It was August 2012 when I created my first FPL team, Robin Van Persie had just signed for Manchester United, and my obsession with Manchester United, which made me follow the Premier league, led me to Fantasy Premier league as well. As I was creating my first FPL team, Manchester United influence played a huge part in determining my team, Rooney, RVP featured heavily in my FPL team throughout that season. I would often captain RVP without much reasoning, while it may have worked to some extent that season, it was a clear demonstration of casual FPL behaviour. 

Some might argue, fantasy premier league an online fantasy game is significantly based on luck and everyone logging in to FPL has a casual approach about it, but like any other game irrespective of the stakes involved there is an urge to do well and to succeed. Every year I hope to focus on matches of teams other than that of Manchester United, gain better insights into the playing style of all teams, identify hidden gems and analyze each captaincy option, hoping this will propel me in the FPL rankings – but I am never able to keep up with the rigour.  

I am not making any claims of being a great player here, in fact 19-20 season turned out to be my worst one in terms of FPL rankings, I finished with a ranking of 6.45 lacs. 8 seasons after I started playing FPL finishing with a rank finishing with such a low rank was disappointing to some extent. While I may have been disappointed with the outcome at a lot of instances, I find a lot of joy in the entire process and FPL makes the Premier league more fun for me. 

This joy is the simple reason that brings me back to FPL season every year, and with it the urge to perform well, hence I am starting this series of articles to not just share how I go about selecting my FPL team but also to keep me motivated to go on and do well this season. 

As a Human capital consultant by profession I know very well that doing well needs to be measured and hence there need to be measurable targets to go along with it, and I have been reading up a lot about OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) in detail lately and feel it is a great concept to apply for setting my FPL goals for this season and see if they help me.

Objective: Achieve top 30k finish in FPL 20-21 season 

This would be my highest ever finish, best thus far is 35k in 17-18, and it is a good stretch objective to have after a disastrous last season. Actually to be honest calling it disastrous seems a bit of a stretch, given I was ranked 16 lacs at the start of Project Restart post lockdown and managed to crawl back to 6.5 lacs in 9 GWs, good momentum to take to the new season, eh ?

Key Results

• Achieve an average of 62 points per game week 
• Captaincy hit rate to be higher than 80%
• At least 75% of the GWs – Less than 5 blanks by selected players (excluding captain)

These key results are hypothesis that will help me achieve the objective set out above.