Team Context and Form Don't Count
FDR is a bit sluggish in how it reflects future match-ups, because it can't account for what's happening from week to week or day to day, and that's often where games are won or lost as the season progresses. So, for instance, a sudden injury or a new signing might really tip the balance of a fixture in a totally different direction to what the FDR suggests.
That's where paying attention to live odds on platforms that let you bet on soccer makes sense. Bookmakers are constantly performing analysis and updating odds to reflect how things stand now, not how they looked at the start of the season.
Defence and Attacking Play Styles Get Obscured
The standard FPL FDR assigns a single blanket rating to each team. But a team can be defensively terrible while scoring heaps of goals, like 2023/24 Tottenham or Newcastle.
If you look strictly at the green FDR colour, you might bench a defender who is about to get shredded, or transfer out an attacker who is about to exploit a high defensive line. While getting into the weeds with other stats might not be your style, you'll thank yourself later.
Lucky Scheduling Gets Ignored
Managers might see a sea of green fixtures four weeks away and completely rejig their squads to target it, which introduces massive opportunity costs. Tearing up a team to buy players from a mediocre club with an easy schedule means you often dump highly in-form assets who can easily outscore the easy fixture players through sheer quality.
The better option is to take a breath and rethink a potentially ruinous strategy only fuelled by FDR. If the wider context shows that a team has just got lucky with scheduling, you'll have dodged a bullet.
Top Players Defy Simple Predictions
Over-indexing on FDR leads to overthinking the easiest decisions in the game. Elite assets like Erling Haaland or Mo Salah routinely haul in red fixtures because top teams create chances regardless of the opponent. Benching or selling premium assets based on colour-coded difficulty usually backfires.
While it's not sensible to completely dismiss fixture difficulty when you're an FPL manager, it's equally important to recognise the limits of this statistic's impact. You'll be able to identify top-level trends, but you'll also need to get stuck into other data points, like expected goals and team injury info, before you can confidently make any major changes.