Fantasy Premier League 19/20: 10 Season-Defining Moments
A look back over the key moments of a Fantasy Premier League season unlike any other.
Fantasy Football is growing in popularity year-on-year, and the art of picking eleven players to do your bidding each week can bring great excitement to even the dullest 0-0 fixture.
Fantasy Premier League has become a truly global phenomenon too, with more than seven million teams being entered last season from all over the world.
There was - prior to lockdown of course - little sweeter than rocking up to the office on a Monday morning and debating the highs and lows of the weekend's fantasy football exploits with your colleagues.
The 2019/20 Fantasy Football season had been a rollercoaster ride with more troughs than peaks for many even before 20 March rolled around.
What had already been a topsy-turvy season suddenly ground to a halt as the pandemic saw daily life change dramatically, and we all became more isolated than Romelu Lukaku playing up front for Manchester United.
But either side of all this madness, there was a weird and wonderful season of our beloved Fantasy Football to bring us joy and despair.
From key players and crazy results to shock injuries and cruel luck, these are the 10 season-defining moments of the Fantasy Premier League 2019/20.
10. Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang's Double Gameweek Nightmare
2019/20 will be remembered as a bit of a troll of a season for many. You would make seemingly sensible moves, just for everything to go pear-shaped.
In fact it says a lot about this season that Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang’s Gameweek 29 isn’t even the worst Double Gameweek nightmare on this list.
The striker actually had a superb season for Arsenal – but from a Fantasy Football perspective it was sometimes difficult to predict just when those hauls would come.
This particular moment was just at the beginning of the UK coronavirus outbreak when the footballing landscape changed drastically within a few days.
Fantasy managers went into Gameweek 29 with a rather sudden Double Gameweek on their hands, as the Manchester City vs. Arsenal game which had been rescheduled due to City’s involvement in the League Cup Final was slotted in midweek.
FPL players across the land saw that the premium-priced Gabonese frontman had notched three goals in his last two games, and he was brought in by 670,000 managers.
Of course, in the game at home to West Ham he blanked big time, Arsenal somehow scraping a 1-0 with Aubameyang a peripheral figure for much of the game and walking away with two fantasy points.
Aubameyang’s owners desperately hoped that he could somehow turn it around away to Manchester City – only for that game to become the first Premier League fixture cancelled due to the coronavirus outbreak.