Deep down, most serious investors know that, short of enjoying access to a fully-functioning time machine or crystal ball, ‘time in’ the market tends to trump all attempts at ‘timing’ the market. Not that this wisdom stops plenty of investors attempting the former – and the same goes double for FPL players, with their necessarily truncated timeframe of 38 weeks per fantasy football season only a partial excuse.
As is so often the case in both spheres, human nature is most to blame here – and, again, FPL players can point to some mitigating factors. Perhaps the strongest – as I have to remind myself more often than I should – is that fantasy football is just a game. As such tinkering with your squad, setting out future strategy and pulling off stunning transfer coups is all part of the fun. Even more so when a plan actually does come together.
That being so, why wouldn’t you look at, say, the 11 points Manchester United midfielder Mbeumo scored in Gameweek 2 and think ‘I can do better’ – joining the 1.6m-odd players who switched to Manchester City’s Cherki ahead of Gameweek 3 (for an immediate return of three points) and then perhaps joining the million-plus bringing in Chelsea new-boy Rogers ahead of Gameweek 4 (for a return yet to be determined)?
That is certainly what the Mean Reversion Machine portfolio has had to do as it seeks to mirror a squad of the most-owned players in the FPL game. Ahead of Chelsea’s home match against Hull, Rogers’ ownership has jumped 10 percentage points to 34% (his teammate Palmer has seen a similar rise to 28%) and so in he comes and out goes Cherki to leave the portfolio looking as follows:
“In other words, you resist the temptation to tinker, trust your initial choices of player and give them more than a single chance to repay your faith. Yes, even Liverpool’s Wirtz.
Source: Fantasy Premier League
Nor was my earlier triple-switch question rhetorical as there are plenty of reasons why you wouldn’t – starting with Mbeumbo’s subsequent games against a misfiring Everton (in which he scored 8 points) and a not-firing-in-any-way Fulham (return yet to be determined). In other words, you resist the temptation to tinker, trust your initial choices and give them more than a single chance to repay your faith. Yes, even Liverpool’s Wirtz.
Seeking to take the ‘time in the market’ principle to its extreme, I took a look at how a ‘ghost’ team – that is, one picked for the first gameweek and subsequently untouched for the rest of the season – would have fared in 2025/26. The purest version – the official FPL team of the season, with Haaland perma-captained – would have scored 2,380 points, albeit with (or perhaps because of) no bench-boost, free-hit or triple-captain chip played.
That performance would have been enough to see you knocking on the door of the top 20,000 – ‘elite’ status indeed – although a Reddit thread offers a glimpse of an even more interesting real-life example from last season. Frustratingly incomplete because the snapshot came midway through double Gameweek 33 and the team’s history has been wiped, it was ranked about 5,000th at the end of April.
A few weeks earlier, it had actually been in the top 300 of the entire game while, for what it may or may not be worth, AI reckons the team would have finished the season about the 10,000 mark – again without the benefits (or otherwise) of any chips or wildcards being played. There were some solid tactical calls, such as a ‘big in defence’ trio of Gabriel, Virgil and James, with Pedro upfront alongside perma-captain Haaland.
And while, before the very first kick-off, a midfield of club ‘talisman’ types in Bruno Fernandes, Bruno Guimaraes, Declan Rice and Morgan Gibbs-White shows a very sure hand, it is hardly in the realms of telepathy. No – what elevates the team to ‘thing of beauty’ is the placing as first on the bench the then-unknown defender James Hill, who cemented his place in the Bournemouth team just as James was injured.
What are the chances, eh? Which is of course the point as, for every statistical curiosity such as this one, there will be hundreds of thousands of untouched squads that finished last season ranked a good deal nearer 10 million than 10,000. On which sobering reality, let’s take a look at how the Mean Reversion Machine portfolio did in a gameweek where, along with around 1.6 million others, we played the triple-captain chip on Haaland:
The resulting 27 points worked out rather better than the first time we played it last season (just the six) and not quite as well as the second (33). In a deeply average week for the rest of the portfolio, however, it still accounted for almost half our overall performance, with five points from the much-maligned Tzolis of Arsenal the next highest individual contribution. As mentioned, Cherki – appearing for one week only – managed three.
As you can see below in our Herdwatch tables of the heaviest trading of recent weeks, he has since been sold by more than 400,000 FPL squads. Other big changes in the shifting sands of midfield sentiment see Rogers, Palmer, Ødegaard and a possibly crocked Gakpo heavily favoured ahead of the largely blameless Szoboszlai, Mbeumo and Bruno. When the latter was heavily sold after Gameweek 1, he bagged just the 23 points.
As for Mean Reversion Machine, can Rogers can do better than Cherki in our benighted ‘Say hello, wave goodbye’ midfield spot? Or will he too move swiftly from ‘hard buy’ to not very ‘soft sell’?
Source: Fantasy Premier League
