Well. That’s it then. Another season in the books, and – as usual – it feels really weird.
The 2022/23 Premier League season started on Friday 5th August, with an entertaining (for me at least, as a Gooner) game between Crystal Palace and Arsenal.
That’s right – we started this FPL season nine and a half months ago. And now, just like that, it’s over.
This is always a time of conflicting emotions for FPL managers. Not just because of your actual finishing position, but because we just spent such a massive length of time with these silly and fake, but also super important (to us) teams on our minds… and now they’re gone, and we’ll never have that specific team again!
So is life, and it’s only a game, of course. But it still feels a little jarring.
I’ll get onto my own review of the 2022/23 FPL season shortly. For now, you’d probably quite like to know how James and I actually did.
Full 90 FPL 2022/23 Performance
Well, James beat me.
He basically always beats me. I got seriously back into FPL for the 2017/18 season. The only time I’ve beaten him since then was in 2021/22, when I finished 16.5k.
In fairness, James is a decent player. He finished a ridiculous 2.3k in 2020/21, and always seems to be right around the 100-200k mark, at worst.
I don’t feel like he’s ‘better’ at the game than me… but he does usually score more points. Probably he just gets lucky.
Our 2022/23 Finishing Positions
Anyway, enough about the past. Here’s how we did this season.
James finished 130k:
And I finished 264k:
Early Struggles
Both of us have mixed feelings about these finishes.
While we’ve both finished higher in the past, our general, soft target in FPL is top 100k.
Now obviously, that gets harder every year, as more and more people join… so we should probably take that into account. Arbitrary as it might seem though, we like targeting that 100k figure.
Neither of us finished in the top 100k this year, which is the first time that’s happened for a few years.
THAT BEING SAID!
I’ve included the big old tables above so that you can see the absolute state we were in just before the halfway point.
In Gameweek 15, both of us were languishing with an OR of well over 1 million. It felt like the season from hell, and – to make matters worse – of course we suddenly stank just when we’d decided to create a Fantasy Premier League website.
This was due to a combination of factors. There was some bad luck (which is normal), and some bad choices (like me ignoring my No-Pep Roulette rule and sticking with Foden far too long).
In addition though, I think a lot of people played their chips early this year. Even with some poor choices on our part early in the season, there’s no way we should’ve been that low down.
Finally, this felt like a particularly ‘template-y’ year. In the first half of the season, everyone had Haaland, Jesus, Trippier, an Arsenal defender, Ward in goal (remember him?), and so on.
Obviously, there are always a few template players. What might have made it even more severe this time, however, was that captaincy was basically taken out of the equation, since everyone was capping Haaland every single week.
The Tables Turn
Regardless, in the second half of the season, we both finally saw a massive rally.
Between Gameweeks 22 and 33, I got 11 green arrows and only one red. James went 12/14 between Gameweeks 22 and 35.
By the end of those streaks, we saw our OR’s jumping from over 1 million to 175k and 103k respectively.
A large part of this came down to both saving our chips, and using them well.
As noted, loads of people used their chips early this year. I don’t know if it was random, or something to do with the World Cup (perhaps people thought their regular chips were worth a bit less, thanks to the extra wildcard we were given), or what.
Regardless, both our runs started when we finally began using our own chips (and using them well).
Also, quite simply, if you’re paying attention to the Prem, then FPL gets easier as it goes along.
We’re all guessing, to an extent, going into the season and in the first few weeks. As we get more data, we can more effectively decide who is and isn’t for real, and make better decisions.
Nobody would have considered triple Arsenal triple heading into the year. Pretty soon it became essential, and remained so for most of the season. On the flip-side, fantasy stalwarts like Trent, Son, and Mo started off underperforming… and just kept on going, for months on end. If you held onto one of them (as many did with Trent, mistakenly supposing Liverpool’s defence might sort itself out at some point), it was to your detriment.
A Quiet Finish
In the last few weeks, it started to feel more like normal FPL.
We weren’t seeing the ridiculous OR swings that we still were quite late into the season. The good players were playing well, and we knew who the bad players were. The double gameweeks finally tailed off, or at least became less important.
Actually, it was quite nice!
The momentum ran out for both James and I in the last month or so, with both of us taking a few red arrows. These didn’t dent our OR too badly though, and we both rallied significantly with strong Gameweek 38s to achieve our respectable finishing positions (his slightly more respectable than mine, not that I’m bitter).
Reflections
Well, where to start?
I guess I have three main takeaways from the 2022/23 FPL season, plus a little extra gripe.
1 – It Really Is A Marathon
This is easily, by far and away, my biggest lesson learned (or re-learned) from the 22/23 season.
I didn’t actually panic around that 15-gameweek mark, and make a load of stupid transfers… but I was close.
When you’re in that moment, and it seems like – whatever you try – you’re not making any progress, and you know that the people beating you aren’t taking it anywhere near as seriously as you (my Dad was still beating me 2/3 of the way through the season – how humiliating), you feel really down… obviously!
But I held off doing anything stupid because I knew we weren’t even halfway through yet, and – sure enough – had the aforementioned big run after the calendars turned over. It was a close-run thing though, and I was pretty gloomy about the whole thing.
Overall, even when everything seems to be going wrong, and your team seems hopeless, just remember that it’s a very, very long season. One or two good weeks, at basically any point, and your fortunes can change completely.
2 – Backing Yourself
Obviously, we have more information, and more opinions, in FPL than we’ve ever had before.
This is both a gift and a curse.
The extra information is great for some stuff, like making sense of the upcoming fixtures (especially doubles and blanks). Certain stats can also be helpful in identifying players that are under or overperforming, or who are on hot streaks that – since they’re not on your team, and you wouldn’t normally consider them – you wouldn’t otherwise have noticed.
On the flip-side, all this extra noise brings a hell of a lot of confusion.
You can have a very good idea of who you want to bring in or bin, who you want to start or bench, and so on. Then you go on Twitter or Reddit, and suddenly everyone else is keeping that player you’re binning, or racing to get the new, apparently ‘must own’ player you hadn’t even thought of (and don’t really want).
Trying to sort good advice from bad is an extremely important skill nowadays in FPL, which simply didn’t used to be so important.
Ultimately though, I want to start backing myself more, which I used to be good at. Several times this season, for example, I didn’t really want to bring in a crap player just because they had a double gameweek, and they promptly got me 2 x 1pt.
Then there was Son-gate.
I really wanted Son, even though nobody else did, heading into his Bournemouth fixture in Gameweek 31. Ultimately I chickened out and got Grealish instead, because everyone else was getting him (also because James put doubts in my mind about Son. Having a friend who also plays is very important in FPL – you can blame them for everything that doesn’t work out).
Of course Son went on to score 9pts, 2pts (Newcastle away, I would’ve benched him anyway), 8pts, and 9ts in his next four games. Grealish, meanwhile, got 7pts, 1pt, 1pt, and 6pts. That’s 26pts vs 14pts in the three games I’d have started Son, for a +12pt swing which would have been big for my OR come the end of the season.
Not that I’m bitter about it.
The point is, I’m still looking for that sweet spot.
It is important to check Reddit and Twitter, because there is some very useful stuff there. But it’s also important to back yourself when you’re seeing things differently, especially when your call is still based on solid foundations (whether that’s watching the games, checking stats, looking at track records/pedigree, or whatever).
And, ultimately, FPL is a much more fun and rewarding game when you’re ploughing your own path, instead of following the crowd.
3 – Extra Pressure
This is the first year that James and I ran the website. And I’ll tell you right now that, even if we obviously don’t have the reach of the big brands, it still makes a difference.
When we first launched the site last August, literally nobody was reading our previews. When you’ve formally expressed your opinion though, and put it down there in actual writing, you still feel that pressure, even if it’s completely illogical.
The site has grown slowly and steadily as the year has gone on, to the point where we’re getting a nice little number of people reading the previews each week now. I wouldn’t say the pressure has ‘grown’ in turn, probably because I’ve got more used to it, but it’s definitely still present.
That pressure isn’t just there for getting your individual calls right, of course. More so, it’s there for your own performance.
Around that aforementioned 15-gameweek mark, the thinking was definitely ‘Oh my God, who the hell’s going to listen to us, we’re not even in the top million!’ Things picked up a bit after that, but it remained imperative that – if we wanted to be taken seriously at all going forward – we needed to finish in respectable positions this season.
Thankfully we did so, both finishing around the top 1-2% of all players who started the season. So… there. We do know what we’re talking about after all! Keep reading our site!
4 – Too Many Doubles and Blanks
And here’s my extra gripe.
This season was a massive pain in the backside to navigate. The number of blanks and doubles was simply ridiculous. The whole post-World Cup run was an absolute nightmare.
In part, this was annoying because it made it especially complicated to give advice.
But also, it meant that FPL wasn’t so much about actual skill this season. It was about… knowing the fixtures. If you were paying attention, and planning your moves literally weeks in advance, then you were fine. If you were a more casual player though, as lots of people are, you were basically screwed.
This definitely benefited James, myself, and the other overly-serious FPL players. It didn’t feel particularly fair to the average fan of the game though, and wasn’t exactly ‘fun’ even as an FPL addict.
Putting a Bow On It
So, there you have it. The emotions really are mixed, now that all’s said and done.
Ultimately, for all the moaning and second-guessing and raging, I still love FPL. I’m really not even sure why, but I do. Having a little break from the stress is certainly nice, but it’s still a bittersweet feeling when the season ends.
Fortunately, I do have a friend that’s just as obsessed with the game as I am. The 23/24 season is pencilled in to start in mid-August. If James hasn’t already sent me a dozen drafts of his Gameweek 1 team by mid-July, I’ll be shocked.
On behalf of myself and James, thanks for following our debut campaign. We’ll have plenty more content for you as the summer draws on, but, for now, we hope you enjoyed the season.
Cheers, everyone!