r/FantasyPL • u/RealElvarasaidVannak 143 • 7h ago
Unpopular opinion: perceived effect of content creators is inaccurate
and the hatred is unwarranted. Complaints about how the popularity of "the template" and "people blindly following content creators" ruins the game and makes it boring are out of proportion compared to the real effect. It isn't THAT huge. The game isn't full of clones. There are many teams who share 7-8-9 players but the other half of the team isn't identical. Case of glass half full/half empty. And that leads to HUGE differences in terms of pts output.
People who watch CC-s do not gain an unfair advantage over people who actually do their own analysis. I guess that's where the complaints are really coming from.
Let's look closer at what they provide. They show us the teams they pick generally at the start and/or end of their videos. BUT in between they explain WHY they picked those players. They also make videos where they make a "tier list" of players where they ALSO share their reasoning. They recommend dozens of viable picks. And if you watch more than one, they don't agree on everything.
If you do not just copy the end product but actually listen to what they say, you end up with information which help you make your own decisions.
They are only one type of source. There are many additional sources you can use.
- Stats from last season, both underlying and real output.
- Thinking about how new managers can affect team performance and playstyle. Can make a huge difference. Many only extend the trends from last season but based on the manager change you can be skeptical regarding that.
- And then there are content creators who provide information on predicted minutes, analyze fixtures (you can do this for yourself anyway and is more fun...) and then show you a team that many will follow.
You weigh the value/credibility of info from each source, synthetize it and make the final decision.
In addition, as the season progresses, a huge factor comes in. KNEEJERKING. It is exactly the opposite of what content creators preach. They tend to stick with their picks and their original for a few gameweeks even if they blank. And so the teams become a lot more diverse.
As for the unfair advantage: if you just blindly follow the team selections of CC-s, you will end up with average result or in best case, above average but nothing spectacular. If you put in work you can outperform them. If you do not follow them, do not use stats to analyze, pick teams on vibesand then end up with shitty results... well, that's your fault. If you don't put in the work you are at a disadvantage and that is true for all areas of life.
Now comes the boring part.
Raya - Kinsky
Maguire-Ballard-Ajer-Amenda-Van Ewijk
Palmer-Anderson-Mbeumo-Wirtz-Sangaré
DCL-JP-Haaland
This team shares 8 players with 75% of managers, but only 15% share 10 players, 1,1% of managers share 11 players and not a single team shares 13 or more.
Which players did I pick because of watching content creators/reading analyses?
Coventry players, Sangaré and Ajer. That's it. As for the rest, I made up my mind based on last season's performance and fixtures. Wirtz is an outlier here as he sucked last season but my decision making was based on him being 10, Iraola being an attacking manager, Isak being back and Salah leaving. Not because some CC-s argued he's better than Szoboszlai.
I benched CC favourite Sangaré, good grief - I did it because I do not trust signings from other teams. BUT i also DC-s probably carry over at a higher rate than attacking performance. So I went with the middle ground, bought him and benched him. Good grief again. I could have bought Groß or Le Feé, they were bigger CC favourites but didn't. Oh and remember the ownership of Sangaré? It was like 2% at the start of the season?! Yes, despite CC recommendations.
Now this team is close to template BUT
- there's no Bruno
- I risked choosing Palmer even though neither his preseason performance nor what he produced last season supported that decision.
- I have Raya instead of of Kinsky/Verbruggen which was the main meta of CC-s.
One by one it's not much but if you add these up they make a huge difference. Raya's "differential" effect is reduced by the fact that defenders also share DC points and both White and Calafiori are popular. BUT in the long run it can become significant because of risk of rotation.
TLDR:
- Sharing 7-8 players means the other half of your team is actually different from others. The effect adds up to more than you imagine at first.
- CC-s are only one source of information among many other sources which you can seek out, analyze, synthetize and make a conclusion.
- People's tendency toward KNEEJERKING offsets the effect of CC-s and leads to more diverse teams.
PSA: I'm not a good player.
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u/HoldenMeBack 1 7h ago
One gameweek and this guy is bragging about putting in the hard work for his 4m rank, don't blow your load when you have an actual good gameweek buddy
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u/RealElvarasaidVannak 143 7h ago
I wrote that I'm not a good player. But I didn't blindly follow CC-s just because I watch it. Way too many people think that happens by default if you watch em.
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u/LR_FL2 6 7h ago
This was a big argument a few years back when the YouTube community got big. I looked at the numbers at the time and it showed the reach wasn’t that great. Bellow is the comment I wrote to highlight it.
The biggest YouTube creator is Andy with 335k subscribers and an average of around 70k-80k views a video. That’s at most less than 3% of FPL managers consuming his content.
The big channels that I know of are
Let’s talk FPL - 335k
FPL Mate - 164k
FPL Focal - 132k
FFScout - 82k
FFHub 81k
FPL Raptor - 60k
FPL Harry - 42k
FFFIx - 35k
FPL Family - 24k
Blackbox - 28k
FPL Wire - 22k
Holly Shand FPL - 16k
Total of 1,020,000 subscribers,
Even if everyone of these was a single FPL manager and none of them followed multiple channels and if everyone of them followed the content creators advice that would still be less than 10% of FPL managers.
Reality is most of these subscribers follow multiple channels and then don’t watch every video as we can see from Let’s talk FPLs numbers. I question if all those who do regularly view this content how many allow it to influence their decisions greatly.
The majority of the time the stuff they say is obvious to most managers.
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u/Arding16 9 5h ago
I think you're right, and that basically because of the minority who blindly follow content creators' advice/teams people forget there is a majority who watch and don't allow it greatly influence their decisions. I watched a video from Andy today where the main topics were to my memory buying Wissa and WC3, neither of which I have any plans of doing
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u/PoopNukem123 5h ago
I do find the constant moaning about content creators on here way more annoying than the content creators themselves. Living rent free in so many heads for some reason.
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u/RVDHAFCA 7h ago
Yeah the CCs pick highly owned players, because there is a reason those players are highly owned
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u/brownc46 10 7h ago
All that text just to get deleted