Well, well, well. If things go my way, captaining Salah instead of Haaland could make me look like I actually know what I'm doing. Hope they keep Casemiro on, he looks haunted in his eyes.
I just felt teams like Arsenal and Liverpool who seemingly have better fixtures and more players to target, for every goal Liverpool scores without Salah’s involvement you could expect a Jota/Diaz involvement and the same thing goes for Arsenal with Saka, where Havertz could come to the rescue but for City and Guardiola’s style Haaland is the only feasible attacking player with guaranteed minutes. If City’s first game of the season were to be against another team aside Chelsea, I sure wouldn’t have started without Haaland.
And that was true the past couple of seasons actually with Salah -- he performs well on a cost-to-point ratio, but the discrepancy in points earned from FPL scoring method still means if you Captain Haaland, he's going to outscore any other actually more valuable (cost-to-point) player over the course of a season. It's simply the way he's built and the way City build around him.
P.S. I switched captain to Salah because I thought West Ham would not be idiots and at least try to mark Haaland. They left him free, they are idiots.
P.P.S. I'm probably also whining because I'm old and old people whine a lot.
It's a big shame, FPL is broken, but if we want to play, we play by those broken rules.
I think FPL rules are as good as possible. Also this season maybe has the best pricing in last few. Finally we have that feeling of you can't have them all that is crucial to the game.
Haaland, Salah, Palmer, Saka, Son - you can't have more than 3 for sure and others will hurt you. You just have to pick those that frighten you most when you don't have them in the team. Haaland scores goals for fun but they get him only 4 points, he also doesn't get assists ever. All the other guys on that list get 5 points for a goal and a lot of assist. Haaland on 15M is perfect and far from broken. He is doing more damage to our heads than actual FPL damage. But that is also important factor and I don't want to watch City without him in my squad.
Just think about last season when Palmer was 5M and Saka 8M. That is broken, but somehow nobody complained since it was easy to have them in our squads.
Oh I've been wanting a weighted scoring for FPL for a long time -- I always, always, prefer weighted scoring systems that rewards value as cost-per-point, and rewards outlier picks, and does comparative scoring with overall contributions on team vs team.
The system looks geared for it. It calculates opponent difficulty, and it already calculates player interventions and involvements, so why not make that part of a weighted score? As in, scoring, clean sheets, dribbles, etc. against a tougher opponent should be worth more. Books use the same systems, but apply odds as a reflection of difficulty and risk-reward, only the money pouring in and the juice skews the odds so we don't see a clean picture. I always envisioned a pure Fantasy weighted system to be where true risk-reward is pictured.
It's been my complaint of 2 decades playing football whether Winning Eleven or Football Manager, you match up with a guy and it's a team full of superstars you're just facing variations of the same thing it got so boring. But don't blame the players, blame the game, it only rewards that kind of pattern and it discourages risk-taking and completely ignores real-world economic factors.
But you're probably right in that the pricing finally looks like it means something now. I couldn't really compare properly as I havent' always been paying attention but it does feel like my squad should have been able to keep my beloved Saka, but couldn't. I want to say it's Haaland's fault though
