Tools, subscriptions, pay-to-win, and what counts as “proper FPL”
Everyone seems to have an idea of the correct amount of FPL. The person who does less than you is not to be taken seriously, but the one who does more than you is obsessive. And, in this incredibly convenient arrangement, your relationship with FPL sits perfectly in the middle and should be considered the purest.
Projection models are ruining the game, optimisers are taking things too far, nobody thinks for themselves anymore, creators have started charging money, and FPL is now “pay-to-win.” Different people have different complaints. Some think the tools are useless, some think they are too powerful, some hate paying for them, and some think they make FPL worse.
Models and projections are where this argument is most visible right now, particularly among people who take FPL seriously. But the argument is bigger than that. It is about how easily “this is how I enjoy playing FPL” turns into “this is how FPL should be played.”
The Certificate of Appropriate FPL Engagement
Imagine that your friend captained Caicedo and they are the type of person who won’t check their captain or starters after selecting the squad. Caicedo scores a 40-yard banger, gets a scrappy assist, DEFCON, clean sheet, and ends up on 15 points. Your mate has 30 points from their captain while you, the ‘engaged FPL manager’, have 4 because your Mr. ‘Obvious’ captain, Bruno or Haaland, blanked.
Your annoyance is short-lived, and a borderline snobbish mindset almost whispers to you that your ‘proper’ process gives you a better chance of beating them over the rest of the season.
You don’t suddenly go around saying that forgetting to set your captain is the optimal way to play FPL, because a worse bet does not become the better bet because it won. You accept the outcome and continue living your life.
That kind of manager does not threaten your idea of what proper FPL is. You laugh at them on bad days, call them lucky on good ones. The problem begins when you think that somebody is doing more than you.
You are already looking at xG, xA, clean-sheet probabilities and bookmaker odds. You listen to two or three favourite podcasts, maybe use an FPL Planner, and none of this feels like you’re ruining anything for anyone. This seems to be around the point where most engaged managers award themselves the ‘certificate of appropriate FPL engagement’. The moment someone combines all this and uses the word ‘projection’, suddenly we have crossed a sacred boundary, and FPL is ruined.
Which is funny because xG itself used to be the nerd shit that was ‘ruining’ football. Mocked as something people with ‘proper’ football knowledge did not need. A decade later, plenty of these ‘proper’ ball knowers have made a ‘proper’ U-turn on their statements.
None of that means every new tool is good, or that every optimiser deserves to become accepted. It just shows how movable these sacred boundaries can be. Yesterday’s unnecessary nerd shit can become tomorrow’s completely normal part of analysing football.
You Cannot Have All Three
I say this to people quite a lot: you are allowed to write with a peacock feather dipped in ink if that is how you enjoy writing. There is nothing wrong with that.
If you are using a peacock feather because you love the process, then great. Somebody sitting next to you writing the same thing on a keyboard should not bother you. They have not taken away your happiness.
But if efficiency is what you care about, then pick that lane. The feather is incomparable to a keyboard if the sole purpose is saving time and effort. You are allowed to say you don’t like keyboards, but make peace with the fact that if there are more efficient ways of doing the same thing, people will use them.
The problem is wanting the efficiency of the keyboard, the feeling of purity that comes with the feather, and somehow also the right to decide which one everybody else should use. You cannot have all three.
It doesn’t matter if you got to a decision by watching three matches, using a projection model, listening to a podcast or sitting alone in a dark room thinking very seriously about Bournemouth’s left-hand side. None of those is inherently pure or impure.
You can build the whole thing yourself if that is how you want to spend your time and other resources. Or you can look at those tools and say, screw that and take my money. I build and use this stuff myself, so obviously I have my own preferences here. I think projections are useful. I think optimisation can be useful.
If these tools got you extra transfers, another chip and 拢5m more budget because of a subscription, I would happily call that pay-to-win. Or, if pay-to-win simply means that money can purchase any competitive advantage, then fine. Paid information can qualify. But that makes the term much broader than people usually mean when they use it. Being able to watch football, access better data or pay somebody else to organise information for you all start looking like huge pay-to-wins. There is a more reasonable version of the complaint.
拢5 Cannot Make Haaland Score
The money argument is different because paying for a good tool can give you better information, a more efficient way of processing it, or both. That is why people are paying for such tools.
And yes, if the tool is good, it can give you an advantage. Pretending otherwise would be ridiculous. If I thought projections made absolutely no difference to the decisions people make, I would have a fairly difficult time explaining why I think they have any value in the first place.
But “this can improve your chances” and “this is pay-to-win” are not automatically the same claim. A projection cannot make Haaland score, the way a weather forecast cannot make it rain.
If paid tools become game-breaking and enough serious managers use them, then those who don’t want to pay might feel like they have to just to keep up. If a paid tool ever became so powerful that not buying it made serious competition essentially impossible, then I think the pay-to-win criticism would become much stronger. But that leaves the important question unanswered: How large is the advantage actually supposed to be?
I cannot state exactly how large it is, and neither can anybody arguing the other side. As far as I know, there is no public survey or dataset showing what share of the top 1k, top 10k or anybody else is paying for these tools. The idea that paid tools are an entry ticket for ‘serious’ FPL is often treated as an established fact without anyone actually establishing it.
One useful piece of evidence came from an independent open-source comparison in 2025. A researcher built OpenFPL using free FPL API and Understat data and compared it prospectively with FPL Review’s paid Massive Data model across the back end of the 2024-25 season.
The two models produced broadly comparable accuracy. FPL Review performed better on the low-return categories, including identifying players who would not play, where team news and expected minutes matter heavily. OpenFPL was slightly better in some of the higher-return categories. That is one study. It does not prove paid models are useless, because that would be a pretty stupid conclusion to draw from a study showing that projection models can work.
What it does show is that the evidence we currently have does not exactly support the idea that paying is some unavoidable entry ticket to useful FPL modelling. We work with what we have, and our beliefs change when better information turns up, right? Right?
But What About the Template?
The one thing we all sort of dislike is that if enough managers have the same information and reach similar conclusions, teams start converging. I hate that too.
But optimisers didn鈥檛 invent the template. Before projections and solvers, people got there through podcasts, Twitter, ownership, bookmaker odds, watching the same matches and talking to the same bunch of managers. Give thousands of people roughly the same information and a 拢100m budget and, shockingly, a lot of them will like the same footballers.
Tools can accelerate that. If everybody is looking at similar projections, similar transfer paths and similar fixture runs, you are going to get similar answers more often.
Nobody Is Forcing You to Buy This Shit
There are plenty of valid reasons to criticise a product, but the fact that somebody built something and charges money for it is not one.
If you are one of those people who thinks all of these websites are shit anyway, then I am not entirely sure why their existence bothers you. Let the fools be.
If the game is overwhelmingly about your superior judgement, then people paying for their silly little numbers should be no threat to you whatsoever. You should be absolutely delighted that everyone is an idiot while you’re Einstein.
And for anyone who manages to believe both that these tools have no value and that those same tools offer an enormous unfair advantage, there is a contradiction to explain.
Either the information helps, in which case perhaps it is not quite as useless as you keep insisting, or it does not, in which case why are you worried about fools being fools?
You are paying for somebody else’s work. That explains why somebody might charge for it. It does not make the price fair, the product good or its effect on FPL healthy. We have survived a world in which people sold Supreme bricks. We will survive the existence of overpriced FPL websites.
So, Who Is Ruining FPL?
Almost every person who thinks or acts like they are the flag bearer of ‘proper’ FPL is guilty of this in some form. Me included. We have turned a fantasy football game into a constant exercise of telling other people that they are playing it incorrectly. It has become very “my way or you’re an idiot.”
A casual does not understand FPL; spend a bit more time, and now you are taking the game too seriously. Build your own model, and you are part of the reason nobody thinks for themselves anymore. Use somebody else’s, and now you have outsourced the game entirely. Pay for it, and you are buying an advantage. Sell it, and you are ruining FPL for everyone else. Somehow, whatever you choose to do, somebody has already decided it is the wrong amount of FPL.
The worst part is that nobody really escapes it. The casual gets laughed at for not caring enough, the obsessive guy gets mocked for caring too much. The eye-test guy thinks the numbers have taken the football out of FPL. The numbers guy thinks everyone else is just guessing.
You are allowed to think your method is better. You are allowed to think somebody else’s method is stupid. The problem begins when whatever makes the game enjoyable for you becomes the standard everybody else has to meet.
So maybe nobody single-handedly ruined FPL. We have all been doing a pretty decent job of ruining it for each other. You can take the game seriously without taking your particular way of playing it quite so seriously.