So the 20/21 Premier League season has ended. Rank wise was one of my worse although it was a half decent recovering considering my rank at some points in the season. Was around 3.5m rank around GW17. Looking at the graph of overall rank at of each gameweek, it was mostly going in right direction from half way.

In the end, I finished with an overall rank of 745k. Took some punts towards the end of the season and they did not really work out – and my rank didn’t really change the last 7 or so gameweeks.

Looking at the stats from FPL themselves. My points score was higher than last season but percentage wise was worse (more players – even if we still have 1000s of teams who just get setup each week to try and get top GW score). This season was in top 9%. Last season was in top 4%.

My highest rank of season was GW1. So it was all just downhill from there! Also, another stat which stands out is I benched 242 points! Average was 154 points.

I was in many mini-leagues, many with 1000s of people but in the mini-leagues where it was against people I actually knew IRL, I was pretty much always on the podium.

This was my 15th season playing FPL but still pretty average! And even though played it for so long, only started taking more seriously probably the 18/19 season (maybe season before that??). This was one started listening to podcasts, reading more FPL articles, following more FPL people on Twitter. In 18/19 season, had one of my best seasons. I know 85k is not great by some peoples standards but good improvement for me compared to previous seasons. Unfortunately 2019/20 and this season have let the side down. Maybe COVID/pandemic didn’t help things. I think many people found 19/20 season tough.

But I am just glad my rank is NOT the lowest ever.

Now to look at my FPL season in more detail and see who performed for me, how many points I could have got if played right players/captain etc.

Time to look at the fpl.guru site. Only recently discovered this site after watching the FPL Blackbox podcast/stream. Lots of geeky FPL data/stats.

Can see my total points possible was 2708 – this is if the optimum team plays so playing the 11 highest scoring players (i.e. not leaving high scoring players on bench) and captaining the highest point scorer in my team. If I scored this, I would have won FPL. The person who won FPL got 2680 points. My best GW rank of 37k was good, worse GW rank of 6.9m was awful!!

I also wondered how many points the winner of FPL could have got with optimal team. He could have got 3056 points, more than 300 points that he actually got:

Looking at my transfers and I made 61 transfers, only banked a transfer 6 times and took 108 points worth in hits!

About a third of my captains blanked which does not sound good. My captains points are about half the optimal points (if I picked highest point scorer in my team that week). I mostly captained Bruno and it was not far off 50/50 for him either blanking or returning.

I think I need to improve my captain picks!

Now looking at some of the data/stats on the FPL Optimized site (another site only discovered recently) and looking at season highlights.

Looking at my “team of the year”, surprised Lingard made it in. He was excellent when he went to West Ham and got lots of points. But maybe thats saying more about other players who were in my team this season! Lingard scored 106 points the whole season but I waited till GW29 to get him in. Missed out on 6 gameweeks (he didn’t play v United) so missed out on 4 goals and 2 assists. I thought Gundogan would be in my team of the year but after I got rid of him in GW29, he only scored 1 goal and 1 assist the rest of the season. Got him in GW21 and so missed out on most of his goals and assists. Only had him for 4 goals and an assist.

Can see I missed out on some big points from Gundogan and maybe too slow to get in Lingard:

Looking at my captain picks, I had an awful run of picking captains in the middle of the season. Between GW16 and GW26, only 4 successful captain picks!

Looking at the timing of ownership, I missed out on big points from Kane and Son at start of the season. I had Bruno most of the season but still missed 3 double digits:

I think one thing I need to do next season is not wait too long to get in in-form players and pick better captains! Some of those captain fails were on players like Bruno and Salah but did have punts I think picking players like Soucek, Antonio and Bamford.