Guide · 6 min read
How the FPL Rivals verdict is decided
The Rivalry Report ends with a winner. This is how it gets there: seven categories, what each one measures, how they're weighed, and how to argue with the result if you disagree with it.
The idea
Two managers, one season of official game data, and a question: who's actually better? Total points answers part of it, but a mini-league argument is never just about the total. It's about who called the captain right, who wasted a Bench Boost, who took twelve hits in October, who benched a hat-trick. The report measures each of those separately, shows the evidence, then combines them into a verdict with a score for each side.
Everything comes from the official game. The site doesn't estimate what a manager might have done; it reads what they did, gameweek by gameweek, and does the arithmetic.
1. Overall points
The season total for each manager, and their overall rank in the game. This is the heaviest category, because it's the one that pays out: whoever has more points wins the league. Alongside the raw total, the report looks at consistency, meaning how much each manager's weekly scores bounce around, and at checkpoints through the season, so a manager who's been ahead at most stages isn't treated the same as one who nosed in front last week.
How to read it: the gap matters more than the order. A 4-point lead after 30 gameweeks is noise; a 60-point lead is a season.
2. Head-to-head gameweek record
Every gameweek is scored as a match between the two managers: higher score wins, equal scores draw. The record, say 14 wins, 3 draws and 9 losses, is a different thing from the points gap and often tells a different story. A manager can trail on total points while leading the head-to-head, if the deficit came from two enormous weeks by the rival and the rest of the season was a steady grind of narrow wins.
How to read it: a lopsided record with a close points gap means one manager is consistently slightly better and the other has had a couple of big weeks. A close record with a big points gap means the leader's edge is all in a few gameweeks, which is more fragile than it looks.
3. Captaincy returns
Two measurements. First, how often each manager's captain was the best pick available in their own starting eleven that week. That's the fair test, because it only asks whether you chose well from the players you had. Second, the points left on the table when the captain wasn't the best choice: the gap between what the armband returned and what the best available option would have.
How to read it: a manager who's right 35% of the time and rarely misses by much is making good decisions. A manager at 25% who has missed by 40 points over the season has been guessing. Captaincy: the maths behind the armband explains why this category is worth as much as an extra player over a season.
4. Chip usage
For each chip a manager has played, what it actually returned: the bench points a Bench Boost added, the extra captain score from a Triple Captain, how a Free Hit or Wildcard week compared with the weeks around it. Alongside that, the report counts what each manager has left. The verdict treats unused chips as an asset rather than a failure, up to a point: a first-half chip that reaches gameweek 19 unused is simply lost.
How to read it: total chip return is the headline, but timing is the skill. A Bench Boost that scored 9 in an ordinary week and one that scored 24 in a double are both "used"; only one was played well. Every FPL chip explained has the windows.
5. Transfer efficiency
The points each manager has paid in hits across the season, and how disciplined they've been with free transfers. Every hit is 4 points that the incoming player has to earn back over the outgoing one before the transfer has helped at all. The report totals them so the cost is visible.
How to read it: hits aren't automatically bad. A manager who took 20 points of hits and gained 45 from them has played well. But a manager who's taken 48 points of hits has spent nearly a full gameweek's score on impatience, and needs to show what it bought. Free transfers, rolling them, and when a hit pays has the arithmetic.
6. Bench points
The points scored by players left on the bench, across all four bench slots and every gameweek. Everyone quotes this number at each other, and rightly: it's the clearest measure of selection mistakes. This one sits alongside the verdict rather than inside it: the report shows the bench total and the weeks that hurt, but the weighted score below is built from the other categories. A high bench total means the manager keeps picking the wrong eleven from a good fifteen.
How to read it: compare it with the total available. A manager with 90 bench points on a 1,900 total has left just under 5% of their available points off the pitch; the same 90 against 1,500 is more damning. The report also picks out the specific weeks, the benched hat-trick or the 15-point substitute, because those are the ones the group chat remembers.
7. Rank trajectory
Where each manager's overall rank has been through the season, not just where it is: start, peak, low point, and the direction of the line over the last few gameweeks. Recent form gets its own weight, so a manager who has out-scored their rival in seven of the last eight gameweeks is credited for it even if the season total hasn't caught up yet.
How to read it: trajectory tells you what's about to happen; total points tells you what already has. If the two disagree, trust the trajectory a little more than you'd like to. Overall rank explained covers why rank moves the way it does.
The verdict
Each category produces a margin between the two managers, scaled so a big lead in one category counts for more than a marginal one. The categories are then weighted, with season output the heaviest, then form, head-to-head and captaincy, then chips, transfers and consistency, and summed into a score for each side. The verdict names the winner, states how decisive it is, and lists the categories that drove it, so you can see whether it was a landslide on points or a narrow call decided by captaincy and chips.
It is deliberately not a simple count of categories won. A manager who wins four categories by a hair and loses three by a mile has had the worse season, and the report says so.
Arguing with it
If the verdict goes against you, find the category where the margin was decided and ask whether it was luck or judgement. A captaincy record built on one 20-point week is luck; a head-to-head record of 15 wins to 5 is not. Before the season starts, or before any gameweek has finished, the head-to-head, captaincy and chip categories have no data, and the verdict says so rather than inventing one.
Run a report on the rivalry you most want settled.