Gameweek 10 main takeaway: on the State of Competition

The small green arrow for us (taking us to 488,000 overall ranking) also highlights two things about the broader FPL dynamic right now:

1. The "Funnel approach" works because its logic is irrefutable - there is a set of good players from good teams facing good fixture runs right now, so deviating from it needlessly will likely backfire. (E.g. getting players from other teams for non-budget reasons.) Of course, there can be bad gameweeks due to league upsets (such as last week), but you do well if things go as expected (such as this week) which is more likely. In contrast, it is impractical to chase outliers ("Micky van der vens"), or YOLOs (e.g. budget enabler Kroupi), or "narrative favourites" (e.g. Sunderland which cannot easily translate real-life results into FPL gold right now due to fixture challenges) due to headwinds.
2. The situation now is highly competitive due to the same reason - "Funnel" players tend to be highly popular picks, so the margin of error is small. This week's global average of 61 pts is the second highest of this season. Our point total of 76 (72 after -4 for transfers) would usually entail a much larger green arrow. The main obstacle was probably our continued lack of 12-pt Gabriel, as we reasonably held onto "flat-track bully" Gyokores as our third Arsenal player, who cushioned the impact with 7 pts despite only playing for 45 min. All this shows how razor-thin the "profit margins" currently are in this competitive atmosphere.

The upshot is that the "funnel approach/strategy" has value (hence it brings green arrows) but neither is it an earth-shattering insight (hence the low profit margin). It simply reflects the reality we must accept or get penalised accordingly.

It arises now because there are fewer good FPL picks than usual in this peeriod of time, than normally when there can be diverse routes to success.

This article reflects one of two value propositions of FPL90cents.com - sensemaking the "macro framework" to avoid key pitfalls. Stay tuned for our deep dive later this week for our other niche area: low-risk/medium-risk setups with high returns.

Thanks for reading!