Looking ahead to a coming FPL season I am disturbed to realise was 20 years ago, a friend mused: “This year I need to jump on the bandwagons more quickly.” Although that line tends to pops into my head every late-summer since, it has never made much sense to me – I mean, surely you only want to be on the successful bandwagons, don’t you? And how can you really know in advance what those will be?
Exhibit A is former Palace striker Andy Johnson – the specialness of whose place in many longstanding Fantasy League players’ hearts will depend on just when they drafted him into their teams in his stellar 2004/05 season. As the cut-price Johnson scored 21 goals across 37 league appearances, some quickly decided buying him was a no-brainer; others held out for weeks, even months, figuring they had already missed out on the best of his run.
You will likely guess from my tone which camp I was in but it was this performance that prompted my friend’s line (and why I know he said it 20 years ago). This season, though – and partly as a function of this Mean Reversion Machine experiment – I feel I have begun to understand what he was getting at. What is more, it may be the one area where FPL and momentum investing truly overlap.
Exhibit B is Antoine Semenyo, the all-action Bournemouth attacker, who is undeniably having a great season on the pitch. Two gameweeks out of five, that has also translated very nicely into FPL points, with 13 scored against Brighton a fortnight ago and, more impressive still, 15 scored against Liverpool on the opening day of the season. Nevertheless, I remained disinclined to bring him into my own team.
Neverthe-nevertheless, I capitulated after the Brighton game because it occurred to me that, in this instance, it may not wholly matter what I thought. Maybe there is a thinner line than I had imagined between contrarian and obtuse. And maybe I should listen to the wider market. After all, as Semenyo’s ownership has risen from below 5% at the start of the season to almost 50% as I type, his price has shot up from £7.0m to £7.7m.
So not only was I missing out on the points a burgeoning number of rival FPL players were enjoying, my squad value was suffering relative to them too. Doubly so, in fact, given the values of the likes of Wirtz were heading south while I sought to cling to the raft of mean reversion, if only for a couple more weeks. And, as a result, I find my squad deeply uncompetitive as we head into wildcard season.
“In investing, the buying and selling decisions of others really can have a direct impact on the game you are playing – that is, on how your shares perform – as more money flows into popular stocks and away from out-of-favour ones
It had certainly occurred to me the project would inevitably have a rearview-mirror element to it. That much it has in common with investment – hurrah for us”
Sure, I have had some value wins with the likes of Joao Pedro, Reijnders and Senesi but they have been more than cancelled out through Wirtz, Watkins, Gui and more. That was made painfully clear to me this week when I saw a post of a genuine wildcard team that very much mirrored my own thinking – only to find I was about £1m short of being anywhere close to replicating that with my current team value. Ouch.
After I posted the first of these columns on LinkedIn, industry legend Simon Ellis took time off from his mission to make the wonderful world of investment a more governance-aware and duly-diligent place to wonder whether the … let’s call it ‘thinking’ behind the MeanReversionMachine squad – to which I am, of course, merely an adviser – was “the ultimate momentum strategy for FPL”.
At the time, it had certainly occurred to me the project would inevitably have a rearview-mirror element to it, given it would be driven as much by FPL players looking back at past performance as forward to elements such as strength of opposition, home advantage and so on. That much it has in common with investment – hurrah for us – but I also figured that particular link broke down there.
After all, in investing, the buying and selling decisions of others really can have a direct impact on the game you are playing – that is, on how your shares perform – as more money flows into popular stocks and away from out-of-favour ones, helping to push prices one way or the other. And particularly so in a world where index-tracking funds hold ever-greater sway.
By contrast, in fantasy football, our actions as players have zero effect on the outcome of the game – be it the reality of what happens on the pitch or the FPL points that results therefrom. As I now realise, however, our actions as players can at least have more subtle secondary effects and so, while I am sure I will start betting against the man before too long, I do plan to pay closer attention to Semenyo Theory at the start of next season.
Right – after all that, let’s try and wrap up the stats as quickly as possible. As you can see, it was another good week for the wider market – with sterling work from Kudus, Guehi and the City duo of Haaland and Reijnders. And score a small victory for project integrity too with the immediate U-turn on my decision to use discretion on goalkeeper paying off as the higher-owned Dubravka outscored the red-carded Sanchez by seven points.
Using my still-nascent grasp of Semenyo Theory, meanwhile, I am not waiting for the end of the month to rebalance the MeanReversionMachine ‘index’. Two free transfers allow me both to better reflect the market and shore up the squad’s value by swapping out Wan-Bissaka for Virgil, the game’s second most-owned defender, and, at last, shifting out Wirtz for the cheapest playing midfielder, Fulham’s Josh King.
That leaves enough cash to buy the next most-owned defender next week – most likely Cucurella or Gabriel. Where I am less clear is how on earth to make use of the ‘triple captain’ chip while retaining my rediscovered integrity. I suspect a big chunk of the market will play it on Haaland v Burnley this weekend but this column’s rules hold the 67%-owned Joao Pedro must be our captain. Inaction may prove the only honourable solution.
Finally, we have our weekly update on how the decisions of the FPL herd – be they the result of hard logic or jerky knees – are playing out in the immediate aftermath. As you can see from the bottom-right table below, the big decisions ahead of GW03 largely paid off, with swift returns for top ‘buys’, Joao Pedro and you-know-who, and nothing too much to regret among the big ‘sells’. As things stand, however, the GW04 vintage is looking less promising and the likes of Grealish and Enzo really need to repay their many backers’ faith this weekend.
