FPLFrasier has been playing Fantasy Premier League (FPL) a little different to most of us this season.
Here, the Fantasy Football Scout Member explains why they opted to avoid checking their overall rank until the final weekend.
Have you ever felt the exhilaration that comes with a huge rise in overall rank (OR)? Do you feel extremely happy when all your decisions go as well as you had expected? And what about when they don’t? When your OR takes a dive, does it leave you with a sense of despair? You are not alone. I have been in that same place before. However, this year, I tried something new. I decided to stop checking my overall rank around about Gameweek 12. Going into the final weekend, my rank could have been 60k, 600k or six million. I had no idea!
If you are reading this article, there is a high likelihood that you are an engaged FPL manager. As engaged managers, we are at times obsessed with decisions and how our team does every week. With excellent websites like LiveFPL freely available, I know people who check their overall rank after every goal, let alone every week. In my view, this is all great as long as you enjoy the process. At the end of the day, FPL is a game that we all love and we should enjoy it.
As FPL managers, our weekly performance can impact our mood (both positively and negatively) for the whole weekend, and this can even carry over into the week. In addition, regularly reviewing OR also has the potential to subconsciously affect our next FPL decision. For example, a good week can make us feel (over) confident about our next captaincy decision, and vice versa. However, if you take a moment to step outside and look in, your current OR has absolutely no say on whether it is Son Heung-min or Harry Kane or someone else entirely who will be the best captain for the next week. Ideally, the best decision that you can make for your team is independent of your rank.
At the end of the day, I see FPL as a game and a hobby. As long as I get the entertainment from the game, I will keep on playing. The day I am not enjoying it, I will quit. When I considered all this, it prompted me to ask what I can actively do so that my rank changes will have minimal effect on my mental health and I can make the best, most impartial decisions for my FPL team.
Toward the end of 2020/21, I came across another manager, Reuser5, who followed a unique path toward their FPL season: they didn’t check their OR for the entire campaign and only looked at it after Gameweek 38. This season, I decided to follow this path and I have completely enjoyed the process.
One may ask how I do it and what is my weekly process for making FPL decisions? Well, I am a football nerd. I watch a lot of matches, read articles, go through stats etc etc. After a Gameweek ends, I try not to focus on how it went; rather, I concentrate on the next decisions I want to make. I watch extended highlights of the games that I may have missed, listen to podcasts, and read articles on Fantasy Football Scout and other portals. In addition, I also run my own model for FPL points projections and focus on that. I absolutely love doing all of this. Another thing I love is interacting with other FPL managers. I believe all of this is more than enough to keep me occupied and leave me with little room to worry about my overall rank on a weekly basis.
As the season comes to an end, I have been asking myself whether I will employ the same process next season. I don’t know the answer yet but, if you asked me now, it seems likely that I will repeat the experiment. However, I don’t want to restrict myself to a ‘rule’. This is a game – loved and played by millions across the world – and I believe everyone should enjoy playing it, irrespective of the final outcome. I know that my process is not for everyone and it may not even be the one for me in the future.
And what was my final rank? Well… 51k. I was nervous before the big reveal as I could so easily have had a seven-digit OR. So, all in all, I’m pretty satisfied!
By FPLFrasier
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