The cost of caution: delaying transfers

Striking the balance between risk and reward is a difficult task in fantasy sports and getting the wrong mix can result in wasted points and eventual failure. Perhaps this is me projecting my own views onto the analysis, but I feel that sometimes those of us who are more inclined to make decisions based on data are generally more concerned with the risk of too much action: such as paying ill-advised four-point transfers on a weekly basis or captaining players based on nothing more than a hunch. I often speak - as do those more learned than I - about the risk of relying on small samples and the need to regress anomalous results back to some form of mean to avoid overreacting to chance events, and these are indeed good virtues which will generally lead to fantasy success.

What I want to talk about here though is another type of risk: the risk of inaction, specifically as it pertains to making transfers. I noted last week that my team is valued at a measly 103m while the league's top teams are pushing into the 110m, or even 115m range. Given my moderate success in the past and the constant turnover of players, I've argued that chasing cash is not necessarily a worthy strategy in of itself and a quick glance at the game's "most valuable" teams will highlight that team value does not always correlate to fantasy points (with a major factor being the transfer prices paid by those teams, of course). I am not fully backing up on that approach as "chasing money" still seems like a strategy that wouldn't pay dividends by itself, as by definition, to get the most gains you need to be selecting players that everyone else is also picking, and those people are generally not the ideal role models for rationale behaviour. What does need to be looked at though, is the idea of making the transfers you want to make, but doing so as early as possible in the gameweek (h/t to reader CDI for raising this question).

At this point, I'm sure many of you are astonished that I haven't been through this before, but alas, I am indeed that foolish. My position has always been that I'd prefer to lose out on the odd 0.1m rise by making late transfers if that means avoiding injuries to players I've just signed. What I've failed to properly appreciate though is the surprisingly high cost of delaying your transfer by just a week. I believe this is something akin to what is often defined as loss aversion, particularly in the sense that signing a player on a Sunday night who then gets injured in training that week stings so badly, that it feels much worse than it is (the cost being, at worst, a four point to get rid of him again). If I delay action, I only lose something I never had anyway - that potential rise in price - but by delaying I ensure that I avoid wasting a transfer: something I tangibly 'own'.

I know reading about other people's fantasy teams is the very definition of mundane, but without copying the data for every player in the league, I've had to draw the line for the below analysis somewhere, so I've decided to focus on the transfers made by my own team this year. The methodology is to compare the lowest price I could have paid for a player with the highest for a given week, which will generally be the price paid if you wait until the last minute to make your move. For example, following his fourth goal in three weeks in GW6, Aaron Ramsey was obviously due for another price rise. If you made the move to grab him as soon as the GW6 fixtures finished, you'd have paid the closing price from GW6 of 6.2m. If however, you waited until right before the GW7 deadline, you'd now find that the same player cost 6.5m. I know this is obvious and self evident, but what is surprising to me is that this issue doesn't just apply to 'obvious' examples like Ramsey. Below are all the purchases made for my team this season, excluding those during the wildcard week (even I'm smart enough to make wildcard transfers on day one of the new gameweek):

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Though this analysis will slightly overestimate my idiocy as on occasion I did make transfers earlier in the week, it still shows a striking impact in that delaying making these moves cost 2.3m on the purchase side and 1.5m on the sale side (this impact is lowered by the way sales price is calculated, but still, it's a material difference). Remember that this is purely a product of timing and I haven't changed my policy as to who to target at all, yet I've left something like 3.0m on the table purely to guard against the risk of injury. What's really surprising to me is that over half of my transfers were impacted by this effect, not just those following a week where a player produces a huge points haul thus triggering a stampede of transfers.

Assessing the real risk of injury is harder, as potentially I changed my transfer target based on injuries which happened during the week. Though I can recall a few anecdotal instances of avoiding injuries due to delaying these moves, I again can't help but wonder if I'm putting too much emphasis on those occasions as they stood out to me as "justifying" my position. I guess if there's mid-week European action, it might still pay to wait on transfers but otherwise it seems that being cautious can lead to a serious loss of funds in the latter stages of the season and right now I would happily give up 8-12 points to correct injured transferees earlier in the year if that meant I could have another three or four million pounds to spend.

To some of you this has probably been as enlightening as a long prose explaining how the earth actually isn't flat, but hopefully my late arrival to the common sense party will help illuminate reality for a few others.