If you check my Fantasy Premier League (FPL) history, you can see that I finished really strongly in the last two seasons (top 0.03% and 0.02%) which was when I started to gather more information for my game. Recently I noticed a lot more FPL sites/blogs have surfaced compared to 2 years ago. I started to be active on Twitter last season and there are now many many more FPL related accounts compared to last year. With so much information available, what used to be a secret is no longer so. I decided to share with fellow FPL fans about how I survived this huge FPL information jungle these two years and how I intend to continue to do so this season. I think this will be useful, especially this season.

To do better at FPL, one of the most important ingredient is information. Information can be in any form; news, statistics, watching the matches, chit chat, dedicated websites, prediction tools and others. Let me show you an example. Do you know what is shown in the picture below?

Without any information at all, it is practically impossible to guess it. You can’t even make an educated guess. You can still guess it correctly if you are super lucky and some people can have such luck but do you want to do that? If you choose your players without even reading some match reports or watch the matches then this will be you.

Personally, I am someone who is more into watching the matches than reading lots of statistics. I find it more enjoyable and able to get more valuable information that stats sometimes cannot show. Of course, this will take up quite a bit of time.

Now to the problem that is facing many of us. Too MUCH information. There are now many FPL fans and players who are sharing information via so many channels. At the same time, there are at least 3 big sites that I know who offer prediction models with good algorithms. Some of these are valuable information. But if you simply just take in everything then you are missing out the fun of forming your OWN team. At the same time, you could be using the “wrong” information if you did not digest the info.

I came up with a theory about how I handle the information available and how I view the sources.

Let me explain in details. Firstly, each information provided is like a shadow shown by shining a torchlight at the object of concern. The idea is to guess the object based on the shadows. Without any information (pitch dark), you cannot guess the object. The opposite is also true. If there are too many torchlight from various angle at the same time, the shadows will be too messy to be useful to you. So my first point to survive the information jungle is Not To Have Too Little Or Too Much Info (noise).

FPL player 1 (orange light) shines from one angle and says it’s a square! Well, it is true that the shadow shows a square but is the object really a square? Same for FPL player 2 (blue light). Both of them do not intend to mislead the others but sometimes it happens. The main point I want to bring up here is Do Not Take The Info At Face Value. Digest it. If you just take everything at face value then I think the chances of failing are quite high.

Another way I interpret the shadows is FPL player 1 is right, FPL player 2 is also right. They are just looking at the situation from different perspectives. For example, FPL player 1 will say don’t take points hits while FPL player 2 will say take points hits, it works! Well, they could be both right as there are many cases of players doing well with or without points hits. Another example is when FPL player 1 says buy midfielder XYZ while FPL player 2 says buy midfielder ABC. Both can be good buys. The key thing to note is what is the situation and team structure of each player which is more important. So think before criticising other views.

Now to my 3rd point: Combine The Info To Make Sense. So a better FPL player will know from the blue shadow that the object could be anything ranging from a circle, sphere, cylinder or cone. He did not simply decide it’s a circle from that one info. The same goes for the orange shadow. Judging from the orange shadow, the object can be a square, cube or cylinder although most people will think it’s either a cube or a square. But he still can’t guess properly with just one piece of info. If he has both the information of the blue and orange shadows, he will be able to eliminate cone, circle, sphere, square and cube from his guess. This will help him a lot!

Now to my next point: We don’t know everything. There will always be some angles where we can’t shine the torchlight. Without that information, we can still make an better guess but we can never be 100% sure it is correct. In the picture that I have shown, the object can be a solid cylinder or it can be a cup. That is when you have to use your gut feeling, your sixth sense. Some people are just better at this. This can be more powerful than stats and info sometimes. So my next point is Use Your Gut Feeling Wisely.

Think about this for a moment. If you make use of good information every week (remember it’s good info), chances of you succeeding is much higher now. Plus a bit of luck, you could well be the next Champion of FPL! So my last point is Luck Is Important!

I hope this article will help you to be better prepared for the new season while navigating through the huge FPL information jungle! Good luck to everyone!!!