Fantasy Premier League looks simple enough on the surface. Pick a squad, set a formation, make transfers when you fancy a change, and watch the points roll in.

In practice, most new managers make the same handful of mistakes in their first season, often without realising it until their rank has already taken a hit. Here’s where things typically go wrong, and how to avoid repeating them.

Chasing last week’s points

A midfielder scores twice against a struggling defence, and by Monday morning half the mini-league has transferred him in. It’s an understandable reaction, but a single big haul rarely tells you much on its own.

What matters more is whether the underlying numbers support it: shots taken, chances created, minutes spent near set pieces. Without that, a standout performance can just as easily be a one-off as the start of a run. Building a squad around whoever topped last week’s charts is one of the quickest ways to end up a step behind everyone else.

Panic transfers after a blank

Patience is harder than it sounds. A captain returns nothing and the temptation is to move him on immediately, usually right before he comes good and often at the cost of paying a premium for whoever just had a big week themselves.

Selling low and buying high in the same transfer is a pattern that catches out almost every new manager at some point. It tends to happen precisely because reacting feels more productive than waiting.

Burning chips too early

Wildcards, bench boost, free hit and triple captain are exciting the moment they unlock, which is exactly why so many new managers use them within the first few months without much of a plan behind it.

Chip value tends to build as the season goes on. Blank gameweeks, double gameweeks and major fixture swings later in the campaign are where a well-timed chip earns its keep, and using one early because the temptation was there usually means missing the moment it would have mattered most.

Fixture difficulty gets overlooked

Reputation carries a lot of weight in FPL, sometimes more than it should. A club heading into a run of matches against the league’s toughest defences is a genuinely risky source of points, no matter how well that player has performed in the past.

A mid-table side with three winnable fixtures in a row is often quietly one of the better transfer windows of the season, yet it gets overlooked far more often than it should. Checking the calendar before checking the ownership percentage would save a lot of managers a lot of frustration.

A weak bench

This one only becomes obvious at the worst possible time. Spend the entire budget on the starting eleven and the bench ends up filled with players who never see the pitch, right up until an injury or a surprise team news update forces an autosub into the lineup. It doesn’t need to be expensive. It just needs to be functional, made up of players who would actually start if called upon rather than whoever was cheapest at the time.

That is why the best players strategically chose their team, so that they can avoid having useless substitutions that end up costing them valuable points.

Copying the template without understanding it

There’s nothing wrong with owning heavily selected players; they’re usually popular for good reason. The mistake is copying an entire template team without knowing why each pick was made in the first place.

When form shifts, and it always does, managers who understand the reasoning behind their squad can react properly. Those who simply matched the top-ranked teams each week are often left holding onto picks long after the logic behind them has disappeared.

Missing price changes

Prices rise and fall based on transfer activity across the game, and it’s an area new managers consistently underestimate.

Waiting too long on a player who’s about to jump in price, or holding onto one who’s about to drop, rarely feels urgent in the moment. Over a full season, though, those small delays add up to several million in lost team value, quietly eating into a budget that could have gone towards actual improvements to the squad.

Getting the balance right

Most of these mistakes come from the same root cause: reacting to short-term results rather than sticking to a longer-term plan.

FPL rewards research and a willingness to sit tight through the occasional bad gameweek far more than it rewards constant tinkering, and the same process could also apply to different online side hustles, too. New managers who learn this early tend to see their rank improve steadily as the season goes on, rather than spending each week chasing whatever happened last time out.