Agent Dembele

I'm sorry, but if your FPL enjoyment depends on how other people play this game, you're putting yourself in a lose-lose situation from the beginning. And every single week. If you see models and solvers as an unfair advantage, try to treat them as motivation to do better. Understanding how they work, finding their limitations and figuring out how to take advantage of them by playing differently is an additional layer of interest in itself. Instead of millions of people with different approaches, you're increasingly battling one collective Tom Dollimore, or however you want to call it. Although dividing players into Grass FC and Analytics FC is incredibly stupid by nature, those concepts no longer really exist in isolation. General data is widely available, models are everywhere and copycats are abundant. So accept that the better the collective intelligence gets, the more clearly your decisions will be reflected in your rank. Underperform against that benchmark and you'll feel it. Outperform it, and the same applies in your favour. If the only thing that matters to you is the outcome, and you're not gambling with money in your mini-leagues, you're gambling with your mood instead. You'll constantly compare yourself with millions of other players. Outcome bias and fake analytical evidence will suck you in. They'll give you the false impression that the data you're using or whatever else has a clear relationship with the points you score, creating an illusion that you understand exactly what works in FPL. And when the points don't come, the gap between what you believe should happen and what actually happens only gets bigger. The right people will help you enjoy the game more. Positive engagement, content creation, constructive conversations, all of that shit. But remember that people will always find a reason to be unhappy with your team. Trust me, even if you never share your reasoning or thought process, people will invent fictional scenarios about how you play the game and then criticise you for those fictional scenarios. Learn to separate constructive criticism from people who simply want to object to everything. They're not the same. Own your decisions, make your own mistakes and learn from them. You'll be fine.