How social media sleuths used fantasy football clues to leak Chelsea team news - The Independent
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On arrival at Stamford Bridge last Saturday, a couple of hours before Chelsea’s 5.30pm kick-off against Tottenham, murmurs of a significant injury were already spreading around the press room.
Chelsea’s official channels were not revealing any team news, but on social media, the pieces of the puzzle were coming together. At 10am, a fantasy football expert under the name FPL Joe had tweeted a graph based on betting markets that showed Chelsea’s projected goals had plummeted from 2.06 the previous day to 1.84 on the morning of the game.
Odds markets can be volatile and swings are not always evidence of team changes, but they can hint at something. “Last year we had a couple of instances where we noticed particularly Manchester City, their projected goals were dropping quite sharply before games,” FPL Joe, a software engineer in his day job, tells The Independent. “That, we would infer, turned out to be as a result of Haaland and similar high-impact players having been benched. I could tell that there was data reacting to real things that were happening in the world.”
An account called “Team news and ticks” is well known for its reliable leaks, and at 1.45pm it posted: “Some massive assets [players] missing in multiple games today,” in a direct call to the Fantasy Premier League community. Given there were only three more games that day, and Chelsea were the most popular team for fantasy managers, it raised the possibility of an absence among their supreme front three: Cole Palmer, Morgan Rogers and Joao Pedro.
Meanwhile, FPL Joe had been digging. A tool called FPL Bot allows anyone to search the 11 million fantasy teams and their managers, which is publicly available information. “It starts with a list,” says Joe. “In my case, it took a bit of time. It’s just doing the research to work out which staff, which players, which family members are most likely candidates for people who might have an FPL account.”
At 2.30pm, he posted a diagram analysing the fantasy football teams of several people with links to the Chelsea dressing room, and the changes they had made to their fantasy teams before Friday night’s deadline. It suggested one of Chelsea’s staff had benched Joao Pedro, an odd move with one of the top-scoring fantasy players so far this season.
Another X user spotted that a Chelsea employee had apparently transferred the striker out of their team. Another suggested a family member of Morgan Rogers appeared to have sold Joao Pedro and replaced him with Aston Villa’s Nicolas Jackson – an inspired move before Jackson’s two-goal haul against Manchester City earlier in the day.
Joao Pedro was not spotted in pictures of Chelsea players boarding the team bus, and sure enough, the Brazilian was missing from Xabi Alonso’s squad when the teams were officially announced at 4.15pm. Chelsea did not want to comment on the possible leak, and Tottenham did not comment when asked whether the club were aware of developments on social media.
At this point it is probably fair to ask whether any of this really matters. If Spurs had found out a little early that Joao Pedro wasn’t playing, would Roberto De Zerbi have made any major adjustments to his gameplan? He might even have anticipated Danny Welbeck starting the game, only to discover it was Rogers leading the line beside Portuguese teenager Geovany Quenda, a surprise inclusion on the left of the front three. It didn’t prove a particularly successful move by Alonso and Quenda was replaced in the second half.
Then again, had the game been on Sunday or even Monday night, Tottenham would have had plenty of time to learn of the rumours and prepare for Chelsea’s possible line-ups. You suspect that scenario would not have pleased Alonso, who is highly secretive when it comes to team news, to the point where journalists who regularly cover the club can find themselves with very little to write about after pre-match press conferences. Alonso even refused to reveal Joao Pedro’s injury ahead of playing Brentford in September, before the last international break, despite the forward having already been ruled out by Brazil.
After Tottenham’s 2-0 victory, the Chelsea manager was asked whether he was bothered by the inadvertent leak from inside the club. “I am not into the fantasy team thing, so I didn’t know that,” Alonso replied.
It is not unusual for Premier League team news to slip out on social media, particularly in the fantasy football community, where knowledge is power. Five years ago, the FPL’s weekly transfer deadline was moved back by half an hour to combat leaks which were giving an unfair advantage to those fantasy managers glued to the right social media accounts in the minutes before the deadline fell.
The situation came to a head at Aston Villa during the 2020/21 season when an account called FPL Insider posted that five people inside the Villa dressing room, including some first-team players and a club physio, had transferred Jack Grealish out of their fantasy teams.
The news surfaced on social media more than 24 hours before kick-off in a Premier League match against Leicester City, and Leicester manager Brendan Rodgers admitted he had learnt about the reports of Grealish’s injury well ahead of the game. His Villa counterpart, Dean Smith, was unimpressed.
“I’ve been made aware that on social media there’d been rumours that he wasn’t going to play,” Smith said. “If it’s coming out of our training ground then I will find out where that’s coming from and reprimand where it’s coming from. It’s something I wouldn’t be happy with and we’ll get to the bottom of it.”
For online sleuths like FPL Joe, bringing confidential information to the attention of fellow fantasy football enthusiasts helps to build a following on social media, giving their readers an “edge” on the rest.
“A lot of [professional footballers] use pseudonyms now, or just nicknames, or something deliberately to obscure the fact that they’re playing FPL,” Joe says. “But most staff members don’t, and most family members don’t, because they wouldn’t expect there’s going to be anyone who’s insane enough to want to follow their account.
“Most people I don’t think are aware that you can go and look at this. It’s entirely public. It is obviously made clear in your terms of service. But it’s different between knowing that your mates can go and check on how well you’re doing in the game, versus knowing that anyone who’s so inclined can potentially go and do it.”
Joe says he regrets putting the names of some Chelsea employees into the public domain during his research into Joao Pedro’s status, and would keep them anonymous in future, or remove people entirely from his research if they requested he do so.
He has built a website full of FPL insights to aid fantasy managers, mostly based on market odds. “Watching the odds week on week, and then actually watching the lines move minute by minute, can be really interesting, because you can almost pinpoint the moment at which the markets react to some kind of information. It’s really fascinating.”
But he stresses it is far from an exact science. “It’s a signal, it’s an indication, and if you’re willing to factor it into your decision making, it can be a really powerful tool. But if you rely solely on it, it’s going to lead to you messing up too many times.”
Villa players and staff were banned from playing fantasy football as a result of the Grealish incident. Several clubs around the Premier League brought in their own rules, with some also banning employees from playing FPL, and others, such as Fulham, simply advising players not to select themselves or their teammates in their fantasy teams.
There is no indication that Alonso is planning to follow Smith’s hardline stance and ban fantasy football from Chelsea’s training ground. But after a week in which the manager’s secretive bubble was seemingly breached, staff at Cobham might be taking a little more care ahead of Saturday’s Premier League game against Manchester United.
