FPL Can Mess With Your Head
*Published on World Mental Health Day - but relevant every gameweek.
If you’ve played Fantasy Premier League long enough, you’ll know the feeling. You climb from a million to 500k and feel unstoppable. A few weeks later you drop from 10k to 50k and question every decision you’ve made since August. Same game. Same season. Two completely different emotional states.
That’s the strange power FPL has over us. A few points on a Saturday afternoon can lift your entire weekend or quietly ruin it. A captain blank can follow you into Sunday. A red arrow can sit in the back of your mind on a Monday morning at work.
Most of the time it’s harmless. Part of the fun, even. But when you’re constantly checking ranks, comparing arrows and refreshing LiveFPL at midnight, it’s worth pausing to remember one thing: FPL is just a game. Your mental health isn’t.
So if the season is grinding you down right now, put the app down for an evening. Watch a game without checking your score. Check in on a mate who took a -8 this week and hasn’t been quite right since. Sleep properly. Move your body. Speak to yourself after a red arrow the way you’d speak to a friend.
Rank is temporary. Mindset isn’t.
At FPL Store we created our Mental Health Matters mug as a small, physical reminder of that perspective. And because words on a mug aren’t enough on their own, £5 from every mug sold goes directly to Mind, the mental health charity, to support anyone who needs it. It’s the one product in our range we’re most proud of.
Whether you’re flying or flopping this season, you are not your rank. And you’re doing better than you think.
