GW9 lookback: Discipline vs Agility

Mbeumo

Our long-held thesis that Mbeumo is a much better pick than Fernandes (see extracts from our deep dives for GW3, GW4, GW6) is surely validated now ...

Two weeks after we sold him and missed out on his 24-point haul.

From our previous analyses:

Even when we sold him, we knew he was a good player but thought he was hampered by Man Utd's overall weak performance. It made sense to sell him before Man Utd's games against Liverpool and Brighton when his returns looked like this:

And of course now his returns provide a very different picture - with an improved set of fixtures coming up.

In contrast, we held onto Joao Pedro for one more game as planned (we've now sold him) and he continued to blank.

We won't go into detailed learning points (which are are only relevant to the decision-maker in question). But we thought this is a nice, "classic" dilemma facing FPL managers - when to hold (discipline) and risk continued blanks, and when to challenge our own thesis (agility) and risk the pain of transfers that backfire.

Closing the loop on Grealish

Another thesis that came true: We earlier warned against buying Grealish given the tough games at GW4-9, true enough, he blanked in every week except when he "scored" because a defender cleared off his back.

Overall update

More broadly for this gameweek, we dropped over 300,000 ranks as the EPL upsets undermined the expected returns from GW9 promising to be "the land of milk and honey".

But we think our actual moves for this gameweek were fine. The main costs came from (a) the upsets, (b) Mbeumo's haul (our sale decision came from the prior week), and (c) Gabriel continuing to shine (which we will talk about for the deep dive).

This is how the latest world number one got to the top ranking this week:

Mbeumo, Eze, and Bruno G being his key differentials. We don't think this can sustain.

And we're confident the coming weeks will be better, so long as we keep generating good insights :)

Even if we don't gain from our own insights, we hope you do! Look out for our next deep dive and theses. And we hope you had a good gameweek and that you've gained good takeaways too. Thanks for reading!