Menu
The season is over, our lessons are learned, stats deep dived and we have looked at some players for next year so lets get a bit meta: what changes would we like to see from FPL in the 25/26 season?
Yeah, that’s right. Time for this tiny blog to scream into the ether when nobody is listening.
If FPL Gameweek can do it, why can’t the official FPL website?
It’s pretty awful that at the end of the season I had to wait 24 hours just to make sure I knew who won a few of the mini leagues I was in. That should be a moment of celebration and exaltation.
We recently saw the FPL games makers change the deadline to one hour 30 minutes before the deadline. That was intended to stop the people who saw team leaks from gaining an advantage.
Of course, leaks persist and there is still an informational advantage to waiting until the last minute to make moves. So, what the hell is the point?
Here is my idea – just allow transfers up to the last minute before the first game. It’s technically possible – just call up ESPN and ask them how they do with the millions of Fantasy NFL Managers every week.
That way, the leakers have their fun, and everyone else in the world gets to remember to make their transfer 10 mins before the first game starts.
Another one that occurs in other fantasy games is making team selection changes during the gameweek. You can do it in the Euros and World Cup games, you can do it in Fantasy NFL and I believe you can do it in Fantasy Champions League.
Again, this helps busy managers by letting them change who is and who is not on their bench before a ball has been kicked.
Why do we get punished for managers keeping quiet/outright lying about injuries, for example? If we could swap players in during a gameweek, it’d stop us falling foul of this, and encourage us to make full use of all our bench spots, since we could actually manually sub these people in. In turn, that encourages everyone to invest more in their bench players, costing money from their overall budget, and thus helping to make the game less ‘template-y’.
The thing about both chips and captaincy is that they are fun but they are also shit.
Chips are fun because you get to play some extra players or whatever. They add an extra strategic consideration for nerds like you and me to think about. And, they generate engagement in the game.
On the other hand, chips are boring for the experienced FPL, because you can’t play them in any other way than in the double gameweeks at the end of the season. So, you just have to sit there and look at that really tempting triple captain button and just wait to TC Salah at Leicester or whatever, like everyone else.
It would be way better if you had to use one set of chips in the first half of the season (i.e. without double gameweeks) and one set of chips in the second half of the season. It may even help to lessen the power of chips a bit which would be nice – it can sometimes feel like you play the game consistently and carefully only to get gazumped by a good bench boost.
I got 37 points from my assistant manager chip, 36 of which came in two gameweeks – that’s incredibly powerful.
That’s too many points from something which isn’t even fantasy. It’s basically just picking a winner. I don’t really like it.
I think this is probably controversial, but captaincy is such a shit show.
Firstly, its normally boring for your engaged managers – I captained Salah 19 times this year. And the rest of the time I captained quite boring picks (Haaland, Isak, etc.).
The risk of not captaining a guy like that is so bad, that you basically have to be boring. And, that makes it kind of a boring decision.
The other thing is when you captain a guy who gets 2xG, against your mate who captains a guy who gets 0.1 xG, and you somehow end off worse. That doesn’t feel good. You made the “right” call… but got outlandishly punished.
Ideally they should wait as late as possible to launch the game.
That would make my life a fucking nightmare when writing pieces for the website. BUT, FPL isn’t all about me… is it?
What I want them to avoid with this one is pricing Cole Palmer at 5.5mn, and then he transfers to Chelsea and becomes the best asset in the game.
Obviously this is a ridiculous (but true) example of when this goes wrong. But they didn’t need to do it, they could have just waited or left Palmer out altogether given the transfer speculation.
Just make price changes more transparent… why are we guessing at this?
Why do we have to rely on third-party tools (which are often wrong)?
Why aren’t we allowed to know when players are going to rise and drop for sure, and make our decisions based on that?
It’s just all a bit stupid isn’t it?
Is this too many rhetorical questions? Will WordPress tell me this is not SEO optimised?
If FPL is to be more accessible to the masses, then they should stop this stupid thing that – if you don’t buy Mbeumo on Monday – then you can’t have him. Most normal people don’t open the app as often as you or I do.
Plus, this change helps engaged managers who don’t have to rush to get their moves done for price change purposes (which is normally a shit reason).
I will admit, I kind of like the tactical decision of when to go early on a player… but I also have a child now, and so don’t want to live my life checking fplstatistics.com every day.
I’m not sure I do want this one, but it’s sometimes hard to justify spending that extra 0.5 on a player. For example, Mateta being 0.5 more than Cunha this year feels like a lot. 0.2 on the other hand? That’s enough to make me think, without outright excluding.
Like I said, I am not sure I want it but it does make you think.
🔥 Help to Support Independent FPL Content 🔥
It’s just a clusterfuck isn’t it?
I absolutely love draft day, and I spend so much time preparing. And then I find it really hard to stay engaged.
I’d like to see some changes in trading. For example, in Fantasy NFL you can own fewer than the maximum players on your roster which allows you to trade two for one etc. Things like that simply need to happen because three players for three players or whatever is very rarely going to work.
I would add that they should also fix the fixture ticker… but then what would you come to us for?!
Anyway, we fixed all the important stuff.