After all
the hours you’ve spent scouting players and tinkering to find the optimal
combination for your fantasy football team, you’ve finally narrowed it down to
something you’re happy with. Despite the crippling restrictions of the seemingly
impossible budget, you’ve even managed to squeeze in that certain player, the
one who’s shown glimpses of irresistible form and who you’ve been telling
everyone will comfortably outscore not only his teammates, but also the rest of
the players in the game. In your mind, he will almost certainly become the most
important player to own, despite his lofty price tag. In fact, he was the first
name on your team sheet and your biggest challenge was fitting rest of the team
around him.
A glance at
your main mini-league rival’s team only serves to fill you with confidence as
you notice what you consider to be a distinct lack of fantasy talent on display. “I can’t believe he imagines
that combination of players doing well,” you sneer, especially since you notice he’s selected the
other expensive striker who plays for your star man’s team and who you can’t in
a million years imagine scoring well. You’re already starting to think of novel
ways to gloat about your mini-league triumph over your fiercest of rivals as
the smug feeling of being at a distinct advantage begins to set in.
Weeks pass
by, and the player who you’d backed to be a points machine isn’t actually
performing that well. Sure, he’s looked dangerous in front of goal and has been
creating chances aplenty for his teammates, but somehow the fantasy points just
haven’t been coming his way. Unfortunately, your mini-league rival, the one who
you’d written off due to his poor selection, is building a solid lead at the top
of your mini-league and, at this rate, will be out of reach before too long. To
make things even worse, the player who you’d written off as a poor pick has
been raking in the points for not only your rival, but also for half of the
teams in your mini-league and everyone who hasn’t got him yet is scrambling to
bring him in, even at the expense of your star pick.
“Surely my
star man will come good,” you envisage. “Surely he’ll reverse this
point-scoring trend,” you muse. “Surely,” you convince yourself, “he’s due.”
You’ve had this player in your team for weeks and feel that you can’t sell him
now. You feel like you’ve passed ‘the point of no return’: to cut him from your
team now would mean risking missing out on his imminent points haul. You’ve
committed to having him in your team now and in replacing him with someone else,
you would be admitting you were wrong all along. Anyway, you’re sure that the
other player won’t possibly continue his good run of form and his plentiful supply of points is
bound to dry up at some point. You can’t afford both without major surgery and sacrificing other areas of your team and you’ve therefore decided that you’re
not selling your star man, and your decision is final.
Surely every
FPL player can relate to this to some extent. That feeling of stubbornness that
is provoked when evaluating a decision you’ve made that hasn’t paid off, even
if it isn’t as extreme as our example above. This could perhaps be partly put
down to a common error in judgement known as the sunk cost fallacy, which can in turn lead to irrational
behaviour. This stubborn approach could be attested to the mistaken belief that
resources spent in the past – in this case the time and energy spent gathering
information and making decisions for your team, as well as fruitlessly urging
him on – should be taken into account when making a decision, and that changing
your mind now would mean that the time and energy you've invested would be wasted.
Weighing up
the potential loss of points that would be incurred by selling your star man
before he goes on his overdue run of good form, you’re even less inclined to
make the swap. Despite the potential points to be gained by drafting in your
rival’s star player at your current player's expense, the fear of missing out on your current talisman’s
points somehow feels more powerful. This phenomenon is often referred to as loss aversion: people’s tendency to
prefer avoiding losses rather than acquire gains, with some studies even
suggesting that losses are psychologically doubly as powerful as gains.
As if there
weren’t already enough psychological factors contributing to you sticking to
your guns and holding your underperforming FPL star, the status quo bias could also influence on your
thinking. This bias describes the irrational preference for the current state
of affairs and, in this case, means there could be an increased value attached
to sticking with your current player rather than switching to an alternative. Coupled
with regret avoidance (the tendency to avoid decisions that you could easily
imagine leading to regret), it’s clear the affect that this could potentially have
on your decision-making.
In
conclusion, next time you’re holding onto that player who you previously
thought would do well (despite the subsequent evidence seemingly contradicting your
decision), ask yourself if you’re falling victim to any of these errors in
judgement.
Further reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost_fallacy#Loss_aversion_and_the_sunk_cost_fallacy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_quo_bias
*Dobelli, R. (2011) Die Kunst des klaren Denkens ('The Art of Clear Thinking'). Munich: Carl Hanser
This article is the
latest in a series called "The Art of Clear Thinking" which looks at various errors in reasoning that cause
many of us to come to illogical conclusions which may in turn lead to bad
decision making. I hope to enlighten and
entertain in equal measure and who knows - it may even help you to
improve as an FPL player!
