Thread by @fpl_gents

Setting goals for a new FPL season {THREAD}

Have you thought about what your goals are for next season? Winning FPL is a dream for most of us, but it can feel a little far-fetched...

#FPL #FPLCommunity #FPLPsychology

When you define your FPL goals this season, I would like for you to contemplate for a moment the Pareto principle, often referred to as the 80/20 principle, and it states: “for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes”.

For example, I've heard that the top 85 richest people in the world has more money than the bottom 2 billion people.

The more successful you become, the more opportunity comes to you. And as soon as you start to fail, people move away from you.

Psychology professor Jordan Peterson says that there will always be people around you that are better at something than you are, and that’s a problem because it might lead to you becoming resentful or even hopeless. So we have to be careful with who we compare ourselves to.

But if we don’t compare ourselves to someone we don’t know what’s good and what we should strive for. So we construct an ideal for ourselves, but we will always fall short of it.

This raises the question, how can we use the benefits of having an ideal, without feeling crushed for not reaching to that level? Peterson suggests that we should aim very high, but then break the goal down into parts.

You want it to be moving towards it in a way that you’ll have a fairly high likelihood of achieving it. We should set a high goal, but differentiate it down so we know what the next step is.

Then make the next step difficult enough to push yourself past where you currently are, but also provide yourself with a reasonable probability of success.

To break down a goal for FPL points I will run a simple calculation for you that focuses on reaching a top 10k finish.

You would have needed 2360 points this season to be in the top 10k.

Let's assume all the chips combined are worth 40 immediate points, we'll deduct that number and see that we needed 61 points in all the other gameweeks where we don't use chips.

2320/38 = 61

So if my aim was to get into the top 10k I would set two initial goals at the start of the season, and then take it from there.

"Score on average 61 pts every GW for the first 4 respectively 9 GWs"

- 244 points after GW4
- 549 points after GW9

Assuming a chip hasn't been used

Why do I focus on GW4 and GW9? I find it useful counting our season as 36 normal gameweeks when I set short term goals. 36 is a number that can be easily divided into chunks of gameweeks.

Even though FPL might be a marathon, there are managers who think that the best way to look at the season is in terms of sprints of smaller time periods. This also aligns well with the concept of breaking down our goals into minor pieces.

We can conveniently divide 36 by 4 to get the number 9. So I think it makes sense to look at the season in sprints of either 4 or 9 or both. Yes, a season is of course 38 GW long but most of us divert from normal strategies in the latter stage for a final push or to hold a lead.

We'll need a bit of luck to achieve such high and precise goals, but setting a points target can help us when calculating how many points we need from certain players. So in my next thread I will discuss how we can assess players' values in relation to our personal points target.

Hope you find the concepts interesting and let me know your 20/21 goals in the comments!

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