MLS Fantasy Boss A Fantasy MLS Community
By: The Fantasy Therapist
Round 22 Big Questions – How should your relationship with the team you support in real life affect your FMLS game? Should it at all?
I am an avid LA Galaxy fan: have season tickets for 14 years in a row, go to every home game, watch every away game on TV, own lots of gear, served on LA Galaxy’s Fan Council last year, and on. Last year (2024) was my best MLS Fantasy ever. The LA Galaxy also won MLS Cup last year after a 10-year drought. Coincidence? Well, maybe but also maybe not entirely. Some of my LA Galaxy triple stacks paid off in spades in 2024.
Emotional attachments to a team are at the heart of sports fandom for most fans. Emotions also play a significant role in managing Fantasy MLS (FMLS) teams: the ecstasy from a differential pick that hits big, the relief when a clean sheet locks, the agony from watching a selected player miss a penalty, the fear of missing out on a big score when we fade a popular player, the dread memory of a player that failed us in a past week. There’s a reason why we retain a full-time Fantasy Therapist in the Fantasy Strategy Clinic! That said, real-world sports fandom and successful FMLS management – to be sure and above all – involve the rational functions of our pre-frontal cortex.
This week’s Fantasy Strategy Clinic focuses on how our real-life fandom impacts our decision-making in FMLS. The general consensus among the cognoscenti on the MLS Fantasy Boss Discord is that the net impact of real-life fandom (when not held in check by rational override of our emotions) is to the detriment of our FMLS scores. The pejorative term applied to that effect is “Homerism,” and critics of Discord comments that seem informed more by emotional fandom than good reasoning and good sense often place – to my never-ending amusement – a tiny Homer Simpson icon under said comments.
While I don’t entirely disagree with those critics, Homerism is a factor for many FMLS managers, and I do want to cautiously defend it in certain aspects and instances.
Five types of Homerism
Before evaluating influences of real-life fandom on FMLS squad management, it serves our discussion to identify and classify the specific ways Homerism manifests in Fantasy Soccer decision-making.
- Type 1 Homerism: Taking players from the favored team against prevailing wisdom or data
- Type 2 Homerism: Fading (ie not taking) players from opponents of the favored team against prevailing wisdom and data.
- Comment: the stated and in my opinion rather justifiable motivation here is “fun.” It’s fun to root for our team. It’s not fun – for some – to both want opponents’ players to do well for FMLS purposes while wanting them to fail for real-life purposes. This effect is particularly strong for me when I attend live games, in which part of the joy is sharing emotional states with the big community in the stadium. The mixed feelings can feel like shameful betrayal and may even feel isolating. I have evolved in my approach to my own Type 2 Homerism, which I describe later.
- Type 3 Homerism: “Reverse-Homerism” – Out of fear of Homer-bias, under-choosing players from one’s supported team or over-choosing opponents’ players.
- Type 4 Homerism: Choosing unusual differential players – typically on the favored team – based on relative “insider” knowledge. Example, on the whole midfielder Diego Fagundez of the LA Galaxy is an unlikely selection on FMLS squads. He is, however, a versatile player. Sometimes he starts and sometimes he comes off the bench. He can play as a winger, a false 9, a 10, an all-purpose midfielder, and even as a defensive oriented 8. If the stars align perfectly (eg he is starting, no other attacking central midfielder (eg Reus or Puig) is on the field, the usual wingers and 9 are starting, the opponents’ defense is bad, other MLS teams midfielders are absent/injured, etc) he could lurch into viability as a 10 who takes a lot of set pieces. It probably takes a dyed-in-the-wool Galaxy fan to actually identify all the factors that set up this rare event. If one did, that would typify Type 4 Homerism, in which a level of tactical awareness that generally resides only in very attentive fans “reveals” an unusual differential play.
- Type 5 Homerism: Using “Homer-knowledge” and insights in appraising matchups (or avoiding ambiguous ones). Here we come to the crux of one seeming contradiction in the Homerism debate: the same care and attention that leads to intense emotional attachment to the fortunes of the football team we support – and which can be blinding – also comes with detailed and even nuanced knowledge of how the team functions well when it does and how it fails when it doesn’t. This may induce the “Homer” FMLS manager to take or fade his supported team’s players or take or fade his supported team’s opposing players based on that knowledge.
Homerism: Therapeutic strategies in its management
I should put in no uncertain terms that Type I and Type II Homerism are almost by their definitions bad for your FMLS scores. Top players eschew these biases and try to weed them out of their game. As a simple thought experiment, if two managers have equal abilities at picking players, but one of them operates with a limited player-selection pool, over time the player with a bigger set of choices should win out. This is most dramatically the case for Type I Homerism. If every game one manager must pick one or more players from a certain team (and I am referring to the favored-in-real-life-team), it becomes quite a severe limitation. The need to avoid a certain team ie whoever is playing one’s favored team (or a hated rival ie Seattle fans who never take a Portland player and vice-versa), should have a smaller effect, and one that should have diminished as the number of teams in the MLS has grown. One modest argument in defense of Type II Homerism is that having one (or more but not a lot more) differential choices each week may be a way to break out from the pack, so that strategy could be married to an emotional policy of avoiding one team each week and looking elsewhere.
The most difficult situations in recent years for me as an “incha” of the LA Galaxy involves LAFC striker Denis Bouanga, when LAFC plays the LA Galaxy in the El Trafico derby matches. He is a frequently selected player and especially fancied in these historically high-scoring matches, often as a preferred captain choice (thank you Leo Messi for diminishing that!). Fading players who are natural or high effective ownership captain choices can be extremely dangerous. Until the last few years, I would simply never take players up against the LA Galaxy (classic Type 2 Homerism). More recently, I have changed my tune. I still decline to take Bouanga as my captain if LAFC are playing the LA Galaxy. However, if he is a consensus captain among my principal competitors and I take him uncaptained or better yet put him on my bench, I am relatively speaking “underowning” him in the sense of “effective ownership” discussed in detail in our earlier article on chalk and differentials. This makes it easy for me to “root against him” while hedging a little against the possibility of a monster performance.
The topic of Homerism was unwritable without consulting the Fantasy Therapist (the other frequent contributor to this series). The FT advocates a “fan of the league” approach to the game in general, especially when Managers move into the top echelons of the game. I don’t think his intent is to undermine passionate individual team supporters, and his emphasis on being a “fan of the league” has benefits beyond the control of toxic Homerism. Indeed, certain top players, including the current player in overall rank #1 (@Vurkes, aka Eli Redpath, our esteemed colleague and matchup-analyst) is a declared non-supporter of any team. No favorite team – no Homerism!
An importance defense against toxic Homerism or reverse-Homerism (i.e Type III) is to cultivate self-knowledge and suspect that bias may lead you astray. Share questionable lineups with a battle-buddy FMLS manager, posing the question specifically, “Am I wearing Homer goggles here?” Your best battle buddies ideally do not support the same team. This is the equivalent of the “Do I look fat in this outfit?” type of reality check and can help us avoid costly mistakes where our own objectivity is limited. Like the outfit question, you don’t want to ask someone who will simply tell you what you want to hear.
Investor Warren Buffett for decades avoided investments in technology industries. It’s not that he denied the potential to make money in them; he just felt like he didn’t understand their business models well and so couldn’t apply his analytic methods to them. Knowing what you know and knowing what you don’t know are powerful attributes in an FMLS Manager, and as the league has grown it’s harder to know about every team and so some matchups become hard to analyze. If there’s one team that most FMLS managers do know very well, it’s the one they eagerly support. That knowledge can help a manager evaluate her own team’s matchups and make decisions accordingly, ie Type 5 Homerism, which I think is the most defensible kind. Ashley Savage (@savageheart on Discord, She’s a Keeper in FMLS), the regular host of the MLSFI podcast is a particularly astute observer of the Seattle Sounders; I never disregard anything she says about them, and her analyses are just as likely to recommend against their players as for them. She is a clear-headed Type 5 Homer and for me makes the case for Type 5 Homerism as non-toxic, useful, and favorable.
Round 22 Homer Picks and Fades
Overall this LA Galaxy fan wants to warn you off the Houston-LA Galaxy game on Friday. The best Houston player – Jack McGlynn – doesn’t do as well against high-possession teams like the Galaxy. The Galaxy’s road form has been poor on the whole, but the general improvement in Galaxy goal production in recent games makes Houston clean sheets unlikely. Houston defenders with attacking upsides might be a consideration (eg Dorsey or Escobar) but there are better choices in other matchups.
LAFC is missing a lot of defenders this week, though they have what looks like a favorable matchup against Portland. How big will the impact of missing Aaron Long, Eddie Segura (red card against the LA Galaxy last week), and Sergi Palencia be? I don’t know! Ask a reliable Type 5 LAFC Homer on the Discord, one who knows what their depth defenders can do.
Avoid bad Homerism this week and every week if your goal is the highest score possible. That said, only you know what is fun for you. If picking players from your favorite team for your FMLS squad makes watching games more fun (and you don’t mind leaving some fantasy points on the table), knock yourself out! It is just a game, after all.
The “Fantasy Physician” is Ron Birnbaum, @Half Century City on Discord
The “Fantasy Therapist” is Mike Leister, @Kenobi on Discord
