Just over a year ago, completely disillusioned with my Twitter feed, with it being wall to wall with political angst and general disquiet about the world, I mulled switching my existing Twitter account off! It simply stopped being enjoyable. Life was tough enough and Twitter was no longer what I had envisioned it to be when I initially joined the platform.
I finally decided that the time was ripe to create my FPL ONLY twitter account, @fplmariner, now described as a Political and COVID free zone.
Fresh on the back of a 50k finish in only my second season playing FPL and finishing 3rd in my works mini-league I began exploring and found some amazing content writers going to great lengths in order to help like minded players (like me) keen on learning from the mistakes that still haunted me from the previous season.
What struck me though was the interaction between individuals, in particular with the podcast creators like https://twitter.com/WGTA_FPL who would often answer your questions frankly and openly.
I was also very impressed with the amount of data, spreadsheets, planners etc that were provided for individuals, often free, as gestures of good will.
After a while I built the courage to start interacting, asking questions, offering my own opinion to questions posed. Covid-19 of course slammed the brakes on that but the post lock-down planning and all hands to the pump at end of season reignited the fire. This resulted in, at the end of the season, being inspired enough (despite a pretty shocking season) to set about dissecting my previous season using data and then moving to the task of quickly planning for the 2020/21 season.
Following a couple of weeks of crunching numbers I started to understand some lessons learned and tentatively began to create posts based on what I call my PPMR model.
This is basically taking the player’s last seasons price, points scored and total minutes (as a total of 38 games (3420 Mins) – if they were at the club for the full season) and calculating their Points Per Million PPM.
I then considered the post lock-down period and looked particularly at the minutes on the pitch post lock-down and corrected the extrapolated points back to PPMR and took the plunge and posted a thread.
It was relatively well received. So armed with new found confidence I decided to have a look during the following lunch at cheap midfielders. This took me about 45 minutes and two coffees and that was that. I posted it on Twitter and also on the “Road to FPL Global Glory” telegram feed and went back to work.
A bit later on I checked Twitter and saw it had been retweeted by a couple of decent accounts and I thought job done. But then the big one, the official site with 1.1 million followers quoted my tweet and all hell broke loose, so much so, I had to turn my notifications off.
After a crazy 24 hours or so I ended up with nearly 2500 followers, up by around a 1000 followers and had multiple requests to help with teams – this was before the fixtures were even out. So I requested most managers to “Wait” but I tried to reply to every one just like others before me.
I know there are far more esteemed content creators out there but I hope you found this interesting all the same and that it inspires you to do your own research and to create your own content which without a doubt will help you get involved. @FPL_GFCT have a fantastic Telegram chat, why not get involved there first; however, when you do create some content, please do send me a direct message so I don’t miss it. I will definitely like it for the effort and if I think its thought provoking I will definitely help retweet it to others as well!
Stay Safe
Chris Turner
Follow @FplMariner
@FPL_GFCT 