The greatest cognitive challenge facing the FPL community

We earlier wrote that GW5 was the most volatile gameweek (paywall now removed) and true enough the FPL community clocked its lowest average points this season, at 42 points.

We achieved 60 points (18 above average), buoyed by our sole recommendation in that article to buy Anthony (who took home 10 pts).

How it happened was that the results were largely rangebound within our macro theses: the broader framework of a team/player's current potential compared to the other teams/players. In other words: even though a player can "outperform" in any given week, the statistical aberrations will kind of even out when there are 11 players on the pitch for the game week. And they will most likely even out across gameweeks.

• A classic example of macro-theses that limit a team/player's upsides and downsides is of course our seasonal opener "4 urban myths of FPL 25/26" on the macro-mistakes by the FPL community). We also continue reviewing the existing/new "macro-mistakes" that continue giving our readers an advantage.

So our ranking will chug along upawards as long as we keep our macro-theses tight - which is why we rigorously go through our house view for each gameweek (and release the full version for paid readers).

We go through our decisional mistakes and apply the learnings to every next gameweek. And we can only do this by being self-honest and analytical enough to sort out which outcomes are due to luck, and which outcomes could actually be better managed without the benefit of hindsight.

And this is the greatest cognitive challenge facing the FPL community:

• On one hand, it is considered an advantage (even a "virtue") in FPL to make minimal changes to your squad, as demonstrated by many top-ranked players (including the meme of how the current world number 1 has not made changes so far. It is true that this game will severely disadvantage fickle players who take on points hits to buy players who are only good for one/two gameweeks.
• But this situation also puts us more at risk of status quo bias / living on "hopium" - where we dig in our heels and hope a poor player will finally be true to form in the next gameweek. E.g. the many posts out there by good players who keep thinking Watkins will finally haul the next week and are languishing right now.

So things are fine when traditional bets pay off and we are actually rewarded by our status quo bias. But things will go very, very badly when we actually need to update our mental models to do well in FPL, because we are sandbagged by the FPL norm.

Which makes FPL the best place to train our decision-making skills: by practising how to be honest with ourselves analytically without making excuses, and taming our "irrational impulses" - or be punished for it! And we then apply this improvement to the rest of our lives.

This is what our site believes in and we try to grow with our readers together - do consider a paid subscription for our preview reads as part of honing your skillset (:

Thanks for reading.