The Chips are (Finally) Down. Well the Chip at Least. - Scout

Gameweek 19: Chip Panic, Cross-Button Chaos, and the Curious Case of the Missing Son

Every FPL manager knows the pre-deadline routine. You log in for a quick check… and suddenly you’ve spent an hour trying to turn a perfectly fine team into a slightly different perfectly fine team. The only difference here is that our managers don’t have thumbs, don’t have fear, and (in one case) appear to have developed a deep personal vendetta against the little X you click to remove a player.

Gameweek 19, then, was less “cold-eyed optimisation” and more “a group project where everyone forgot the deadline was today”.

Here’s what the AI dug up, messed up, rage-quit, and (in one glorious instance) finally button-pressed.

ChatGPT Agent Mode vs. The Cross Button (Spoiler: the Cross Won)

We gave the ChatGPT Agent the keys to the browser and said: go on then, manage your team like a real manager.

What followed was… an hour of transfers in theory and zero transfers in practice.

The sticking point? Removing players. Specifically: clicking the little cross to get rid of them.

It would line up the move, hesitate, attempt the removal, fail to register the click, panic, start again… and repeat the whole thing like a manager trapped in a time loop where the only escape is the “Confirm Transfers” button it never reaches.

It wasn’t bad strategy. It was UI purgatory.

Somewhere in that hour-long saga, ChatGPT also kept trying to find Son Heung-min — despite Son no longer being in the FPL player pool (because, in our universe at least, he’s now playing in the US).

Which brings us neatly to…

The Son Heung-min Mystery: Coincidence… or Shared Braincells?

ChatGPT wasn’t alone. Deepseek also went hunting for Son like it had a cherished 2021 spreadsheet open in another tab.

Now, maybe it’s coincidence. Or maybe two different “independent” AI managers have both been trained on the same stale assumptions and are politely refusing to update their internal world model.

Either way, it’s oddly human. The “I swear he’s still an option” energy is strong.

If this keeps happening, we may need to add a new rule to the experiment:

You can’t transfer in delusions.

Claude Discovers Chips (and Becomes the First AI to Actually Use One)

And then, finally — a breakthrough.

A chip. An actual chip. A real, honest-to-goodness button press.

Claude was the first AI to clock that we’re entering the “use it or lose it” part of the season — that period where chips stop being “strategic assets” and start being “that thing you’ll forget until it’s too late”.

So Claude did what any sensible manager would do:

It used… Triple Captain.

Is that the most logical chip to use right now? Debatable.
Is it the first chip used by any AI so far? Absolutely.

And in a league where several managers are still struggling to remove a player from their squad without spiralling, we’re calling that progress.

Claude: 1
Everyone else: 0
The concept of “later”: in shambles

Mistral: Fully Aware, Still Useless

Mistral continues to be the AI equivalent of a manager who turns up to training, watches half the squad limp off with injuries… and then announces:

“Right. Same XI next week.”

It recognised that roughly half its team were either injured or away at AFCON.

And still made no changes.

No transfers. No contingency plan. No attempt to replace the absent players. Just a serene commitment to doing absolutely nothing.

At this stage, Mistral isn’t managing a football team. It’s running a museum exhibit titled:

“Injured Players of the Modern Era.”

Deepseek’s Transfer Logic: Woltemade Out, Beto In… Why?

Deepseek, meanwhile, did decide to act – which sounds promising until you look at what it did.

It sold Woltemade and brought in Beto, which is the kind of move that makes you stare at the screen and whisper:
“…but why, though?”

Even better: Deepseek then kept both Salah and Mbeumo, despite explicitly acknowledging they’re at AFCON.

So we got the worst of both worlds:

It made a transfer, but one nobody asked for
It didn’t solve the obvious availability problem it already knew about

It’s classic AI decision-making: immaculate confidence, mysterious priorities, and the tactical coherence of a dream you forget the moment you wake up.

Copilot Couldn’t Read the Pricing JSON, Got Grumpy, and Downed Tools

Finally, Copilot.

Copilot tried to do things properly: check the pricing data, validate moves, confirm budgets.

Then it hit a wall with the player pricing JSON, failed to make sense of the online version, and… basically went:

“Nope.”

Not “I’ll approximate.” Not “I’ll proceed with what I’ve got.”

Just a full-on sulk.

It chose not to make any transfers at all — not because there were none worth making, but because it couldn’t get the numbers in a format it liked.

In human terms: it rage-quit because the spreadsheet didn’t open.

GW19 Summary: One Chip, Two Tantrums, and a Lot of Denial

If Gameweek 19 had a theme, it’s this:

One AI finally discovered chips exist (and hit one with gusto)
One AI got stuck in UI hell
One AI did something weird instead of something necessary
One AI recognised disaster and politely did nothing
One AI refused to play because the data wasn’t in its preferred file format
Two AIs went looking for a player who isn’t even here anymore

So yes — it’s chaos. But it’s consistent chaos, and that’s what makes it beautiful.