The final whistle has blown on the FPL 2024/25 season. To be honest, I am relieved it is over. In this piece I will be focusing on my season.
This is going to be more long form and rambley than most of our stuff. But that’s fine, because the season is over and nobody will read it anyway. This is basically just FPL therapy for me. And if you are still reading… then you are as much of a nerd as me.
Context – My Season
When I was first thinking about writing this piece, I thought I was going to feel like an Arsenal fan – I was going to miss out on my goal of my highest ever OR, but get a good second place.
Now, actually writing it, I feel like a Forest fan. Very happy with my OR if I look at it from the start of the season… but incredibly disappointed at how it finished.
Like Forest, I had a terrible run of form to finish the season. I was 12k in GW 32 and aiming to get to my highest ever rank (inside top 2k) so I went a bit hard/stupid. It massively backfired and I ended up 73k.
Mini League Winner but not the Quadruple
I am still happy that I won the mini league that I care about the most, which is a classic mini league with an old group of friends. It’s always my main aim in the season, and I am pleased to say I won it for the fifth time in a row in my most convincing win of all time.
I was nowhere near to winning what my friends and I call the quadruple – classic, cup, head-to-head and draft. I used my chips to try and get good OR, and sacrificed any real chance of winning these competitions – another reason why I am just a bit disappointed.
Full90FPL League Winner Anounced!
As an added kicker, I also lost the Full90FPL Public League on the last day of the season…
But congratulations to GaloDoidoCampeão2024’s Thiago Chang! Get in touch with us on Reddit or admin@full90fpl.com – we would love to hear from you.
What Went Wrong?
I often think people blame their chips or wildcard usage for why they have done poorly, without looking more deeply. However, for me, it is pretty true. I had 12 red arrows this year, six of which almost immediately followed my second wildcard.
I just took on far too much risk at the end of the season.
I absolutely killed it when I played my chips the two previous years, and I probably got overconfident thinking that I could do that again.
Lessons From the 24/25 Season
Lesson 1: Double Gameweeks Are Not As Powerful Now
The first lesson that I am taking then from this season is that double gameweeks are not as powerful anymore. And I should have known this, because there were fewer teams playing.
But, I think I convinced myself that I could pick fifteen double gameweekers, and then I would get a jump on the competition who wouldn’t do that.
Partly that makes sense – like I said above, I was chasing my best ever rank, and I didn’t have too many weeks in which to do it.
But getting players like Digne and Savinho was a HUUUUGE mistake, and I feel like an idiot for buying them. Not only that, but I left myself stuck with the piece of shit structure I had and I couldn’t make easy moves anymore.
It is amazing that after seven-ish years of playing this game seriously, consuming crazy amounts of FPL content, and writing my own blog, that you can still make some basic mistakes like this. Naturally I blame my partner in crime for not talking me out of it…
(Talking of Joe – you can get his take on all the double gameweeks late this season, and how we didn’t do as well as we’d hoped, here.)
Lesson 2: Bench Boost Not As Powerful Anymore
My second lesson then is that bench boost is not as powerful anymore either. And that is largely a result of the double gameweek shenanigans.
The bench boost always was a bit crap, because you basically get to play two crappy bench defenders, one crappy bench midfielder and another goalkeeper. But, it was also pretty damn powerful on a double gameweek.
People think that triple captain is mega powerful, but you tend to get an extra 12 or so points from it in a double when a player returns. Whereas a bench boost in a double gameweek should get you 16 points in appearance points, and then you just hope for a clean sheet or two.
Of course, it didn’t work out like that AT ALL for me and many others, as there was so much rotation in gameweek 33. I think I got six points. I am still too angry to check.
Next year, I will just use the bench boost in a single gameweek – either in my head-to-head playoffs, or a single gameweek earlier in the season where I have a major benching headache.
Lesson 3: The Extra Free Transfers Make This Game Better
For those of you keeping count, this is another example of me being wrong.
I bemoaned the changes to FPL as basically pointless at the start of the season. I don’t think I was wrong about the changes to bonus points etc, but I was wrong about holding five frees.
Maybe it was just this year and it will never happen again, but I got up to five free transfers at least once. And it helped me and other patient managers (until I stopped being patient and started being stupid).
Lesson 4: Playing Good, Safe and Sensible – Tight is Right
I talked about how I only got 12 red arrows – well, that means I had 26 greens.
There is a saying in Poker: Tight is Right. Whilst playing is more fun than folding, playing it “tight” and only playing when you have a good hand is the way to win.
And I think we can take that saying and bring it to FPL. For basically most of the season, I bought good guys with good fixtures and I played it tight. I generally made slow and steady progress… until my wildcard foolishness.
Lesson 5: Trust Our Fixture Ticker
And linked to the above, I basically changed the way I was doing our Full 90 FPL fixture ticker this year, focusing on xG and xGC, and making the ranking very simple, but it worked fantastically.
If I can get someone better at coding than me to help, then I will put it on a dedicated space on the website.
Its nothing incredibly fancy, but that and the fixture swing piece that I did were actually really good and really useful tools.
That’s It.
I’ll be looking more at 24/25 FPL statistics in the next season review, and focusing in on what we can learn from that side of things rather than the meta game.
Until then, thanks for reading, everybody… and I hope you’re feeling a bit better about the season than I am. If so (or if not), let us know in the comments below or on Reddit.