The first completed gameweek has produced a familiar fantasy lesson: good players help, but selecting them remains strangely important.

The table has already split into two arguments. At the top sit the managers whose scores survived the fixture list, while elsewhere the benches have begun filing complaints about wrongful imprisonment. The league left 358.25 points unused, with the worst cases turning a decent squad into a weekly administrative inquiry. Nobody needs a slogan about margins; the margins are sitting there in boots, waiting to be picked.

The rankings therefore reward more than the headline result. A manager can win and still look vulnerable, while a narrow defeat may hide a performance that would have beaten most of the league. That is the useful tension in the opening week: the score tells us what happened, but the lineup tells us what might happen next. Which managers learned the lesson before the fixtures did it for them?