I have talked a little about Manhattan in recent editions and he even made a brief cameo in one of my previous articles. He was but a baby then, and I’ve been nurturing and raising him daily. He keeps making neural connections, compounding FPL knowledge past, present and future. It is amazing and terrifying to behold.
FPL Prometheus
Over the past week I’ve witnessed in Manhattan an exponential growth curve.
As we rapidly approach our first deadline of the FPL season, it’s now time to get serious about how we’re going to build our teams.
Let the “Pick Player A! “ “No, Player B! “ thing play out on FPL Twitter. So much of it is noise. Insolent noise. I partake on it from time to time, but I try to do so only from a high signal position. I do that because I am trying to identify my tribe. People just like you, dear reader. FPL managers who want edge and who are willing to work for it and put skin in the game. I’ve talked about why I paywall so much of my most sensitive analytics content. I do it because a) I pay a lot for data that many don’t have access to; b) I pay for compute power than many don’t have access to; and c) it protects YOU, because the second an insight is shared on Opta Analyst or some free access source is the very second that edge is gone. Trust me, smarter people than us are already on it. Heck, I’m on it. Manhattan has already eaten that information for lunch and connected it to thousands, perhaps millions of other high signal bits and pieces from the sharpest minds and fields in the world.
Fair warning, because we’re on the cutting edge of technology here and things compound so fast, there will be times when information shared in these pages changes. We’re Bayesian here and when new information comes in we interrogate, prosecute and run it into the ground. Only what survives makes it into these pages. There is no such thing as perfect process and results and, frankly, you wouldn’t want that. It would be a fairy tale or worse, a con.
Throughout this season, Manhattan will get ever smarter and by next season it’ll be miraculous. It only gets better from there for us.
Normally I'd share a lot of good info for free before getting into paywall, but I have been so hard at work running tests for this article over the past few nightsand I've hardly slept. As I write this the sun will set in an hour here in Texas and I need a good night’s rest. So we’re gonna get down to business quickly today.
You’ve also waited long enough for this piece. Just know, everything I am about to reveal has been thoroughly tested. Should new information lead to a change of beliefs, I will of course update you.
What follows is information that will change FPL worlds in similar fashion to how Oppenheimer’s Trinity test changed our real life one.
And now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
He received every new idea as perfectly beautiful
I started with a list of questions for Manhattan. The types of questions that every FPL manager would like to know ahead of GW1, and many questions contain information of the sort that most of us are highly confident are true because we believe so because someone on Twitter said so who also believed it and so on and so forth.
We received those ideas, treated them with respect, tested them rigorously and killed every single one. No argument from me or Manhattan, just stunning compute and cold, rigorous calculations. What emerged from the rubble is some of the highest FPL signal I’ve ever been privileged with.
The way we’re going to do this next is I’ll create a composite FPL manager. avatar. Someone like you or me. We are good at this thing we call FPL, and we want to get better. We are humble yet confident in our abilities and we’ve put in the work. We’re faced with decisions about how to build a GW1 team that will set us up for season-long success. We’ve been exposed to the FPL Twitter noise and want clarity. But we have questions. Lots of questions.
Said FPL manager will now ask their questions and will get clear, data-driven, thoroughly tested answers from SantiSignals x Manhattan.
The questions will cover topics like how to split our budget, what formations to pick, DEFCON vs clean sheets, what each price band of defender should deliver for your team, GK spend, how many premiums to carry, what position elite managers differentiate from the pack and so much more.
FPL manager, please meet SantiSignals x Manhattan. Let’s have a chat about your GW1 deadline team build!
FPL manager: Does budget split determine how well I do?
SantiSignals x Dr Manhattan: Nope. We ran a test. Knowing every result from last season in advance, what is the best team you could have picked in August and held all the way through the season? We worked it out twice.
The first time we spent on each position group (ie., defense, midfield and so on) the same amount as the eventual top 1k managers. The second time we spent exactly where the mid-table managers spent (season end ranks between 1-5m). Both came out identical at 2,381 points.
The elite managers’ split and the mid-table ones are worth the same. Good FPL assets exist at every price, which means you cannot win your season on budget allocation and you cannot lose it either, unless you’re just clowning. Don’t be a clown.
Q2: Should I copy what the top managers spend?
There isn’t a lot to copy, frankly. At GW1 last season, the eventual top 1k and mid-table sample managers built near identical squads. Position by position the biggest difference between them was £1.31m in Midfield. Every other line was inside £0.9m on a £100m budget. There is one exception, which we’ll get to in Q6.
Q3: What formation should I build for?