The Painful Realization That I Didn’t Know How to Pick a Defender
You know how it goes. I was sitting there, seven Gameweeks into the season, watching my rank absolutely plummet. My captain was blanking, and worse, my defenders were conceding goals faster than my kids eat snacks. Every single FPL content creator I saw online kept droning on about “fixtures” and “FDR.” I had been playing this game for years, but honestly, I just clicked on the green square teams and hoped for the best. That wasn’t working anymore.
I decided enough was enough. I wasn’t going to trust some vague colored square created by the official site anymore. I was going to find out, definitively, What is FPL FDR? and how the hell they actually calculate that number.
I Started Digging Where the Sun Don’t Shine
My initial process was a total mess. I hit the search engines hard. The problem? Every article just parrots the same useless information: “FDR stands for Fixture Difficulty Rating, it goes from 1 (easy) to 5 (hard).” Great, thanks, I already know that! I needed the underlying math, the algorithm. I wanted to see the damn spreadsheet the FPL dev team used.
I wasted probably two full evenings reading through forums and Reddit threads, trying to find some disgruntled former employee who leaked the truth. Nothing.
I realized quickly that the official FPL FDR, the one with the colors on the main site, is intentionally opaque. It’s a proprietary score, and they don’t share the exact weights. This annoyed me immensely. How can you expect me to optimize my team if the foundation is guesswork?
So, I shifted my focus. If I couldn’t get the proprietary data, I’d have to understand what factors must be included, and then try to reverse-engineer something useful myself.
The Practice of Reverse Engineering the Difficulty
I decided to compare the official FPL FDR with what the third-party analytics sites were saying. I pulled data from four different popular tracking sites over the last three seasons. I built a massive comparison table. I spent a Saturday afternoon copying, pasting, and highlighting data until my eyes burned.
This massive effort allowed me to uncover the underlying assumptions that seemed consistent across all ranking systems, including the official one, even if they wouldn’t admit it:
- Recent Form is King: If a team has scored 10 goals in their last three games, their opponent’s difficulty rating immediately jumps up, regardless of where they finished last season.
- Home/Away Multiplier: This is huge. A fixture rated 3 at home might instantly become a 4 or 5 away, especially if the stadium is notorious for being tough to visit.
- Historical Strength (The Baseline): They always start with the previous season’s league finish. Liverpool will generally always be a ‘harder’ fixture than Luton, even if Luton is on a momentary hot streak.
- Double Gameweeks are Chaos: When teams play twice, the second fixture rating always seemed slightly softer, probably just to make fixture planning easier for the manager.
It was like assembling a cheap IKEA bookshelf—the instructions were garbage, but eventually, you figure out where the pegs go through sheer trial and error.
The Real Meaning of the Colors: My Practical Application Record
After all that spreadsheet torture, I finally had a practical understanding of how to use the FDR, even without knowing the secret algorithm. It’s less about picking the perfect team and more about managing expectations based on the color grade. This is what I documented for myself, and this is what actually helped me climb the ranks:
FDR 1 & 2 (Bright Green & Light Green): Maximize Attacking Returns.
When I see these, I don’t care about clean sheets from my defenders. I bench my cheaper defenders and stack my midfield and forwards. This is the time to bank those double-digit hauls from premium attackers. If my defender gets an assist, great, but a clean sheet is a bonus, not the goal.
FDR 3 (Yellow): The Trap Game.
This is where managers lose points. An FDR 3 is usually a team that is mediocre but good at home, or a top team playing away against a solid mid-table side. My rule for FDR 3 is simple: Don’t take a risk on a cheap transfer here. If I have a defender with a 3, I expect 2 points and I’m happy with 6. It’s the ultimate “manage expectations” rating.
FDR 4 & 5 (Orange & Red): Bench, Bench, Bench.
This is where I stop being clever. If my cheap defender or my rotation option faces a 4 or 5, they go straight to the bench, no discussion. The only exceptions are premium defenders who are essentially playing as wingers anyway (the Trent Alexanders of the world). Clean sheets are basically impossible, so I am only looking for attacking returns or saving the inevitable minus points from conceding three goals.
The Takeaway: Don’t Just Look at the Square
The whole experience of trying to crack the official FPL FDR code taught me one crucial thing: the official rating is a starting point, not the gospel. I realized I was wasting time trying to find their secret numbers when I should have been spending that time building my own bespoke ranking based on current form and underlying metrics.
I still glance at the official colors, sure. But now, when I see a 2, I immediately cross-reference it with the opponent’s recent xG (Expected Goals) conceded data. If the xG data contradicts the 2, I ignore the official color. I spent hours trying to find a magical formula, and what I ended up with was just a better, more disciplined process for evaluating risk. And honestly, my rank jumped immediately after I started ignoring the official ratings and trusting the ugly spreadsheets I built myself.