from our mistakes without actually experiencing those mistakes in reality. Instead, the practice of visualising the potential ways in which our plans can go wrong can help us to more instinctively avoid those pitfalls in the future. Performed consistently, pre-mortems shouldn’t just make our plans better, but they should also help to make us better planners.