What is FPG?
Like most groups of lads in their 20s, each year the excitement of a pending premier league season, would mean the arrival of a message on the group chat inviting us all to join another season of FPL. I however dreaded receiving this message as it initiated a process which I had grown to resent.
For those of you who haven’t played FPL, before joining a league you have to pick a full team of premier league players which make up your squad. If like me, you are highly competitive, picking your squad requires you to trawl through hours of data and overanalyse each and every decision — looking at last seasons results, recent injury news and endless transfer rumours.
After days if not weeks I would finally get my team to a place I was happy with. However more often than not, during the first round some series of events would reduce all that effort to nothing — whether it be my star striker who I had spent hours picking getting an injury ruling him out until Christmas or my CB conceding an own goal in the last minute. This would inevitably cause me to underperform on the opening week on FPL.
This pattern would repeat itself over and over again throughout the season and would became incredibly frustrating and tedious. Over the course of the season I would become more and more disillusioned and I would start to neglect my team. This pattern of behaviour meant I would never do very well — I would often end the season in the bottom half of the league. Naturally that was followed by an onslaught of friendly abuse from the lads — which seriously triggered my previously mentioned competitive nature.
I decided after a couple of years that I would take a stand. I decided not to join the league and to give FPL a miss. Since, why would I play a game I kept losing?
This was however somewhat worse, as although I wasn’t subject to so much ribbing — I also wasn’t subject to much of the chat at all. I then felt left out of 90% of any the conversations and after 1 lonely season I was back playing.
This caused me to think there had to be a better way, there had to be a game which we could play which didn’t become tedious to maintain and didn’t take up half my mental capacity every week — and that maybe just maybe I wouldn’t be so bad at…
What is my FPL Alternative
Introducing FPG — FPG was designed with one main objective in mind — it had to be simple to play. Because if for what ever reason I didn’t get many points for a given round — I didn’t want to feel like I had wasted hours of my life.
Also while I wanted the players of FPG to feel like the interaction each week was simple and easy — the game itself had to be complex enough to make it interesting to play.
With both of those things in mind here are the rules for FPG:
Basic Rules
Each round of the premier league, you will pick a team you hope will earn you the most points — depending on the result from that weekends games you will earn the points below.
Win = +1
Draw = 0
Loss = -1
However — be careful you can’t pick the same team more than twice a season.
Extra Rules
Head 2 Head
If you picked a team, who is playing a team picked by someone else in your league. The additional points will be added to your week's score.
Win = +1
Draw = 0
Loss = -1
However, bear in mind that you won’t know what team everyone else has picked, until after the games for that week have finished.
Double Points Round
Each Round has a 10% chance of being a double point rounds — This means at the end of the round all points are doubled — even negative scores!
Draw Means More
Similar to the Double Points Round, each week additionally has a 10% change of being a ‘Draw Mean More’ round. This means for this round of games a draw will earn you 2 extra points. Meaning that for these rounds the highest earning result will be a draw — pick wisely.
Derby Game
If the team you picked is playing in a derby, an extra point will be added or deducted for a win or a loss respectively.
Win = +1
Draw = -1
Loss = -1
However a point will also be deducted for a draw — because drawing a derby is boring!
How to Win?
Have the most points at the end of the season.
In the event of a tie break — it will be decided on your choices accumulative goal difference throughout the season.
When did I build My FPL Alternative
The truthful answer to this question is I have had numerous attempts at building FPG — the most successful of which was finished in September of 2024.
I first came up with the idea 5 years prior to that in 2019 — and during the pandemic I set about teaching myself how to build a mobile app.
Unfortunately as with most people who want to learn how to code — I tried to run before I could walk and that attempt did not get off the ground.
I did however, a couple of months later, get a working version up and running in the form of a Facebook messenger chatbot. This was great — I had done it — I had built a working version ready for my pals to test… Here we go.
With somewhat of a holding hand from me it actually worked! That was for about 5 weeks when Facebook started to treat my account like a robot and require a password change every 2 days. That combined with the bot starting to freak out and send multiple instances of the same message meant that FPG V1 died.
That started a 4 year long development pause caused somewhat by the fact that the world opened up again. During those 4 years — after repeated reminders from my brother that I never got FPG working — I would dabble in a couple of short lived attempts at building FPG, I even got as close as sending out a rules reminder to my mates once — but all ultimately failed for one reason or another.
That is until I discovered Streamlit — as a data engineer by trade, front end development was not something I was very familiar with. However now with the help of Streamlit I could design and build an interactive app for my users to play FPG.
After another year of honing my Streamlit skills and finding the time to actually get my head down and build it — we had the first version of FPG I was happy with, as of the point I am writing this I currently have over 30 people Beta testing for me with the first full season planned for 2025/26.