Gameweek 1: I Think I've Made a Mistake.

Well. That escalated quickly.

One Gameweek into my attempt to get back into FPL and I've already got a player I rejected scoring 13 points, my bench goalkeeper outscoring my starter and one of my £8m forwards somehow managing zero points despite having 1.08 xGI.

So yes. I'm doing great.

The important thing to remember here is that I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing. I'm not an FPL expert, I'm not secretly sitting on years of fantasy football knowledge and I don't spend every weekend watching six Premier League matches while studying every move.

The whole reason I started this was to see whether I could actually stick with FPL for once. I've started it plenty of times before, got really into it and then completely lost interest a few weeks later. Rather than pretending I'm here to become some sort of fantasy football expert, I'm treating this as an experiment.

Pick a team. Play the Gameweeks. Make some decisions. Get some of those decisions completely wrong. Then come back the following week and do it all again.

That's the plan, anyway.

So, how did the experiment start?

For anyone who missed the beginning of this slightly questionable experiment, I came back to FPL despite barely following the Premier League anymore.

I looked at last season's points and goals, and I tried to make sensible decisions. I spent exactly £100m and, on paper, I didn't hate it.

In fact, I felt reasonably good about the team. There were players I liked, there were some fixtures I liked and there was a vague idea behind most of the selections.

One week later, I'm not sure whether that makes me feel better or worse.

João Pedro understood the assignment

Thank you, João.

Honestly, without João Pedro I'm not sure what this review would look like. While several members of my carefully researched squad were busy doing very little, João decided that somebody should probably score some points.

He scored a goal, added an assist and finished the Gameweek with 11 points.

Eleven points from one of my forwards is exactly what I wanted when I picked him. The slightly annoying part is that he wasn't my captain, because apparently I like making things harder for myself.

Still, I'm taking the win. João Pedro is currently one of the reasons I'm not looking at my squad and immediately thinking about deleting the whole thing.

Marc Guéhi!

There were a few players I felt reasonably confident about before the season started. Marc Guéhi wasn't necessarily one of them.

He was more of a "179 points last season looks nice, I'll have him" kind of decision.

Turns out, that may actually have been enough analysis.

Guéhi scored 10 points after scoring a goal, and suddenly he's the second-highest scorer in my starting XI.

Maybe the spreadsheet knew something after all. Or maybe I got lucky. Let's not investigate too closely and ruin the moment.

My captain got two points...

Yea...

Semenyo. The player whose points were going to be doubled. ... scored two points.

Which becomes four with the captaincy, so technically it isn't a disaster. But João Pedro scored 11 without me giving him the armband, so naturally I'm now questioning every decision I've ever made.

The frustrating thing is that the numbers weren't exactly screaming for a huge haul either. Captain hindsight is a wonderful thing.

The obvious question now is whether I got the captain wrong or whether Gameweek 1 was simply one bad result. I have absolutely no idea yet, which is probably why I'm going to try very hard not to panic after one week.

Thiago somehow got zero

This one is going to annoy me.

Thiago was one of the players I actually felt quite good about before the season started. I saw 22 goals last season, saw £8m next to his name and thought, "Yep. That'll do."

Then Gameweek 1 happened.

He played 82 minutes and finished with 1.00 xG and 1.08 xGI. He had the numbers. He had the minutes. He had the chances.

And somehow?

Zero points.

Notta one. Nada. Zilch.

I'm not even angry at him. I'm just disappointed.

The Arsenal plan was... fine?

I may have accidentally built my entire Gameweek 1 strategy around Arsenal playing Coventry.

Raya. Gabriel. Rice. Three players. One fixture.

Before the deadline, that seemed perfectly reasonable. Arsenal had the fixture, I liked the players and I clearly wasn't worried about putting too many eggs into one basket.

The results were Raya with six, Gabriel with five and Rice with three.

That's 14 points between them. Not exactly the explosion I imagined when I looked at the fixture before the deadline, but nobody completely embarrassed me either.

So we'll take that. For now.

And then there was the bench...

I don't really want to talk about it, but we're going to.

Kelleher scored seven points.
Raya, who I actually started, scored six.

Apparently the entire purpose of owning two playing goalkeepers is to guarantee that you pick the wrong one.

Tarkowski also scored six, Senesi got three and Le Fée got two. That gave me 18 points sitting on the bench.

Eighteen.
Sigh.

Cole Palmer... Oh.

Before Gameweek 1, I left Cole Palmer out.

I publicly put him in my list of rejected players and wrote, "This could age horribly."

Cole Palmer then went away and scored 13 points.

Well, that didn't take long.

The annoying part is that Palmer is £9.5m.
I had that money available in the squad, but I chose to spend it elsewhere.

And the worst part is that I can't even complain. I made the decision. Nobody forced me to leave him out. I looked at £9.5m, looked at the rest of my squad and decided I could live without him.

Apparently Past Jenna was feeling very confident.
Present Jenna is less convinced.

How did everyone actually do?

So... how bad was it?

Not terrible. Which is probably the biggest surprise.

For a team built by someone whose main Premier League research involved looking at numbers and occasionally thinking "yeah, that seems good", Gameweek 1 could have been much worse.

There were some genuine positives.
Guéhi scored 10. João Pedro scored 11.
The Arsenal triple-up didn't collapse.
Raya got a clean sheet and Gabriel did enough to make the decision look reasonable.

There were also some very obvious things I'd like to change.

Thiago got zero.
Kelleher outscored Raya from the bench.
My midfield didn't exactly set the world on fire.

And then there's Cole Palmer.
We don't need to keep talking about Cole Palmer.

What have I actually learned?

One Gameweek isn't enough to decide whether a player is good, bad, a bargain or someone I should immediately transfer out. I know that much.

I also know that expected goals aren't actual goals, a bench goalkeeper will always seem more attractive when he's sitting there with more points than your starter and leaving out a player who then scores 13 points is significantly more annoying when you publicly documented the decision beforehand.

More importantly, though, I think I'm starting to understand what I actually want from this.

I'm not trying to become an FPL expert overnight. I'm not going to suddenly start pretending I can predict every haul or explain exactly why one midfielder is going to score more points than another.

I'm just trying to stick with it.

That's the experiment.

I want to see what happens if I actually keep coming back every Gameweek, make decisions, learn from them and don't immediately abandon the whole thing because one player blanked.

If I can make it through a few bad captain choices, a couple of awful transfers and another Palmer goal without giving up, I'll consider that a win.

The experiment continues

One Gameweek isn't enough to decide to start ripping the squad apart.

There are already players I'm looking at differently, though.

That's probably unavoidable. I spent the entire weekend watching points go up and down, looking at the players I left out and wondering whether I should have made different decisions.

The temptation now is to react.

Transfer out the player who blanked. Bring in the player who hauled. Look at the next fixture and convince myself that this time I've definitely worked everything out.

That sounds suspiciously like exactly how I said I wasn't going to approach this.

So I'm going to try not to panic.

Whether I actually manage that is another question.

Gameweek 1 has given me a few good decisions, a few bad ones, a bench that is already annoying me and a very public reminder that maybe I shouldn't reject Cole Palmer.

Honestly, that's a pretty good start to the experiment.

The team moves on to Gameweek 2.

I'll make some decisions, probably question those decisions, probably change my mind at least three times and then eventually hit the button.

Hopefully I'll still be doing this next week.

And if I am, then I suppose the experiment is already working.

Gameweek 1 is done. The experiment survives.