Having your mutually beneficial trade proposals turned down flat because the other side believes the world is a zero sum game sure is…a relevant lesson in the live environment.

The best auction leagues allow for weekly waivers and free agency, so there’s much more ongoing decision-making than is optimal under the one-transfer-per-week regime. (The demands of being on top of this, combined with us all being on the wrong side of the age curve, were among the things that made us decide it was time to call it a day for TWFC.)

I'm retired, rip.

I played the official FPL for years unseriously, and then started a draft league (the Theo Walcott Fan Club) with friends, before turning it into an auction league. I highly recommend getting yourself in an auction league if you aren't already. (Draft leagues are also way better than official FPL, because each player can only be owned by one manager; auctions are the pinnacle of the game.)

Fantasy auctions are about the most fun you can have (tonight, I am Billy Beane!), and about the best way to practice rigorous analytical thinking (cost-effectiveness! Ever-changing counterfactuals! Emotional attachment to my own public predictions!). Some might dread to think how many hours I spent building and refining my player pricing model over the 9 years TWFC existed. But I don't regret them: I carry the lessons I learned with me every day, and they're one of the main sources of inspiration for my new Blog with No Name (working title). There will be blogs about this! Like and subscribe!

Maybe blogging will get me back in the game..

Legend. Love that you went for it! Looking forward to learning why I was wrong to ignore The Franchise Universes..

Peak Andy. Applying discount rates to pledge shortfalls is delightful on so many levels. Thanks for writing this!

I might just take my own footnote idea seriously and start writing a sports blog for impact reasons, and because you only live once.

We can have all sorts of fun learning from sporting rigour and the glory of randomness. Sporting competitions and complex collaborations. Sporting politics and power structures. Sporting regulations and unwritten rules. Sporting incentives and ingenious-to-idiotic strategies.

You can get ahead of the curve by subscribing here, if you’d enjoy reading headlines like these ones I just found on the back of an old envelope:

You don’t have to stick to your picks

Solving the most pressing problems starts with updating your preseason predictions

Kicking the ball in the goal is not what makes goalscorers great

From shot selection to cause prioritization

The referees are not the problem

Regulating AI is the handball rule and the offside rule in a trenchcoat

You’re right that CEA (including EA Funds) is the last project remaining within EV.

We are spinning out to build an entity structure optimized for an independent CEA. Among the lessons we learned from the EV experience were that entity structures and associated regulatory requirements can be complex, especially when operating in multiple jurisdictions, and that getting our structure right matters in many ways. To take one example: the EV structure requires two CEOs (in the US and the UK), whereas our new CEA structure will require only one.

CEA grew the number of people engaging with our programs in 2025 by 20–25% year-over-year, beating our targets of 7.5–10% without increasing spending, and reversing the moderate decreases in engagement with our programs during 2023–24.

We were joined in January by two new Directors: Loic Watine, who will lead EA Funds, and Rory Fenton, who will lead our new Strategy and M&E function.

You can read our full 2025 progress report here.

“Chief of Staff” models from a long-time Chief of Staff

I have served in Chief of Staff or CoS-like roles to three leaders of CEA (Zach, Ben and Max), and before joining CEA I was CoS to a member of the UK House of Lords. I wrote up some quick notes on how I think about such roles for some colleagues, and one of them suggested they might be useful to other Forum readers. So here you go:

Chief of Staff means many things to different people in different contexts, but the core of it in my mind is that many executive roles are too big to be done by one person (even allowing for a wider Executive or Leadership team, delegation to department leads, etc). Having (some parts of) the role split/shared between the principal and at least one other person increases the capacity and continuity of the exec function.

Broadly, I think of there being two ways to divide up these responsibilities (using CEO and CoS as stand-ins, but the same applies to other principal/deputy duos regardless of titles):

1. Split the CEO's role into component parts and assign responsibility for each part to CEO or CoS
   1. Example: CEO does fundraising; CoS does budgets
   2. Advantages: focus, accountability
2. Share the CEO's role with both CEO and CoS actively involved in each component part
   1. Example: CEO speaks to funders based on materials prepared by CoS; CEO assigns team budget allocations which are implemented by CoS
   2. Advantages: flex capacity, gatekeeping

Some things to note about these approaches:

• In practice, it’s inevitably some combination of the two, but I think it’s really important to be intentional and explicit about what’s being split and what’s being shared
  • Failure to do this causes confusion, dropped balls, and duplication of effort
  • Sharing is especially valuable during the early phases of your collaboration because it facilitates context-swapping and model-building
  • I don’t think you’d ever want to get all the way or too far towards split, because then you functionally have one more department-lead-equivalent, and you lose a lot of the benefits in terms of flex capacity and especially continuity
• Both approaches depend on trust, and maximising them depends on an unusually high degree of trust
  • CEO trusting CoS to act on their behalf
    • In turn, this depends on trusting their judgement, and in particular trusting their judgement of when it’s appropriate to act unilaterally and when it’s appropriate to get input/approval from CEO
  • Others trusting that CoS is empowered to and capable of acting on CEO’s behalf
    • Doesn’t work if CEO and CoS disagree or undermine each other’s decisions in view of others, or if others expect CoS decisions to be overturned by CEO
    • It being easier to burn credibility than to build it is something close to an iron law, which means CoS should tread carefully while establishing the bounds of their delegated authority
• It’s not a seniority thing: an Executive Assistant having responsibility for scheduling is an example of splitting the role; a Managing Director doing copyedits for the CEO’s op-ed is an example of sharing the role
• I don’t think the title “CoS” matters, but I do think maximising the benefits of both models requires the deputy to have a title that conveys that they both represent and can act unilaterally on behalf of the principal to some meaningful degree
  • Managing Director and Chief of Staff do this; Project Manager and Exec Assistant do not

Congratulations on developing and launching this new strategy!

I'm Chief of Staff at CEA, and as we wrote in our own recently-published strategy post, we're making diversifying EA funding a central part of our efforts to steward the community in the coming years, and I'm excited about us exploring more ways to collaborate on making pledges a big piece of that puzzle.

Staff costs are a relatively small proportion of our total spending, but the proportion increased in 2024 compared to 2023 (28% vs 21%).

Between 2021 and 2023, our total spending increased by 264% (from $6.9m to $25.1m), while our headcount increased only 40% (from 24 to 34), which meant we had insufficient capacity to improve the quality and cost-effectiveness of our programs. This informed our decision to make foundation-building our organizational priority in 2024, including both investing in hiring to increase our capacity and cutting non-staff costs, with the majority of savings (per Ollie's comment) being contributed by lower spending on events, especially EAG.