FPLHINTS Magazine (Edition 1)

BY FANS - FOR FANS

June/July 2021

Issue #1

FPlHINTS Magazine @FPLHINTS @FantasyGaffer @MattyhFPL @FantasyYIRMA @JackGoodwin

Pre-GW1 planning + more!

Edited by Ash, FPLHINTS | Designed by Jack Goodwin

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A Message From The Chief

@OLApeder

How I ALMOST WON FPL

7

@fplhints

Many thought it couldn’t be done. So, I went ahead and did it anyway!

13

@fantasyGaffer

Greetings and welcome to the first ever edition of FPLHINTS Magazine!

19

@Calleditfpl

23

@MattyH FPL

35

@FPL_Fly

39

@JackGoodwin

41

@Fantasyyirma

44

@fplbaldeagle24

48

Fixture Difficulty & Rotation Sequences

50

Word Search

Getting my mojo back Planning, Thinkering & Tinkering Treating Crypto like FPL Statisfaction - Promoted Teams no such thing as an fpl expert September 1999 in fpl Running away from fpl Consistently finishing in the top 10K of FPL

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EDITOR WRITERS DESIGNER ADVERTISING

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@FPLHINTS @OlaPeder | @FantasyGaffer | @CalledItFPL @MattyhFPL | @FPL_Fly | @FantasyYirma @FPLBaldEagle24 | @JackGoodwin @JackGoodwin Perfect Picks App ISSUE 001

With the 10-year anniversary of FPLHINTS fast approaching it kind of made sense to rethink, rebrand and try something new. For all intents and purposes this is effectively a good old 3 fashioned fantasy football fanzine, by fans – for fans. I’m still in the process of working out how many foreseeable editions there will be and how often it will be published, but in all likelihood, I will endeavor to have releases for strategic time periods. This new digital magazine will always contain top end content from fantasy football fanatics, with diversity of thought being paramount. Moreover, this first edition is completely free. So long as we have a sponsor, you won’t ever have to pay a penny for any future releases of this magazine. Bringing this idea to fruition wouldn’t have been possible without the backing of Perfect Picks and Jack Goodwin’s designs. In addition, a special thanks to the unique collective of writers who have also made the magazine what it is. As you will soon find out they are a pluralistic bunch with their own authentic voices, and they will hopefully add value to your content consumption. Here’s to a new kind of thinking to get you going during pre-season and beyond!

Ash, Chief Editor @ FPLHINTS Magazine

June/July 2021

FPLHINTS Magazine is an unofficial e-magazine for fantasy football managers and is not affiliated in any way with the official FPL game. In addition, the opinions expressed within this magazine are solely those held by each author. Constant care is made to ensure that content is accurate on the date of publication and content is published in good faith. Finally, please note, within this e-magazine you might find links to websites, third-party content and advertising.

OLA HOVDE: The Interview

HOW I ALMOST WON FPL @OlaPeder

"It's no longer a case of if we see a Norwegian FPL champion, but when"

- Ash, @FPLHINTS, Fantasy Football Monthly (February 2019)

Last season, Ola spent a staggering 36 Gameweeks ranked within the Top 100 of FPL during which he was virtually the undisputed World Number One for almost every week from Gameweek 10 to 37.

This meant he remarkably only had nine green arrows from September to May. In the end, Ola narrowly missed out on the coveted crown. As a small consolation, he did however win one of the longest running and largest mini-leagues by topping the FPLHINTS classic league and kindly donated his prize to Save The Children.

I caught up with him for his thoughts and takeaways on how he came so close to winning FPL.

Ash: Before September last year, your best overall rank was 1.63M. So, no doubt you must still be delighted at making such a massive leap and finishing 10th?

Ola: I am very happy with how my overall season went and delighted to finish 10th out of 8 million managers! But since I was so close to finishing first, I would´ve hoped to have won it. It's an opportunity that most likely only comes once. However, finishing 10th still won me most of my mini leagues, and most importantly I won against all my friends!

Ash: Your start to 20/21 was impeccable and helped you from the get-go. Did you have an approach or strategy in mind before Gameweek 1?

Ola: I started making my squad as I usually would and spent a lot of time before the first deadline. I didn't have a special strategy before the season, all I knew was that I was not bringing in Aubameyang. I pretty much played the game with one thing in mind, which was to win the mini league with my friends. I never thought that finishing in the top 10 was even a possibility.

Ash: When you broke into the Top 100 as early as Gameweek 2, did you think it would last? And did you have some sort of game plan to build from there?

Ola: When I broke into the top 100, I knew that I had to start using a lot more time on researching FPL, and spent many hours each day watching YouTube, scrolling through Twitter, and researching players' statistics all over the internet.

I gradually had way more knowledge about FPL and Premier League than ever before and think this is what made it such a successful season for me. I didn't have a specific game plan except to just play my game and not worry about EO and the other managers in the top 100.

I knew that it was extremely early in the season, and that there were over 2000 more points to gain before the season was over. Therefore, I didn't really bother to think about finishing in the top 100, although I knew that I had a spectacular start which gave me something to build on.

Ash: You became World Number One by Gameweek 10. From that point onwards did your mindset change in any way?

Ola: When I became number one in the world, I knew that I had a real chance of winning the whole thing. I think I was ahead by almost 20 points or so the first gameweek I was ranked number one and knew that this was my chance to gain a lead. I gained a huge lead after this and was 63 points ahead of second place at one point. So, my plan was working perfectly, which was to just think about my team and not EO and such.

Eventually this came back to bite me, especially with Gündoğan’s form in the middle of the season.

Ash: Did you feel invincible being ranked World Number One for so long in FPL? Or did you feel pressure to constantly maintain your lead?

Ola: There were lots of times where everything just went my way, and those times I felt like no one could catch up. I still knew that even with a 50-point lead down to second place can disappear in 2 Gameweeks as all it takes is one manager in the top 10 to get a big score.

Therefore, I felt like I had to increase my lead as much as possible. I would say the pressure was high every Gameweek.

Ash: I also noticed that you only took one hit between Gameweek 1 to 18, which ultimately worked wonders for you. Was there ever a temptation to make more transfers during that period?

Ola: When I decided to make transfers, I always looked at what I could do with the number of Free Transfers (FTs) that I had. I personally don't like taking hits, unless it is absolutely necessary, since you must make up 4 points to break even, which can be risky.

I´m also a huge fan of saving a FT, especially last season. It's like a safe card if my players are ruled out for the next Gameweek. There was never a big temptation to take a hit, because I liked to play it safe.

Ash: As your lead gradually ebbed away in the final Gameweeks, did you modify your thinking or game plan in any way?

Ola: I tried to play more aggressively and started taking more risks. For example, playing without Kane or Bruno, and I also tried to attack the fixtures by taking hits. The gap between first and tenth was extremely small, so I wanted to have a “differential” team, which in the end didn’t work out. I also made more decisions based on what players my opponents had, yet my captain Mo Salah was always there.

Ash: Looking back, if there was one thing different that you could do, what would it be?

Ola: There's one thing I could've done that would probably have made me the winner of FPL 20/21 - transferring in Gündoğan when he was on a super streak.

I was probably too stubborn to jump on the big scorer and wanted to gain a bigger lead by picking Bernardo Silva. With hindsight I should´ve just played safe by picking Gündoğan. I still know that to win FPL you must take risks, and this particular risk just didn't pay off.

Ash: Also, what's your initial thinking for the 21/22 season? Are there any players or teams that you've got your eyes on?

Ola: I currently haven't thought much about next season. I had to have a break after an insane 20/21.

Nevertheless, I have always got my eyes on Salah and Trent-Alexander Arnold. The key for me is to get ahead of others on cheap and not so popular players - for example Bamford and Dallas during last season.

I´m keeping an eye on the summer transfers, but I think teams like Aston Villa, Leeds and Norwich could have some high scoring players. Also, no one season is the same, so to be a good FPL manager you have to adapt quickly to every season.

Ash: What one piece of advice would you give to FPL managers that haven't had a Top 1% overall rank previously but want to improve?

Ola: The biggest tip I can give is to use more time looking at FPL content be it on YouTube, Twitter or other platforms.

I have found that just scrolling down the Twitter feed and reading everyone's tweets is of benefit to me. There's so many people who post great information and stats, and you can use this to make an educated decision.

Also following people like Ben Crellin, who predicts when the rescheduled games will be played. And of course, watching games also helps massively, because statistics can´t cover everything and the eye test is just as important!

Ash: Finally, I have to ask you this, why are Norwegians so good at FPL? Ola: Honestly, it has to be because most of the Norwegian football fans watch the Premier League, it's way more popular than the Norwegian league, Eliteserien.

I think a lot of the Norwegian FPL managers play the game seriously, and there are probably fewer casuals in comparison to other countries. There's also a lot of FPL coverage in the Norwegian media, including videos, news articles and multiple podcasts. I also think it Is very normal to have a mini league with friends, family or coworkers where the winner gets some sort of prize.

Ash: Ola, thank you so much for your time. It was a privilege speaking to you and learning more about your fantastic adventure over the past year. What you did will not be forgotten. I wish you all the best for next season and I'd also like to thank you for your generosity.

By Ash FPLHINTS

THE BENCHMARK BEFORE THE DECLINE

As I embraced the FPL Twitter community, I realised that there were different types of FPL managers with different types of philosophies – Prior to May 2021, the last and only time I finished inside the Top 5K in FPL was during Man the best of which would consistently finish in Top 10k almost every season.

City’s first title winning season in the Premier League.

While still maintaining Top 1% finishes for a prolonged period of time in the subsequent Back then, I started Gameweek 38 ranked 73rd seasons, my overall rank was slowly declining. in the world. Top 50 was in sight. This platform was achieved with a risk taking and cavalier mind-set. Aguero, who had been a sensation in his debut Premier League season, was my captain.

What could go wrong? However, that day didn’t yield many fantasy football returns for me, and my transfers failed spectacularly. It wasn’t going as expected until deep into injury time when Man City’s Argentinian talisman scored the historic goal that won them the Premier League.

I finished 110th overall and I knew back then I would never finish higher.

What I didn’t anticipate was how gradually my overall rank would fall over the following years.

This was due to the limitations of my own strategies at that time, misjudged risks, the popularisation of analytics which made managers make more informed decisions and a growing influx of managers which seemingly made it harder to finish in the top echelons consistently every year.

I knew even then that I wasn’t an expert, just an addict that wanted to do well.

Was it too much to ask? All the while trends were beginning to emerge which showed how the very best managers played the game which began to influence my own thinking even if this wasn’t reflected in the patterns of my overall rank.

CAPTAIN EO / CAPTAIN OBVIOUS Even the most novice of managers will know that ownership is important. Not having a high owned player during a week in which they do exceptionally well will almost always result in a red arrow.

But there’s so much more to this in the form of effective ownership which becomes apparent after the Gameweek deadline and once the game has updated. This concept factors in percentage calculations based on benching's as well as captaincy by each ranking tier.

It was this latter point that really got me thinking when I played VirtualFPL during the summer of 2020. I came to realise that it simply isn’t worth the risk to take a punt on a captaincy unless you were desperately chasing or had nothing to lose.

The captaincy should be the safest option so that your rank has some basic protection. Yes, that sounds boring. But when you look at it, that’s how the consistently best managers in the world generally play it.

Captaincy polls usually provide an indication of this in the form of the obvious pick. So, to put this into perspective, for a large part of last season, I couldn’t stomach having an out of form Mané as a punt captain compared to Salah.

This would have been even worse if he ended up having an EO of 0.5% and Salah had an EO of 156% for a given Gameweek. Could you be content with that? The potential for failure would be too much and thankfully I didn’t have to take such risks last season.

For me it was clear – to be the best you need to imitate what they do, especially on captaincy.

GETTING A HEAD START Fortunately, I got on the right side of the curve last season almost immediately. This was at a time when many seasoned managers lamented their bad luck due to their own false starts. The reality of the situation is that we now have more than 8.24 million managers in our midst – using sophisticated tools beyond our wildest imaginations, consuming tons of content, being more informed, wanting to win coveted leagues and prizes – who play FPL. That’s a staggering 196% increase in managers in the space of almost 10 years.

That sort of growth has meant that more than ever before you need to get fortunate early on. This thinking undermines the skill element of FPL as you really must hope for the best and make your own luck in the initial Gameweeks with this approach and the chances are against you when millions of other managers are trying to do the same.

All the more so in Gameweek 1 when engagement levels are probably at their highest in terms of playing numbers. I have no doubt that the purists among us will dismiss this view of needing to do well from the get-go and say that I’m being lazy in even thinking that. It’s a marathon not a sprint, right?

After all, there are so many success stories of managers languishing in the low millions until the halfway point before a herculean assault into the Top 10k on the final day of the season.

But that sort of hassle means that you must hustle and make riskier decisions that you wouldn’t otherwise make – for the most part they may not even pay off and you will have to constantly adopt the contrarian picks even if you don’t believe in them at all.

That seems wrong and simply futile. In my estimation, for a lot of seasoned managers, having a good start would almost be like a head start so that they can lay the seeds for a good finish by staying ahead of the curve so early on with safer so-called shield picks rather than chasing with riskier sword-like picks – it’s as simple as that.

MAINTAINING MY MOMENTUM It’s all well and good getting into the upper echelons so early on but staying up there when there are still so many variables is a gargantuan challenge. In fact, in recent memory, I actually had a relatively good start to the 19/20 season (Top 100K by August of that year) before scuppering my position relatively quickly.

I was adamant not to repeat the same mistakes again. So last season, despite a small blip in Gameweek 2 when I sold Son before his four-goal haul, I managed to stabilise things and build on my overall rank.

Part of this was me deciding not to panic and actually trust the players that I picked. In fact, I only took one hit between Gameweek 3 and Gameweek 20. That in itself was self-restraint on my part in terms of my usual player turnover. However, the very best managers also don’t take regular hits, so I knew I was in good company.

But then I did something which probably went against the grain. As I reached the Top 20k by Gameweek 4 I just didn’t want the euphoria to end. Even by now I was prepared to do what was needed to finish inside the Top 10k of FPL by Gameweek 38 but without making aggressive transfers.

In short, I wasn’t going to shoot even higher and aim for a Top 1k position if the chances of failure meant I could tumble outside of the Top 100k in the space of one Gameweek.

With that said, I tried doing one thing very different. I consciously decided that I would use all my chips as early as possible – to lay down a marker on my early lead – and hopefully rise even higher with these potential boosters.

Wildcarding in Gameweek 6 to lock into the early template made sense as I had enough player form to gauge over by then. But immediately it resulted in a red arrow. My Free Hit in Gameweek 11 was essentially forced due to the first truncated Gameweek of the season (due to Covid-19) and I was caught short. Disappointingly it was a red arrow.

But my wildcard before Blank Gameweek 18 and the subsequent Double Gameweek worked a treat – I was even ranked 500th at one point even if the De Bruyne Triple Captain could have gone better. Green arrows galore.

Finally, I used my Bench Boost in Double Gameweek 26. My Leeds players let me down but by now I was knocking on the door of a Top 5K rank, and I didn’t leave the Top 10K after Gameweek 29.

Using the chips relatively early meant I took more hits later and was essentially running on fumes but that was often offset by buying players for Double Gameweeks. With that said, the hits worked more often than not, and I was happy to lead almost all of my mini-leagues for the vast majority of the season.

In addition, upon reflection, my chips usage had mixed results but ultimately, they did the trick due to the overall gains they yielded.

THE UNLIKELY LADS I was a fervent advocate of differentials – low owned and unheralded players – during the nascent years of FPLHINTS. But overtime the whole concept almost seemed like a mirage to me. And yet last season, if anything, was probably defined by low priced players that had amazing fantasy return streaks.

This is validated by the fact that 9 of the top 20 overall points scorers had a price tag of less than £7M. For my team, things kicked off nicely with an unexpected Saïss 15 pointer. And the week after, Calvert-Lewin joined the party with a 17 pointer. Saint-Maximin and Wilson chipped in together with 28 unexpected points in Gameweek 4. Surely, the premiums would come to fore? Of course, they did eventually.

But then out of nowhere, due to Man City’s injuries, Gündoğan became a serious option. City were getting better. I couldn’t afford Dias but got Stones and then he somehow produced an unreal 27 pointer! What on earth was happening?

But there was more… Lowton became a short-term hero with his Double Gameweek wonder goal and clean sheet. And then Lingard tapped into his inner-Messi with his loan move to West Ham United. Ironically, had I still kept a Free Hit for later on I wouldn’t have actually bought him for the majority of his mega returns – I was forced to buy him due to another Blank Gameweek.

Godfrey also came out of nowhere, with a string of clean sheets and a double digit Double Gameweek haul for good measure. I’d never had it so lucky and so good with differentials delivering on an industrial scale. Also, to sum it up, even the out-going champions of England had two regular starting £4.0 defenders in FPL by the end.

And last but not least there was Souček. I had him very early on, but he was an unmitigated disaster for my team. When I started him, he blanked. When I benched him, he scored. When I sold him, he scored. The less said about him the better.

But to conclude, one of the reasons why many differentials were able to shine was in part due to the unprecedented number of Double Gameweeks and unexpected injuries that uniquely came about last season. In my estimation, we may not ever see something on this level for cheaper players and differentials being serious differentiators ever again.

LESSONS LEARNED You don’t actually need to be an FPL guru to game the system and win your mini-leagues.

You just need a moderate amount of strategic focus, reasonable planning and a bit of luck on your side to achieve a high overall rank. And as I’ve learnt in a sobering way, you just need to be consistently boring with your captaincy picks.

You also need to deal with failure swiftly and ascertain what the best way is to respond as it could be something that will make or break momentum and even define your season.

In addition, play FPL the way it should be played and not the way you want to play it. But does that mean you abandon logic and personal gut instinct? No. But what it does means is that you sometimes have to adapt to the real-time circumstances at hand and make calculated and careful judgement calls even if you’ve adopted an approach that others may question.

Moreover, planning can come unstuck with variables. Your bespoke battle plan spreadsheet will only take you so far.

In addition, to some extent, you essentially have to fake it. In my estimation, to be the best you need to think like the best – you have to think like a consistent Top 10k finisher if that’s what you essentially want to achieve. This is easier said than done if you’re not an expert like me.

I’m grateful that I somehow managed to finish in the Top 5k and score over 2500 points (this tally would have won FPL in many bygone seasons). I may never repeat either feat again. But ultimately it just depends what you want when playing FPL.

There’s so much more to the game than green and red arrows. And lest we not forget it’s only a game. So, get whatever you want out of it within reason and enjoy the good things in life.

Chief.

All stats are sourced from https://www.premierfantasytools.com/

Planning

Th i n ke r i n g

& T i n ke r i n g

My Methodology For Pre-Season

by Jon Wallin @FantasyGaffer

Writing about FPL for more than a decade, John has bylines at FourFourTwo, The Athletic and http://SI.com. You can subscribe to his FPL Draft newsletter and preseason FPL Draft Guide at http://FantasyGaffer.Substack.com or his daily Sorare newsletter at http://SorareDaily.Substack.com .

You can tell him how bad his advice is @FantasyGaffer. DMs open.

This is how we win. Every summer, while everyone else is taking a deep breath and enjoying their successes - or trying to forget the failures - of the previous FPL season, I'm busy putting together the data to make next season the most successful season yet. For the last fifteen years, the motions have been the same but the data available has gone from a handful of dubious statistics to full suites of data, pages of game logs, and subscription services which rely on making that information easy and accessible to all fantasy managers. Hey, I have two of those (FPL Draft and Sorare)!

The abundance of information can be overwhelming, misleading, or worse can convince you that you need to buy Harry Kane just because he led the league in goals and assists last term. I'm all for "doing your own research" but there's a place for trusting in the work of others, and I have more than a decade of experience - read: mistakes - that can help you refine your approach. Here we'll give a very high-level overview of my summer evaluation process, starting with (mis)using the data that gives you the biggest bang for the buck and takes the least time to distill into actionable information: expected goals.

Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There’s no better rule.

I don't need to give you an expected goals (xG) primer, there are plenty of those on the internet already many of which are written by people far smarter than I. Those are also focused on using data in a more comprehensive, nuanced and scientific way than this article. We're going to grip it and rip it, using the approach which unearthed fantasy studs like Riyad Mahrez before his breakout with Leicester, advocated investing in Glen Murray as your FWD3 and not being tricked by Lucas Moura's 10-goal haul.

The easiest way to start is to understand three buckets of attacking players: those who over-performed, under-performed, and performed in line with expected goals, expected assists, and non-penalty expected goals + expected assists per 90 minutes (that's displayed as npxG+xA/90 and is available on FBref which utilizes StatsBomb data). You want to invest in players who have track records of performing at or above expectations and who under-performed in the past year helping lower their initial FPL price for the approaching season.

NAME NAMES!! Settle down, I have them right here:..

Rk

Player

Pos

Squad

Apps

Starts

Min

npxG+xA▼

1

Kevin De Bruyne

MF

Manchester City

25

23

1,997

0.79

2

Harry Kane

FW

Tottenham

35

35

3,082

0.73

3

Sadio Mané

FW

Liverpool

35

31

2,810

0.67

4

Mohamed Salah

FW

Liverpool

37

34

3,078

0.66

5

Michail Antonio

FW

West Ham

26

24

1,974

0.62

6

Timo Werner

FW

Chelsea

35

29

2,602

0.62

7

Roberto Firmino

FW

Liverpool

36

33

2,838

0.6

8

Patrick Bamford

FW

Leeds United

38

37

3,050

0.59

9

Raheem Sterling

FW

Manchester City

31

28

2,536

0.58

10

Jamie Vardy

FW

Leicester City

34

31

2,840

0.56

11

Dominic Calvert-Lewin FW

Everton

33

32

2,871

0.55

12

Bruno Fernandes

MF

Manchester Utd

37

35

3,099

0.55

13

Raphael Dias Belloli

MF

Leeds United

30

26

2,360

0.54

14 15

Jack Grealish İlkay Gündoğan

MF MF

Aston Villa Manchester City

26 28

24 23

2,185 2,029

0.53 0.53

This chart reflects the top 15 EPL players in npxG+xA/90' with a minimum of 1,710 minutes played.

That's half a season. So, of course, the place to look for great value are players who flexed massive in minimal minutes.

There were just nine EPL players who played between 1000-1500 minutes and recorded an npxG+xA of 0.5 or higher: Edison Cavani (.66), Diogo Jota (.66), Tammy Abraham (.63), Kelechi Iheanacho (.62), Rodrigo (.60), Mbaye Diagne (.51), Anthony Martial (.51) Matěj Vydra (.51) and Fernan Torres (.50). That's my earlyseason watch list for potential discount acquisitions depending on a bit of health, a greener new pasture for Tammy and Mbaye and a regular starting role for Kelechi Iheanacho.

Indeed, this may finally, after three years of my constant banging on about *this season* being The Yearanacho: the year when he bags 20.

The most interesting name in the chart above is the massively under-performing Timo Werner, which lines up well with countless analysts insisting he wasn't playing that poorly and every observer with even one functioning eye screaming that Werner couldn't hit water if he fell out of a f*cking boat.

That is a key aspect of underperformance that you cannot afford to overlook as an FPL manager. If Timo holds his place for his sophomore season, and he merely plays at expected level, he would score twice as many goals (he had six goals on 11.9xG last season).

Similarly, Everton's Richarlison scored just seven goals from 11.5 xG. Depending on price, you could be successful investing in those players once they are back in the fold following long summer international responsibilities.

Underperforming players are one thing, but underperforming teams present a different opportunity.

This works on both ends of the pitch, with expected goals (xGA) allowed a useful barometer for a team's defensive success.

Taken in context with squad rotation/playing time and the attacking potential of individual defenders, team xGA can give you a leg up picking your back five, helping save a few pounds without compromising fantasy returns.

Looking back to the 2019-20 season, two teams’ expected goals allowed stand out: Chelsea (37.9xGA | 54 goals allowed) and Sheffield United (47.9xGA | 39 goals allowed).

Chelsea, as a team, kept just nine clean sheets that season, while The Blades managed 13 which trailed only Man City (17), Burnley and Liverpool (15). Last summer, the fantasy community was split between those who continued to believe in the low investment, high return potential they had just witnessed and those who - correctly - identified that Chris Wilder's side would play closer to expectations in 202021. En route to relegation, only two Blades managed better than 70 points (GK Ramsdale had 123 while forward McGoldrick had 100 on the nugget).

Chelsea went the other way, finishing 2020-21 with the second lowest team xGA (32.8), second fewest goals allowed (36) and second most clean sheets (18) in the Premier League. In all, four Chelsea's defenders topped 100 points with Ben Chilwell's 139 good for 7th most at his position. Even more remarkable, the Blues defenders did it in limited minutes with none of Chilwell (139 points, 2,286 min), James (115, 2,367) Azpilicueta (112, 2,187) or Zouma (108, 2,027) playing more than 2,400 minutes the equivalent of 27 matches. Chelsea may well be expected to further improve on the defensive record this season, continuing their dominant run under Thomas Tuchel.

Looking ahead to 2021-22, the most obvious teams that should be expected to take a step forward on defense are Liverpool, who will welcome back Virgil van Dijk from injury, and Wolves. Wolverhampton under Nuno displayed a penchant for playing below expectations, at least on the basis of goals allowed.

Last season his squad conceded 52 goals from 45.9 xGA (7th best) while their 2019-20 campaign saw 40 goals conceded (5th best) from just 34.8 xGA (2nd best).

We expected a step forward in 2020-21, but perhaps were denied by COVID’s wider impact as well as inconsistent tactics and starting lineups. The club also lacked in clean sheets with 13 in 2019-20 dropping to just 10 last term. Replacing him is former Benfica manager Bruno Lage, who has been part of the set-up at both Sheffield Wednesday and Swansea City. In his 2019-20 title win in Portugal, Lage relied heavily on pressing from his 4-4-2, a trait which was only partially shared by Nuno: Comparatively, Wolves press so infrequently in the attacking third, they attempted the least number of pressures in the final third in the Premier League in the 2020/21 season with 903, 70 behind 19th placed West Ham. On the other hand, they rank 7th in the league for attempted pressure in their defensive third with 2108. In this sense, they share similarities with Lage’s Benfica.

Assuming Lage has a fully healthy squad and elects to resume a 4-4-2, which was used by Nuno a bit last season, Wily Boly and Connor Coady should be locks to start, with Semedo and Boly scored 68 points last season but featured in only 21 matches, which is a nice pace, and was present in six of their ten clean sheets. Semedo (109 points) and Coady (106) both played nearly every match and could start the season similarly priced at £5.0M. Either are worth adding to start the season depending on Wolves opening fixtures and both should secure playing time in excess of 3,000. Dissect the fixtures for more potential insight.

You Can't Win If They Don't Play Playing Time. Like location in real estate, the three most important stats for FPL success, in my opinion, are Playing Time (starts), Playing Time (total minutes), Playing Time (usage as a substitute). To hit the jackpot here you're targeting players who start regularly, who play 90' or close to it every start, and who are never used as substitutes! That last one is nearly impossible to project but if you hit on both of the first two, you'll be in good shape for the third. To locate potential diamonds in the rough we look for the guys who had big points on a per 90' basis, then use a bit of common sense and sleuthing to identify which can and should step up this term.

Before going any farther, if you're doubting the veracity of this approach consider this list of names which are the top 10 FPL midfielders in Points Per 90' (PP90') with a minimum of 2,000 minutes played: Player Fernandes Gündogan

Points

Final Price

Minutes

Assists

Goals

PP90'

Bonus

11.3

244

3101

18

14

36

7.1

5.5

157

2025

13

4

22

7.0

12.9

231

3077

22

6

21

6.8

Son

9.6

228

3119

17

11

26

6.6

Maddison

7.2

133

2093

8

7

12

5.7

11.8

176

2808

11

11

14

5.6

Grealish

7.5

135

2183

6

12

13

5.6

Sterling

10.9

154

2534

10

9

10

5.5

Rashford

9.6

174

2917

11

11

9

5.4

Pereira

5.4

153

2574

11

7

15

5.3

Traoré

5.8

135

2315

7

7

7

5.2

Salah

Mané

Any of those names are going to be among the very first you pick in your squad with all of them excellent choices for present and future success. The downside for many of those names are high starting prices which will only increase as the season wears on. But there is valuable information here as well. You're better off owning James Maddison than Sadio Mane; you should have selected Jack Grealish over Raheem Sterling. Jimmy and Jack outperform their significantly more expensive peers on a /90' basis but lost time due to injuries, costing them valuable minutes and you valuable points. To afford any of these names, you need to have a keen eye for a bargain. Here are the players who performed best on a PP90' basis but played between 1000-1999 minutes last season. I've highlighted a couple names here and discussed them more in depth below.

Player

Final Price

Points

Minutes

Goals

Assists

Bonus

PP90'

Foden

6.1

135

1607

9

8

17

7.6

Jota

6.9

86

1106

9

0

9

7.0

Mahrez

8.1

145

1945

9

8

15

6.7

Lingard

6.6

106

1423

9

5

15

6.7

7

95

1297

7

4

4

6.6

Torres Pépé

7.7

114

1606

10

3

11

6.4

11.8

141

1995

6

12

19

6.4

El Ghazi

5.2

111

1604

10

0

13

6.2

Willock

4.9

79

1210

8

0

5

5.9

Barnes

6.6

126

1944

9

5

13

5.8

Havertz

8.3

91

1512

4

6

3

5.4

De Bruyne

I expect that many fantasy football managers that win their mini leagues will be managed by those with the patience to rotate Phil Foden and Riyad Mahrez this season. But there will be a fair few who start the year by investing in Joe Willock, Harvey Barnes or Kai Havertz and reap the instant reward of points and the longer-term benefit of price increases ballooning their budgets. Phil Foden (7.6 points per 90') and Diogo Jota (7.0) actually paced all FPL midfielders, minimum 500 minutes played, except Gareth Bale. I know we've all been burned by Pep before, and again, and once more in the future, but of all years this is likely the one when Foden ascends, and we see De Bruyne perhaps shifting deeper into the midfield.

Now, Gareth Bale is mentioned above, and he tops this chart as well, showing players with less than 1,000 minutes this past season. His 11.2 points per 90', excellent form to end the season, obvious health and sublime ability for Wales at the Euros and a new manager in at Spurs should have you drooling. But in all likelihood, he will not be at Tottenham for the 21/22 season.

Player

Final Price

Points

Minutes

Goals

Assists

Bonus

PP90'

Bale

9.2

113

912

11

3

16

Mata

5.8

32

507

1

3

3

5.7

van de Beek

6.6

32

511

1

2

0

5.6

11.2

Martinelli

4.9

36

582

2

1

0

5.6

Praet

5.2

37

714

1

2

1

4.7

Vitinha

4.7

26

509

0

1

0

4.6

Lanzini

6.4

28

556

1

1

0

4.5

Tella

4.3

36

735

1

2

2

4.4

Alli

7.4

30

613

0

2

0

4.4

6

48

999

3

0

2

4.3

6.4

26

548

0

2

1

4.3

Minamino Shaqiri

A final name to highlight here is Vitinha. The 20-year-old midfielder only earned 520 minutes but did feature in 19 matches for Wolves last term. If he is able to secure a regular spot under the new boss, he could be among the best discount fifth midfielder options, certainly in the mix with the best of the promoted names.

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Game Stats are not the only relevant part of pre-season analysis. Players careers are always ebbing and flowing; managers come and go, squads make strategic (or not-so-strategic) investments; injuries, rotation, domestic and European cup competitions will all factor into a player's season-long value. And that is why summer planning needs to look at more than just the first few weeks and plan for not just your first squad of fifteen, but also another 15-20 players you want to watch from the beginning of the season. I like to have about 10 defenders, 10 midfielders and 5-7 forwards on my shortlist. Once prices and schedule are released, you take the pre-season preparation you've done and narrow the focus to the first few weeks to pick your team. Emi Buendia signs for Aston Villa? Add him to the top of your list.

A player ruptures a ligament on international duty? Drop them off the ranks entirely. You'll need to be flexible, be comfortable looking past names and the associated back page expectations to concentrate on their production and find a careful balance between riding the hot streaks without losing patience for low-cost investments to come good.

Now, the one, big, variable which hasn't been mentioned yet: summer tournaments. The Euros and Copa America are underway concurrently, and others like the CONCACAF Gold Cup, the Olympics and World Cup qualifying are due to take place.

If you're new to FPL - congratulations on finding this excellent resource early in your fake career! You haven't suffered the heartache of picking a perfect starting XI only to find three of your players named to the bench as they 'recover' following summer tournament play and a late arrival to pre-season camp.

I try to be mindful of players returning from international duty to see if they've been given an extended break and if they have featured at all in any of the pre-season matches.

As you're reading this, the prospect of charting every Premier League player's summer return date, injury status, etc. can fell daunting. That's because it is a massive task, but not one you need to undertake and certainly not one to undertake alone. Good resources are available from a variety of sources. Some are subscription like my FPL Draft newsletter, some are free; some for you and some for me; some chart health and in-jur-ee (this could get very Seussical, so I'll stop there).

If you're an FPL veteran, you're likely already following accounts like Ben Dinnery, who covers injuries and suspensions with great accuracy and quick updates. You should bookmark sites like Understat and FBref, both of which have free statistics available for your review and use. And you will want to start or join one of the many FPL community Twitter lists where you can find accounts tweeting projected XIs, discussing strength of schedule, and providing updates on expected price increases and price falls. You can absolutely play and succeed at FPL without going to these lengths, but a small investment of time this summer will put you in the best position to succeed in August and ride that wave all season.

Now, In Conclusion So class, what have we learned about summer planning? Know your stats, make a shortlist of key players you want in each position, find a couple of accounts you trust to track injuries and selection/rotation concerns, pick 15, make a starting XI, and hit save.

DO NOT FORGET TO HIT SAVE! See you (fantasy) pitch side.

FPL Freestyle My Experience Of Treating Crypto Like Fantasy Football Matej is the founder of @CalleditFPL. He is a basketball turned football and tennis fan (and Arsenal fan if he had to pick from Premier League). His best finish in FPL was 15th overall during the 2012/13 season.

“Seriously, can you, please, go just ONE WEEKEND without you checking your stupid fantasy game results all the time?” was my wife’s response to me being glued to my phone on a Friday evening back in March of 2020.

Normally, she would be spot on. Ever since I started playing fantasy football many years ago (on a dare no less), it has taken up more than a reasonable amount of my time. To be honest, I still can’t really explain to my friends what exactly is the allure of the game. When I finished 15th overall several seasons ago, I did get a “Wow, that’s great” from them – but the “why” still eludes them. I guess it’s one of those things where you have to be a part of it (looking at you), otherwise it just seems dumb if you’re on the outside looking in.

Anyway, back to the story of my wife complaining. Indeed, the weekends would normally see me checking and updating my FPL score on multiple occasions, especially during those dreadfully boring Sunday brunches with people you barely know, while you had to pretend you were so interested in their stories. This time, however, it was different. You see, I just got back from a business trip and the world at the time felt different. I was slightly anxious. Sure, we’ve heard the stories from China about some kind of a virus, but is it really happening if it’s not happening to you? I remember how weird it felt when I arrived at the eerily empty Dubai airport and started seeing more and more people in masks quietly walking in their own imaginary corridors and trying to avoid each other. I obviously didn’t wear a mask yet and had no plans on doing it. Little did I know that it was one of the last “normal” days that I would enjoy for a long time. Masks became mandatory by the time I got back home. The corona virus had spread around the world and conspiracy theories were piling up.

And of course, the Premier league, like almost all other elite competitions, had been put on hold.

So there I was, hungover from the red-eye flight and disgusted by having to inhale my own bad breath in a mask that made me feel like Darth Vader and not having to do my team on a Saturday morning. What do you do without footy on TV? Well, you know what they say - “Devil finds work for idle hands” - and that’s exactly what happened. Browsing through the news websites, I was soaking in “experts’” take on what this new corona thing will mean for human kind and society overall. I remember reading about lockdowns and rolling my eyes at how journalism seems to resort mostly to exaggeration these days. Sigh. Hindsight sucks!

There was also one more piece of news that I kept seeing as well and ignoring for a long time - about Bitcoin crashing. Now, I’ve heard stories of people getting rich from this crypto thing, but never really paid much attention to it. “Imaginary internet money that has no real value”, “ponzi scheme” and worse were my first associations when people mentioned anything crypto related at the time.

I mean, I would never get myself dragged into this, I’m not that gullible! But still, something tickled my interest. Reading and re-reading articles of how Bitcoin and the whole crypto market was crashing, predictions about how it could go down all the way to zero, I couldn’t help but think of fantasy football and one of the rules I made for myself early on.

It originated from way back in 2014, when Liverpool (think pre-Barcelona golden Suarez years) were in a mean losing streak, stuck around mid-table and far from being title contenders. I remember thinking that this team is just way too good to stay there, looking at the quality of players they have. Having been on multiple basketball teams, I knew that it usually takes you just one good game to turn the momentum around. Checking the ownership of Liverpool assets literally made me drool. There was Luis Suarez, one of the top finishers in the game on a great team, with an ownership of less than 5% and juicy fixtures to boot. It was a no-brainer, and he was soon spearheading my Warsaw Hopefuls fantasy football team.

To finance the move, I had to downgrade one of my midfielders and that meant that the young Raheem Sterling (before it was a thing) would become my 4.4m (if I recall correctly) midfield enabler. And boy oh boy, did The Reds deliver. They went on a massive run in the following weeks, with both stars scoring massive fantasy points and helping my team shoot up in the rankings. I still love using this “rule” today and it still brings dividends.

And this Bitcoin thing felt just like that. Could it have gone down to zero? Sure. Like I said, I had no clue what this was, but just like Liverpool getting relegated that aforementioned season, it just felt kind of unlikely.

Without doing any additional research (I know, stupid), I jumped into my Revolut app (that conveniently announced that they will support crypto trading just a few weeks or months earlier) and purchased myself a tiny bit of Bitcoin and Ethereum crypto coins.

I remember feeling good about it and thinking that this might be a turning point in my life - one way or another. And just like that, a new obsession would be born that day. In the following days, just like I was doing with FPL scores all those years, I loved to open the app and watch my investment numbers going up and down as the whole crypto market was slowly bouncing back. In the following months, I kept investing whatever change I could afford into cryptocurrencies and reaping the benefits.

Obviously, it’s all sunshine and roses when captain Suarez scores a hat-trick and adds an assist that bags you 40 points, including the bonus and appearance points. But greed is a monster. Pretty soon, you find yourself wanting more and more gains and thinking of ways of how to do it.

Providing you have a well-balanced team; you resort to what I love(d) to post on my Twitter profile - differentials. I’ve had many discussions over the years about what constitutes a differential, i.e., is 20% ownership too much? What about 10%? Or should it be 5% or less?

Honestly, I like all of these answers to a certain extent. My teams are normally built on the backbone of highly owned high-hitters from top clubs, sprinkled with a couple of slight differentials (in the 10-20% ownership) and 1 or 2 real differentials (falling in the below 5% ownership), depending on the time of the season and other variables.

Translating this tactic into crypto meant expanding my presence in other top 10 currencies and going, as I would later learn they are called, mid and small-caps. Simply put, I wanted a taste of the “get ahead of the game and find a couple of golden nuggets and that one true jewel before most do”. The logic here is pretty straightforward - you get a cheap differential just before it goes on a run and you stay ahead of the pack (and realize major gains). Before you know it, you should either be a crypto millionaire or in the top 1k of FPL. Piece of cake, right? Well…

We all know it’s not, because I am not sipping ridiculously expensive champagne in my brand-new villa at the Caribbean seaside, nor have I been crowned the FPL winner of 2020/21. Differentials are often differentials for a reason - either inconsistent, in poor form or on terrible teams - and often a combination of all three.

Sure, the potential for reward is very high, but so is the risk factor. And it’s a similar situation with the crypto market. Encouraged by my early wins with the large caps, I made one of the cardinal sins when it comes to “games” of chance. Instead of sticking with the plan (you know, the balanced thing), I came to a “brilliant” idea. What if I put all of my hard earned money into one of the coins that hasn’t had its run yet? It all made sense. What a freaking brilliant idea!

After putting in hours and hours of actual research this time, I’ve decided that I’ll invest everything into a coin called XRP from Ripple.

It ticked all the boxes that I was looking for. It was worth only 10% of its previous all-time high, hasn’t run yet in this bull market and was one of the big three - so it’s like it’s not even a risk, am I right?

At first, man oh man, it looked wonderful. Everything was growing my investment and my greed. I was patting myself on the back and thinking I should’ve done this a long time ago. I was all in and I was winning! Just a couple of more months and I’ll be able to claim my prize as the fantasy football winn...I mean as one of the people who made it in crypto.

Looking back, it’s easy to say “Man, you are such a dumbass!

Everyone knew XRP had issues and nothing good would come out of it, especially after that SEC happened”. I did know. I anticipated it. I just chickened out. I’ve basically done what every seasoned fantasy football manager knows so well - I’ve stuck with my differential for far too long during its dry spell and ditched it just before it went on a run again.

I would then curse my luck as XRP started creeping up again, resisting the temptation to get back in at first, but the fear of losing out feeling kicked in during a local high, which just caused me to lose even more of my gains.

When the dust settled, I was back at my entry. I’ve spent months and months doing this, only to come back to where I’ve started. I was crushed. Beaten. Felt depressed. To add insult to injury, I calculated that if I had only stuck with my initial choices, I would have had 15 times more than I had at the time.

There were only two choices - get out or regroup. Those who know me know I hate to lose, so getting out was never really an option. I decided to do it right this time. I invested a lot of time into learning about how to trade crypto. About how to look at charts and analyze them.

About how to take emotions out of the equation. And just like in fantasy football, I laid out a reasonable plan - make a team that consists of proven, highly owned big-hitters. Put the captain’s armband on the top players in most Gameweeks and stick with them.

Whenever there is a potential to play with a differential, do it, but think of it more like jumping in and jumping out than putting it all on one card and hoping for a miracle. And right now, I have a well-balanced crypto portfolio which is basically like a well-balanced fantasy football team. And while the market is currently looking quite bearish, I am not panicking and I’m sticking with my plan. And you know what? My portfolio is in good shape, I still own XRP and still love a cheeky FPL differential!

Follow @CalleditFPL on Twitter

Statisfaction Crunching the numbers for the newly promoted teams @MattyhFPL is a Liverpool fan and a fantasy football enthusiast with an academic background in Mathematics.

As each season of FPL goes by, the game gets increasingly competitive as we have more and more individuals signing up (8 million+ in 20/21). Additionally, with the amount of content and data easily accessible nowadays, getting an elusive Top 10k/100k finish just gets that much harder, meaning a good start is almost essential. A significant factor in gaining a head start on your competitors is by finding those bargain buys which can hit the ground running. Two great examples of these are Patrick Bamford in the 20/21 season and Teemu Pukki in the 19/20 season, both of whom played for newly promoted sides.

In this segment I will take an in-depth look at the three promoted sides for the 21/22 season which will include: • • • •

Each team’s performance from the previous season Predicted formations and line-ups Players with the best FPL potential & their underlying stats Looking into the opening fixtures

Quick key for some terminology used: xGF – Expected goals for

xGA – Expected goals against

npxG/90 – Expected non-penalty goals per 90

xA/90 – Expected assists per 90

npxG+xA – Expected non-penalty goals plus assists per 90 Sh/90 – Shots per 90

SoT/90 – Shots on target per 90

xMins – Expected minutes played per game

BCC – Big chances created

External sources in this segment have been cited on a fair use basis from publicly available information: All statistics and league tables shown in this article are from Infogol.net

NORWICH CITY Introduction The Canaries finished top of the Championship, which ended their short one-year hiatus from the Premier League. This is the second time Daniel Farke has led Norwich to the Premier League after previously winning the EFL Championship in 2019, however he will hope they can prove to be more consistent with performances this time around.

Norwich deployed a 4-2-3-1 formation which is built by Farke on their passing game, with ballplaying CBs being incredibly important. Grant Hanley covered this role with the good passing range he possesses and the ability to provide line-breaking long balls to the forwards. The team defends from the front by pressing the opponents, with Todd Cantwell being the engine to constantly cut the passing lanes and closing the opposition down. The idea of the system is to win back as well as control possession and with the talented Emi Buendia (now at Aston Villa) they played through the lines of the opposition defence.

Previous Season Let us look into their 2020/21 EFL Championship season.

Top goal scorer: Teemu Pukki, 26 goals Top playmaker: Emi Buendia, 16 assists xGF 77.0, 1st in Championship xGA 52.5, 9th in Championship (however only conceding 36) Although they were relegated the season prior to this, they managed to keep hold of most of their squad and continued to play the same free-flowing style of football.

They also incorporated a few loanees including box to box midfielder Oliver Skipp who is said to have been the finishing piece to the puzzle of this Norwich side, offering the versatility to enable the team to commit to such quality attacking football.

The big standout however was the increased amount of attacking contributions from Argentine Emi Buendia, with 0.68 npxG+xA compared to 0.34 & 0.41 from the last two seasons respectively; not having to rely fully on Teemu Pukki to supply all the goals was a massive boost.

However, with Skipp’s loan expiring and Buendia transferring to Aston Villa this summer in a £30m move and Norwich’s model of buying cheap, it will be difficult to replace these players and could leave Norwich a little vulnerable.

FPL Ones To Watch

Teemu Pukki – 6.0m, FWD • 26 goals (5 pens) + 4 assists in the 2020/21 EFL Championship.

• Fairly priced at 6.0m, possibly the cheapest viable forward option after the price increases for our 20/21 budget strikers.

• On penalties and Norwich’s main goal threat. npxG/90 0.51

xA/90 0.11

npxG+xA/90 0.62

Sh/90 3.41

SoT/90 1.39

BCC 4

Pens Yes

xMins 84

Emi Buendia – 6.5m, MID (Now at Aston Villa) • 15 goals + 15 assists in the 2020/21 EFL Championship.

• Evidently more involved in attacks further up the pitch than last season, making more progressive runs inside to the edge of the box.

• Including him in this Norwich section as he is still a newly promoted player.

• Now at Villa, his competitive 6.5m price tag means he is 1.5m cheaper than Jack Grealish (8m) and 1m cheaper than Ollie Watkins (7.5m).

• Incredibly good option as he should be nailed on in that Villa attack, also increases the supply for Ollie Watkins who will thrive playing ahead of both Buendia and Grealish. npxG/90 0.3

xA/90 0.34

npxG+xA/90 0.64

Sh/90 2.8

SoT/90 1.0

BCC 18

Pens No

xMins 85

Todd Cantwell – 5.5m, MID • 6 goals + 6 assists in the 2020/21 EFL Championship.

• Started off very well in the 19/20 Premier League season, finished that season with 6 goals and 2 assists.

• With the amount of midfield options this season it will prove hard to fit him in, especially with that 5.5m price tag being slightly too expensive for a bench player.

• However, Norwich may become more reliant on him attacking wise with the departure of Emi Buendia. npxG/90 0.17

xA/90 0.18

npxG+xA/90 0.35

Sh/90 2.0

SoT/90 0.6

BCC 7

Pens No

xMins 79

Max Aarons – 4.5m, DEF • 2 goals + 2 assists in the 2020/21 EFL Championship.

• Played 90 mins of 45/46 games last season.

• Attack-minded fullback, constantly overlapping down the right side and possesses great crossing ability.

• Norwich defence is the downfall with xGA stats around midtable from the championship last season so we can expect them to leak goals and not keep many clean sheets. npxG/90 0.05

xA/90 0.11

npxG+xA/90 0.16

Sh/90 0.6

SoT/90 0.2

BCC 5

Pens No

xMins 90

Opening Fixtures

Worst possible first two fixtures for a newly promoted team.

Overall, possibly the most difficult opening six fixtures out of all the 20 Premier League teams.

Initial opinion would be to avoid including any Norwich players in your starting 11 for the opening 2 games, however starting with some of the budget players as enablers/squad players is an option (Aarons/Cantwell).

Worth considering on any early wildcard, as the Liverpool and Manchester City games are out of the way after the first 2 weeks.

Predicted Line-Up

WATFORD Introduction Now we move onto the Hornets, who alongside Norwich also got relegated during the 2019/20 season only to get back into the Premier League at the first attempt.

The road back to the topflight began in December when Xisco Munoz was appointed who, with his beaming smile and characteristic charm, got the club heading back in the right direction with an attacking 4-3-3 style.

His organisation and personality rubbed off on the players with many relishing the new managerial voice at Vicarage Road. Xisco was successful in getting the most out of the individual players and just four months later their promotion back to the Premier league was confirmed.

Previous Season Now let’s look into the numbers behind the team and individuals for that 2020/21 EFL Championship season.

Top goal scorer: Ismaila Sarr, 13 goals Top playmaker: Ken Sema & Philip Zinckernagel, 5 assists (Zinckernagel with 26 less games played) xGF 68.1, 4th in Championship xGA 47.3, 3rd in Championship (however only conceding 30) Another similarity between Watford and Norwich is that after being relegated down to the Championship the season prior, Watford also managed to keep hold of most of their players including the highly prized Ismaila Sarr. After a fairly good/average first half to the season, the addition of Xisco really upped the ante. This is best displayed by the before and after stats from the season.

Before Xisco: Games played: 20, Points: 34 (5th), Goals: 23 (11th), Conceded: 15 (2nd) After Xisco: Games played: 24, Points: 54 (1st), Goals: 38 (3rd), Conceded: 13 (1st) With the integration of Sierralta into the starting defence, the team became solid at the back and the more attacking minded system meant the goals were flying in.

FPL Ones To Watch

Ismaila Sarr – 6.0m, MID • 13 goals (2 pens) + 4 assists in the 2020/21 EFL Championship.

• Talisman, on penalty duty, midfielder and a 6.0m price tag ticks a lot of the boxes for me; not much else to say except he is the best pick of the bunch when it comes to Watford assets.

• Showed some good signs in the 19/20 Premier League season, including that masterclass against Liverpool to end their unbeaten record. npxG/90 0.22

xA/90 0.18

npxG+xA/90 0.40

Sh/90 2.2

SoT/90 0.8

BCC 11

Pens Yes

xMins 89

Joao Pedro – 5.5m, FWD • 9 goals (2 pens) + 2 assists in the 2020/21 EFL Championship • As cheap a forward you are going to find that he should play week in week out.

• However, with Sarr being only 0.5m more with penalty duty and classified as a midfielder – I find it hard to advocate him as a good option to start off with.

• At the time of writing this (literally), Watford have just signed striker Emmanuel Dennis from Club Brugge – whether he will come straight into the side or Joao Pedro will remain as the #9 is uncertain. npxG/90 0.26

xA/90 0.06

npxG+xA/90 0.32

Sh/90 1.8

SoT/90 0.7

BCC 2

Pens No

xMins 72

Philip Zinckernagel – 5.5m, MID • 1 goal + 5 assists in the 2020/21 EFL Championship (10 games) • 19 goals + 18 assists in the 2019/20 Eliteserien for Bodø/Glimt • Everyone who has watched Eliteserien or played ESN Fantasy will know how good this guy was in the Norwegian league for Bodø/Glimt. But he will have a different test now in the top tier of English football. With that said, he has put up good underlying numbers so far in his short spell.

• Being slowly integrated into the side last season, hence the low xMins value. I expect him to become a regular starter for the upcoming season.

• 5.5m is an extremely fair price, but once again with how low FPL towers have priced Sarr I think it’s hard to go with anyone else – but this guy is one to keep an eye out for. npxG/90 0.24

xA/90 0.22

npxG+xA/90 0.46

Sh/90 1.1

SoT/90 0.2

BCC 3

Pens No

xMins 46

Danny Rose – 4.5m, DEF • Attacking fullback, playing in one of the best defences of the Championship last season.

• 4.5m price tag is very appealing if he can get himself fit for the new season.

• Offers good rotation with other cheap defenders such as Ayling/Coufal.

Opening Fixtures

Better than Norwich’s start, however still a difficult opening 3 games.

Fixtures are not difficult enough to advise staying away from the attacking assets, especially with the value they offer.

Same point with the early wildcard as with Norwich – after GW3 they have a nice run so the likes of Sarr/Zinckernagel should be in for consideration for those who do pull the trigger on that chip early into the season.

Predicted Line-Up

BRENTFORD Introduction Finally, we have The Bees.

A football club model we can all look at in awe, building from the ground up in a decade-long project based on mathematical modelling and analytics.

By utilising the numbers in football, they found undervalued players to help the club win and then be sold for profits and have rose from the brink of bankruptcy in the fourth tier to the top division of English football for the first time in the club’s history.

Previous Season Top goal scorer: Ivan Toney, 31 goals Top playmaker: Ivan Toney & Bryan Mbeumo, 10 assists xGF 76.2, 2nd in Championship xGA 41.4, 1st in Championship This season, Brentford boasted the best defence in the league, conceding just 41.4 xGA. When you look at the black and white number of goals conceded this does not seem the case, however both Watford and Norwich massively overperformed defensively (Watford conceding just 30 from 47.3 xGA and Norwich 36 from 52.5 xGA).

For the most part, they set up in a 4-3-3 system however towards the end of last season Thomas Frank decided to shake things up and make the switch to a 3-5-2.

When they opted for the 3-5-2 system, they fielded Mbuemo/Forss as a supporting striker for the main man Ivan Toney.

The consensus is that they will revert to the original 4-3-3 for the start of the new season, however we will have to wait and see if any business is done during the summer transfer window to know for sure.

FPL Ones To Watch Ivan Toney – 6.5m, FWD • 31 goals (9 pens) + 10 assists in the 2020/21 EFL Championship, winning the golden boot.

• Great underlying stats, best of all the attackers from the newly promoted sides.

• An incredible poacher that likes to attack the far post but also very skilful. Shows all the qualities needed to cope with the transition in quality from Championship to Premier League level. npxG/90 0.51

xA/90 0.16

npxG+xA/90 0.67

Sh/90 3.0

SoT/90 1.3

BCC 10

Pens Yes

xMins 86

Bryan Mbeumo – 5.5m, MID • 8 goals + 10 assists in the 2020/21 EFL Championship.

• Only 22 years of age, incredibly talented youngster who is constantly improving.

• Had COVID during the backend of the 19/20 season, which resulted in him taking a little time to get back up to speed.

• 5.5m is a competitive price, coming in 0.5m cheaper than I anticipated. Could be the perfect 5th midfielder in a 5-man midfield.

• Potential to play OOP upfront alongside Toney if Brentford decide to swap to 3-5-2 permanently or just for the occasional game (played there for last couple games) • Was not 100% nailed when Brentford switched to the 3-5-2 as he sometimes came off the bench for Forss and other times even filled in at wingback. npxG/90 0.29

xA/90 0.21

npxG+xA/90 0.5

Sh/90 1.5

SoT/90 0.3

BCC 9

Pens No

xMins 70

Josh Dasilva – 5.5m, MID • 5 goals + 4 assists in the 2020/21 EFL Championship.

• Should be nailed on in that starting 11 now that Marcondes has left.

• A favourite amongst the Brentford followers, England U21 attacking midfielder that shows a lot of promise.

• Loves a shot from outside the box and is particularly good at them too. npxG/90 0.12

xA/90 0.16

npxG+xA/90 0.28

Sh/90 1.2

SoT/90 0.4

BCC 6

Pens No

xMins 71

Sergi Canos – 5.5m, MID • 9 goals + 8 assists in the 2020/21 EFL Championship.

• Good underlying stats shooting wise.

• Low xMins compared to the other Brentford attacking options.

• Played at wingback when Brentford swapped to the 3-5-2 for the last part of the season (however will probably go back to the 4-3-3).

• When he plays, he is a good option especially at that price. npxG/90 0.24

xA/90 0.2

npxG+xA/90 0.44

Sh/90 2.2

SoT/90 0.7

BCC 8

Pens No

xMins 62

David Raya – 4.5m, GK • Brentford finished the season with the least expected goals conceded in the league.

• Average of 2.1 saves per game.

• All the ingredients for a high ceiling goalkeeping option, expect when Brentford do keep a clean sheet, he will be on for 7-8 points at least

Opening Fixtures

Best opening fixtures of all three promoted sides, however they are still not easy.

Gameweeks 1-3 considerably easier (in a goal scoring sense) than the subsequent Gameweeks 4-6.

Definitely viable to punt on their players from the start if you are willing to risk it, some great enablers in the squad.

Predicted Line-Up

Launched in 2020 and available to download from the App Store and Google Play, Perfect Picks is the free-to-play sports prediction game that you play against other fans.

With multiple weekly jackpot prizes on offer of up to £1,000, Perfect Picks rewards players for the accuracy of their predictions, just like FPL. Rather than banking points for individual goals, assists or clean sheets, however, Perfect Picks requires players to simply predict the game result and margin of victory.

One nil to the Arsenal? OK, maybe not in 2021. And anyway, Perfect Picks utilises a format that ensures excitement is guaranteed until the very end of each game, unlike typical correct score predictions which often succumb well before the final whistle.

The Premier League features heavily as part of Perfect Picks’ comprehensive football coverage, but with Contests also available for NFL, MLB, NHL and NBA, there is something for everyone. A Contest is a group of games selected by the Perfect Picks team, typically from the same competition over a weekend or midweek period.

Each Perfect Picks Contest is scored out of a maximum of 100 points, which means the app allows users to easily compare their performance against other players, gain a ranking based on the average of their own scores and try to beat a personal best. All of which is sure to appeal to seasoned FPL die-hard fans.

One star pick is available in each Contest too which doubles any points scored in that game. Sound familiar?

There is no excuse for missing a deadline either. Perfect Picks allows players to personalise which sports and competitions appear in the app, as well as whether they would like a reminder sent to their device before a Contest starts.

A personal news feed meanwhile contains regular Contest alerts and results, league updates, friend request notifications and much more all in one place.

Speaking of leagues, Perfect Picks offers an ideal platform for private competitions with friends or colleagues and is fully customisable.

Want a season-long Premier League battle with teammates? No problem. How about a one weekend all-sport challenge? Perfect Picks has that covered too.

When the Perfect Picks team creates a new Contest, players automatically receive a notification to their device if it is part of a league they are a member of. All results are tracked and displayed in a league table, and there are live leader boards too with projected points updating based on real-time scores as the goals go in.

The private leagues feature is sure to be popular with players ahead of the new Premier League campaign – Perfect Picks currently offers Bundesliga, Serie A, Ligue 1 and La Liga Contests too, as well as MLS, Scottish Premiership and Championship

Download the Perfect Picks app, join a league now and make your Premier League picks before the big kick-off for your chance to win!

There's No Such Thing As An FPL Expert

…and here's why

From the mind of

@FPL_Fly

Do you know the problem with ‘experts’? No matter in what field their expertise is in, if you were to hold a magnifying glass up to them you would find flaws and failure. There are many factors in determining expertise, and in my opinion trying to prove that such a person – or persons – exist in the world of fantasy sports is impossible.

For a start, how do you measure expertise? What are the parameters? Well, let’s take FPL. I guess we would be looking at performance across more than one season, their final overall rank in those seasons and an ability to categorically say that this was not as a result of an overarching amount of blind luck.

And this is where the whole premise of an FPL expert collapses. The ‘L’ word. Even the most ardent believer in such a thing as an FPL expert cannot in all good conscience dismiss the huge part luck plays in the game. You can study all the stats available, spend hours collating information from numerous sources and plan for every conceivable variable – but ultimately you will be relying on lady luck to be very firmly on your side.

In FPL, the ability to measure success is straightforward. The most successful manager in any given season is the person who finishes in the coveted number one spot. But to truly be proclaimed as an expert then that metric must be applied consistently. How many managers have won the title twice?

Or even been close?

Here’s a side story. Not long after the National Lottery started in the UK (a matter of weeks after its launch) I bought a ticket in a local newsagent. Upon checking the result that night it transpired I had picked 5 out of the 6 numbers. Enough to retire on, right? Unfortunately not. Just under £1000. But do you know what? I’ve never, ever purchased another ticket since. I figured that was the closest I would ever come to winning so never bothered again. Lightning rarely strikes twice.

But I still play FPL. Why? I’ve never won it, and to be honest only ever been close twice (676th in 2009/10 and 596th in 2017/18) but the game gives me a vested interest in the Premier League. This is important to me when my own club are not in the topflight, which as a Wolves supporter has been far too often!

Sorry Fly…

Anyway, back in the room. An FPL expert. So, we’ve determined success can be measured, and the ultimate metric is winning the thing. And then winning it again. Which nobody has done. Does that mean we have to dumb down the criteria? Ok. Let’s say consistent Top 100 finishes? Top 1000? Top 10,000? Where do you want to draw the line to fit the pro-expert agenda?

I guess we are going to need another metric as this feedback loop isn’t fit for purpose. What about using ‘knowledge’ as a substitute for ‘expertise’? Would that work? I guess someone can be knowledgeable about the game of football, or the fantasy format of FPL, or even both. Does that constitute an expert? In some ways I guess it does. There are many people that are knowledgeable about football but couldn’t play the game as they have a foot like a fifty pence piece. There are many that know the rules and tactics of FPL inside out and back to front but cannot apply that to a decent final rank, let alone win the thing.

Some combine the two, and if the measure of success - and therefore expertise - was the ability to wax lyrical on a pod, host a YouTube show or write a blog (whether they charge you it or not!) then you could label them as experts. But you’d be missing the point. Which leads us on nicely to ‘Authority Bias’.

There are many out there who very successfully do some of the things I have just said; pods, shows, blogs etc. Some even get tapped up as regular talking heads on FPL’s in-house broadcasts. Surely, by the very fact these people have been hand-picked to talk about the game and offer their advice and guidance, they must be experts? Often, they are even touted as such in the accompanying social media blurb.

They’re not though. Most of them have sizeable social media followings. They’re also non-controversial and ‘vanilla’ with their personalities. No Piers Morgan types thank you very much. However, this positioning as ‘experts’ creates an authority bias and a perception that these are the people you need to listen to. They are our mentors effectively. How often have you changed your captain pick, or transfer target after watching or listening to one of these types confidently stating that it’s the ‘other guy’ you should be picking?

Just because they have created -or been gifted – a platform for themselves, it should not by default mean they are experts in the field. Far from it in a lot of cases, and we need to err on the side of caution. Often, either as individuals or by the platform that gives them their mouthpiece, there will not be any kind of announcement of their credentials or past FPL history.

How do we know whether those held up as experts have any kind of credibility then? We don’t. This is because once again knowledge might be confused with skill and these people may easily overload your senses with an appearance of knowledge, which you will then assume is expertise – they are completely different things.

This is surprisingly easy to do in FPL. You just have to devote a little more time to the game than the average ‘casual manager’ and you instantly become more knowledgeable. How many times in a work league have you seen your casual colleagues or friends burn their chips early in the season with no understanding that later on there will be fixture blanks and double GameWeeks? Does that make you an expert? It might in their eyes but all you have done is equipped yourself with a little more info than they were willing to acquire.

What are we left with then? What about those who invest an inordinate amount of time in the study of stats, whilst also recognising that luck will always play a huge part in any success they achieve? The explosion of data in the fantasy sports domain has been sudden and confusing to those managers without the brain power – or time – to sort the wheat from the chaff and interpret it properly and in turn strip out the emotion (some would also say fun) out of the whole fantasy football experience.

There’s big money involved nowadays so some would say that this is a necessary part of the game. I’m not saying whether that is right or wrong, or straying into the separate discussion on “FPL addiction”, but we know it exists and that Pandora’s box can probably never be closed again. Some may believe that with financial reward on offer that they must strive to become an expert in order to succeed, or indeed that those who are succeeding and making money from the game are experts.

The assimilation of information, selection of reliable metrics and being able to completely disregard the white noise from that myriad of outside sources that in the main fit into the authority bias bracket is crucial. Stripping the game back to raw data may be a recipe for success one day. But it hasn’t been proven yet. None of the winners of FPL strike me as being robots. Quite the opposite. Their post-season interviews have always struck me as people that have played the game from the heart.

Remember the guy a few years ago that won despite refusing to pick Liverpool players at a time when they were beginning to come to the fore? That to me shone a beacon on how the game should be played! I’m not dismissing those that rely on stats, but I am suggesting the game should be a blend of all sources available. Your personality type, or the goal you are actually playing for, should determine the balance you put on this strategy, but ultimately it should be a game you play for enjoyment.

Your individual goal could also determine a definition of expertise. I’m no expert (obviously) but consistently win my work league or those private leagues with a small amount of mates in. Why? Because I spend more time than them on the game. But in other leagues I’m in with more people – and especially those stacked full of the ‘FPL community’ I am consistently rubbish.

My mates and work colleagues may consider me to be an expert. Those in the FPL community certainly would not. The deeper the field size (in terms of sheer numbers and/or knowledge and experience) the worst my results get. Why? Because luck starts to far outweigh skill. That’s just a simple fact of life. In my opinion it’s also the reason the ‘stats hounds’ have never, and maybe will never, win FPL. After reading this far, you may still share an opinion that is 180 degrees away from mine and truly believe that there are experts in the FPL community and that’s fine. With no definitive metric to base expertise on it comes down to your own personal judgement and what you perceive an expert need to be in possession of in order to be given that label.

What I would always implore is that you play your own game. For some that will mean you only rely on yourself when making decisions, for others that will mean collating info from numerous sources and then filtering those in order to decide, and for others it will mean allowing yourself to be led by others and effectively put them in charge of your decisions. There’s no right or wrong way, as long as YOU own the final outcome and understand the implications.

My advice is to always question the reliability of anyone who holds themselves – or is held up by others – as an expert. Pods, blogs, videos, tweets, no matter what the medium or platform should never be taken at face value as containing any kind of expert opinion. Question the credentials, check the record, focus on the facts and not the rhetoric of these people. It just makes sense to do so.

Please don’t misunderstand me here. Content creators do an amazing job, and I am in awe of a lot of them as they continue to keep things fresh and original. Some have managed to turn FPL into a fulltime job that pays their mortgage and puts food on their table which is absolutely staggering and fair play to them. But again, I advise caution. Just because they have freed up the time needed to obtain knowledge it does not and can not imply expertise.

Expertise in any field is rare, and in the world of FPL I do not believe it exists at all. There are knowledgeable managers. There are skillful managers. There are lucky managers. And once a season there will be one manager who is a knowledgeable, skillful and above all very lucky manager.

MAYBE ONE DAY THAT WILL BE YOU. MAYBE ONE DAY IT WILL BE ME. BUT ONE THING I CAN SAY WITH SOME CERTAINTY – IT WILL NEVER BE ANYONE THAT PROCLAIMS THEMSELVES TO BE AN EXPERT.

Fly Be brave, follow Fly on Twitter @FPL_Fly

Retro Corner By @JackGoodwin

The year is 1999, September time, you just finished watching American Beauty at the cinema and are driving back home in your brand-new Citroën Xsara Picasso with Blue (Da Ba Dee) blaring from the radio.

It’s now Saturday evening on the 18th as you sit in front on the TV, switch on Match of the Day and brand-new host, a young Gary Lineker is taking you through that day’s action in the Premier League.

Fresh from being held 0-0 by Croatia Zagreb in the Champion’s League, current Champions Manchester United were looking to bounce back at home against Wimbledon. This however didn’t go to plan as Walid Badir gave the Dons the early lead in the first half, a lead which they kept a hold of until the 73rd minute when United’s Jordi Cruyff scored the equalizer – the match ending 1-1.

In the Midlands Aston Villa who had started the season positively grabbed more points, a hard fought 1-0 victory over Bradford City, Homes Under The Hammer’s own Dion Dublin with the games only goal.

It was a 5-goal thriller including a Kevin Phillips hat-trick as Sunderland battered Derby County 5-0, Gavin McCann and Niall Quinn getting in on the goals themselves. Michael Gray bagged a brace of assists in a game which lifted Sunderland to 5th in the league.

2 red cards, 2 goals apiece and 1 coming in the final 5 minutes of the game! Leicester vs Liverpool was a cracker which ended 2-2, Leicester taking the lead in just 2 minutes after a Gerrard mistake – Tony Cottee slotting it in. A Michael Owen double before half time gave Liverpool the healthy lead, a lead which seemed even safer 5 minutes into the second half when Frank Sinclair was given a straight red card for a nasty one on Titi Camara. All went Pete Tong in the 86th though for Liverpool as Muzzy Izzet sealed a point for the Foxes.

None other than Thierry Henry scored the only goal for Arsenal to beat Southampton 1-0, meanwhile Watford was causing an upset in the final match of the day, Allan Smart scoring the games only goal to take all 3 points from a lackluster Chelsea side.

There were 4 games on the Sunday, Everton beating West Ham 1-0 after a Francis Jeffers thunderbolt, whilst Leeds cruised past Middlesbrough thanks to goals from Michael Bridges and Harry Kewell.

Then, Sunday got bloody interesting indeed! Tottenham were laughing at half time against Coventry, a cool 1-0 lead thanks to Steffen Iversen in a game short of chances. Then, the lads likely were given orange slices! Second half saw Spurs score another 2 goals within 2 minutes to go 3-0 up – Chris Armstrong and Oyvind Leonhardsen scoring. But it wasn’t over, Coventry instantly responded with Robbie Keane breaking the Spurs defence before Yousesef Chippo scored in the 75th. A really tight game which Spurs only just saw through, winning 3-2.

But then, this happened… Alan Shearer happened. Newcastle United 8, Sheffield Wednesday 0 – or to correct that further, Alan Shearer 5, Sheffield Wednesday 0. Yes, the Geordie legend was one short of a double-hattrick in a game which saw 8 goals scream past a helpless Kevin Pressman in the Wednesday nets. Aside from Shearer, Aaron Hughes, Kieron Dyer and Gary Speed were allowed to score also. More surprisingly, this was Newcastle’s FIRST win of the season and saw them lifted from bottom, to second from bottom!

1999 Fantasy Premier League?

Let’s pretend for a moment that the FPL, as it stands in all it’s glory today, existed during this, GW6 of the 1999-2000 season.

Let’s go through what would be the Team of the Week and the star performers…

ST ST ST MID MID MID DEF DEF DEF DEF GK -

Steffen Iversen = Alan Shearer = Kevin Phillips = Muzzy Izzet = Kieron Dyer = Nobby Solano = Tony Adams = Gareth Southgate = Aaron Hughes = Michael Gray = Alec Chamberlain =

1 goal, 2 assists and 3 bonus 5 goals, 1 assist, 3 bonus too. INSANE! 3 goals, 3 bonus 1 goal, 1 assist, 3 bonus 1 goal, 1 clean sheet, 2 assists, 2 bonus 2 assists, 1 clean sheet, 1 bonus 1 assist, 1 clean sheet, 3 bonus 1 clean sheet, 3 bonus 1 goal, 1 clean sheet 2 assists, 1 clean sheet, 2 bonus 1 clean sheet, 7 saves, 3 bonus

15 points 27 points.

17 points 13 points 16 points.

10 points 12 points 9 points 14 points 16 points 11 points 160 POINTS

This in your head yet?

Jack

Ryan is an Arsenal fan. He’s essentially been spouting absolute nonsense about fantasy football matters since 2012. He also happens to host the @BangAveragePodcast I started this article at least half a dozen times.

Stop. WAIT… That is a complete pork pie-esque fabrication of the lesser-known truth.

I contemplated starting this article half a dozen times…one for each email received from Ash (@FPLHINTS) with the reminder of the article deadline. Admittedly it was due sooner, but at least I have now passed the 50-word mark!

In fairness my good friend Ash did tell me not to focus on FPL too much if I didn’t want to and it’s for a good reason too. Here is a little secret that some close to me already know (in addition to the 7 regular Bang Average Podcast listeners); somewhere along the way, I fell out of love with Fantasy Football and quite honestly…I’m ok with that!

I want my words to leave a positive reflection, so despite some of the negative connotations thrown towards fantasy in this post, I have an incredible amount to be thankful towards the game for.

Almost 7 Years ago, I wrote an article entitled “Fantasy Football: Why Bother” wherein I waxed lyrical about my love for all things fantasy and how it had encapsulated my heart, mind, body and soul…fine whatever – it wasn’t that dramatic – but it was raw, genuine and to be honest I meant every f*cking word of it. Here’s an excerpt: It’s a question I am asked repeatedly on a Saturday afternoon, typically when the Mrs wants to go to B&Q and I explain that I’d rather watch Soccer Saturday to find out if a defender from a team I don’t support keeps a clean sheet away from home. It’s a difficult paradigm to explain because in all honesty I ask myself the same question at times.

So, perhaps it’s because my four appearances for the local U16 team during my youth didn’t quite satisfy my urge to prove myself on the global stage as the next George Best. Perhaps it’s the involvement and interaction the game provides. Perhaps it’s both in my case, it’s hard to say.

Now I have played the game in some form or another for the best part of two decades. Older farts such as myself and many of my fellow writers for this magazine will well remember writing out lists of potential players, agonising over player selection and posting off my team only to forget about it a month later.

That historical mainstream approach was to get excited in July/August only for the appeal to die down as the season progresses. It’s different now of course with the constant stream of content and coverage meaning that it is increasingly difficult to forget about your fantasy football team and even more so when you’ve spent the almost a decade as a fantasy football social media account…

BTW… The Euros are in full flow and the FPL powers that be decided it was a good idea to launch the new season 50+ days before the commencement of GW1…cue auto-pick team set and forget for the next 6 weeks…

Fast forward to 2020. Following the first Covid-19 lockdown and enforced postponement of pretty much everything (never mind football) I had a distinct change in attitude towards the game. When Project Restart came around and Premier League returned on June 17th, 2020, I had lost my appetite for the game to a large extent.

To be honest, I probably felt the restart had come about too soon but the crippling realisation was that I hadn’t missed the game as much as I most certainly would have done in the years previous.

Now – and I want to ensure clarity around this. This was very much my personal position and regardless of whether you share this or have a complete opposite perspective. Again, that’s ok.

Fantasy for me over the years was always less about the game, the points the rankings etc. – it was about the community, the people that I met as a result of a common interest…the interactions and engagement around the game from people from all corners of the globe that piqued my interest more so than a differential clean sheet defender with an assist to his name.

What lockdown taught me specifically, fantasy or no fantasy, was that those people, those interactions, that engagement was there regardless of if FPL matches were on-going and in many cases to a greater extent.

Ash (@FPLHINTS) won’t mind me saying this, but I’ve probably spoken with him more in the past 9 months than in the previous 9 years. That’s nothing to do with anything other than the fact that we shared a common interest across the past year for running and were in a fortunate position of being able to support and push each other on.

I’m under no illusions. I speak with people every single day from different cultures, backgrounds, countries, faiths, etc. and many of whom I would not have met in any other circumstance than a shared interest in fantasy and a penchant for social media. My revelation really wasn’t that I had to have fantasy football in my life – more so, I needed to have like minded people in my life to interact and engage on a regular basis.

So, is there any positive spin from all of this? Well whilst I may have disengaged with Fantasy to a greater extent, I did invest more so on myself and my own well-being.

At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic I found myself working from home and with that came additional time each morning and evening that previously would have been earmarked as commute time to the office.

Embarrassingly for me to admit, I had let my own health deteriorate to an extent, increasingly gained weight over the past few years and had a terrible approach to diet, sleep and exercise. Guys in a similar age bracket (mid 30s) may resonate with this in that increasing demands on your time through work, raising a young family and a multitude of other “reasons”. I will stop short of saying “excuses” because I genuinely believe it can be tough to strike a balance between work, play and well-being. Real life can be challenging and overwhelming at times – no doubt. So I hadn’t previously felt the need to hold myself accountable for my own health when there was something else that required more priority in life.

My good friend Jack Goodwin, who might also be eye-balling this article, says “If you want time, you make time.” It’s a powerful statement and no doubt someone else said it first, but it resonates with me. It’s why I am writing this at 1am on a Wednesday evening. It’s why I run at 6am in the morning because quite simply if I don’t make the time to do the things that I want - they do not get done.

Jack’s not wrong.

- Ole Gunner Solskjaer

Therein was the real issue. There were times across the past season where I didn’t want to make time for fantasy and so I didn’t. Biggest kicker. Being disengaged with Fantasy this past season had some unexpected consequences. I peaked at 2k OR, spent 20+ Gameweeks in the “Holy Grail” of the top 10k and finished 13k OR…easily my best finish for a number of years.

Let me be clear – my strong performance this year doesn’t prove being less engaged helps your performance at all – I think it simply proves there’s multiple ways to play the game. Of course, play it well and appreciate that there is a combination of luck and skill along the way. The percentage split between luck and skill has been long debated but I would probably place it 75/25 in favor of luck which again is not an opinion shared by all.

So, highlights for this season past when I think back on it? It’s not the strong overall rank finish at all to be honest. It’s the fact that I got to know and engage with people I have known for years through fantasy football on multiple different interests. It’s the fact that across the course of the season I dropped approx. 55lbs /25kg and put myself in a healthy weight and position moving forward. It’s the fact that over the past year I’ve clocked in around 2000km total. It’s the fact that whilst I’m never going to win any races, I went from struggling to jog 1km to running 5k, 10k, half marathons and I did it with the support of friends, family and a community that has grown around me from fantasy football beginnings to a point where I find it difficult to place where it started. Finishing a 5k for the first time under 30mins doesn’t sound like much to some runners but from a complete unfit standing start that was a milestone for me, more so than the subsequent sub 28, 25, 22, 20min 5k times clocked.

From a fantasy football perspective, the highlight isn’t even close… Sergio Aguero, Triple Captain GW38. What an incredible send off for an all-time Premier League legend. Nothing else compared throughout the season to that final day appearance and 2 goals from the bench! AGUEROOOOOOO one last time in FPL was an incredibly fitting finish. The differential points were appreciated also!

Back in 2012 when we started posting previews on upcoming fantasy football Gameweeks I couldn’t have imagined the scale it has reached now. From a handful of dedicated accounts back then to quite literally thousands of dedicated accounts talking all things fantasy. The landscape has evolved dramatically to include accounts, sites, blogs, vlogs, YouTube, etc. And whatever the f*ck Twitch is… I still don’t get that one! There’s something for everyone and in it’s essence it’s why I agreed air my thoughts here in the first place – A great opportunity to showcase different aspects of a community playing the same game across a magazine format through a collection of different writers with vastly different perspectives on the game.

Kudos to Ash (@FPLHINTS) for running with it. And with the competitive element in mind, please note that despite the two of us running approx. 3000km during lockdown…I’m still faster!

Last but not least, Pro Tip for the upcoming season: If for some reason you accidentally have John Stones set as your captain for a given Gameweek for the love of God don’t forget to switch it again the following week.

Follow Ryan on Twitter @FantasyYIRMA, but be careful mentioning running to him if you want to enjoy the rest of your day.

Adnan Hajrulahovič is a fantasy football enthusiast from Ljubljana (Slovenia) with an academic background in MLIS. He has a career average overall rank of 15K. Outside of FPL he enjoys playing football, basketball, hockey and chess.

@ FPLBaldEagle24

The Beginning It only feels like yesterday when I first heard about FPL. Seven years ago, my friends told me about it when playing football. They were already few months in for that particular season, so they told me I needed to wait for the next one to join in. So that’s what I did. I knew nothing about FPL. I was only given a few pointers just days before the season started. All I was told was that I needed to pick 15 players within budget!

I didn’t know much other than the fact that Chelsea won the title the previous season. I thought if I picked some players from the teams, that I already knew about, I couldn’t go wrong. With hindsight, I must admit my Gameweek 1 team was strange looking. I remember I got myself two tried and tested Chelsea defenders – Terry & Ivanović for 7M – as they were supposed to score goals and not concede many. But they conceded few goals in those early weeks and Terry even got a red card for good measure.

That was my welcome to the FPL. It was already personal. I’m very competitive in pretty much everything sports related so you can imagine my frustrations when things didn’t go my way. After 5 Gameweeks I was around 3 million in the world, and last in my mini-league. It was around that time I found out about chips and decided to use my wildcard.

As the days went by, I started to take the game very seriously so I read all that I could on the internet at that time and watched the games live. I just wanted to beat my friends. By the time we got to midseason I was already in mid-table in our main ML, and I think I already started to get a good feeling about the game. I eventually finished second in my friends mini-league. I was proud that I cut down the lead from around 200 points at some point to around 30 and that was against someone who already had multiple FPL seasons under his belt and definitely knew what he was doing.

I finished my season at 71k overall and with a red arrow. I remember that lively as De Gea was chasing golden glove in the last game versus BOU and I owned Chris Smalling who scored an own goal and lost his clean sheet in 93rd minute. He went from 8 points (2 bonus points) to 0 in the last minute of the game. I was fuming as you can imagine.

I’m telling you all this because it was a fast learning curve and useful experience. I learnt much more about FPL in that rookie period than any subsequent season. But nevertheless, the passion was well and truly there – I was officially an addict. I thought I was equipped enough for next season. I couldn’t wait for it to begin so I could have a proper pre-season preparation for the first time and do better.

The Ascent So, I had all summer to process the first season and see what worked for me and what didn’t.

First of all, I had more time to prepare for the start. I read some articles about newly promoted teams and watched some pre-season games. I was now familiarized with the teams and knew what I could expect from them. I knew there were big transfers before every season, so I followed that too. That’s pretty much all I did initially. I took in the information about transfers, potential key players in new teams and picked the team that I felt confident in.

Next thing I needed to do was to try to minimize the mistakes I made in my debut season. So, after evaluating it, I knew I had to slightly change my approach to the game. I noticed I took quite a lot of hits, which in itself I don’t mind if my hand is forced but I knew that was not actually the case.

I made a lot of mistakes by getting players who I then needed to sell in a short space of time. I told myself I needed to plan better as I can’t be just throwing away precious points. To try and attack the best fixtures was the next logical thing I had to do. I didn’t pay much attention to fixtures in the first season. Of course, there’s a higher chance for points when strong teams play a weaker ones.

Those two changes were the main ones, but I think it’s worth mentioning two other things and that’s building Team Value (TV) early on and looking at stats. I know a lot of managers don’t care about team value and still do well in FPL, but I do pay attention to that. It doesn’t mean I do my transfers just for the sake of TV, but I definitely hate losing value on players so sometimes I do an early transfer because of that, especially in the first part of the season. In fact, it helped me quite a lot in the second part of the season when I was activating my second wildcard.

I finished in the Top 5k by the end of my second season which was a very proud moment for me, I won my main mini-league for the first time and it definitely felt good. I knew how much time I put into FPL, so it was nice to see all the hard work pay off. At that moment I felt I had my first proper season when I knew what I was doing.

The next goal was to maintain that rank in future seasons. Of course, every season is a different story.

So the biggest challenge for me was to adapt as quickly as possible. There are so many different trends every season, so what works one season does not mean it will work as efficiently the next time. I try not to force things when I play FPL. What I mean by that is I try recognize what I want to do before I do it and only attack certain Gameweeks when I feel the moment is right.

I follow my intuition a lot. It has served me well for now so I will continue to do so in the future. When I get the feeling like it’s better to wait one more week and use that additional information for better decisions later on, I usually follow it. Of course, we all make mistakes, I’m no exception. It’s just important to try and learn from them and move on.

Game Management And Breaking Into The Top 250 During every season we all have good Gameweeks and bad Gameweeks. It’s easy to say it doesn’t influence our mood when we have a bad one, but we all know it’s not true. It’s human nature to feel down after a bad experience. What I usually do when I have a bad one is I try to focus on the decisionmaking part of it and not the outcome. I know we usually just see what happened at the end and that the things didn’t end up the way we wanted them to end up.

It’s important to remember that FPL is a live game. Things change on a daily basis. The information we had yesterday might not be as useful today when new information comes out. So we make decisions based on information we have at that moment.

After that it’s out of our control. It’s safe to say life feels much better after a good GW, after those I usually try to save a free transfer if my team is still looking good but in some cases, when an opportunity arises, I try to use some of those extra points (and take a hit) to get the players I want in ahead of my rivals. It’s always nice to lead early especially with competition getting better every year.

It’s not an easy thing to do, that’s for sure.

My emerging strategies and take on the game set me up well for my best season to date when I finished 237th overall. That was only in my fourth season. It was a season where I had an unbelievable start as I was never outside of the Top 100K. In Gameweek 10 I was already sitting at 10k. The main thing I remember was that I bought the right players earlier than most of my rivals did. Just to clarify they were not some random picks, eye test and stats backed them up. For example, I got Son in (under Pochettino) when he was still not a certain starter. People stayed away from him, and it took them at least 5 or 6 Gameweeks before they saw him as a legitimate transfer but he already did the damage I needed him to do.

Timing is very important as we know. So the ultimate goal is to recognize those players before our competition does. That season I was lucky enough to have a lot of those calls go my way.

Maintaining My Base The following season with VAR introduced to the Premier League I had a slow start. I’m not the type of manager who suddenly just starts playing very risky, with a team full of differentials. It’s not my style but I’m aware there are managers out there who handle those situations differently. A few low-owned players with potential to be explosive is enough for me. To be honest, I use the same strategy even when I’m sitting higher in the rankings. I never go all in, maybe that’s the reason I will never win FPL. But last season was something altogether completely different with new and unexpected challenges.

Almost the whole season was played in front of empty stadiums, and we had quite a lot of postponed games for different reasons too, (Covid-19, protest incident at Old Trafford, etc.) which was very problematic for FPL managers, and it meant we needed more luck than ever before.

I have to say those postponements were not kind to me as I was player stacked with the wrong teams at the time. It was something we didn’t have any control over, so we just had to lick our wounds and move on. After all, there’s no room for sympathy in this game. Sure, feel sorry for yourself for one day, but then pick yourself up and regroup.

I finished last season at 3240th overall. I made the biggest jump from Gameweek 10 to Gameweek 20, when I climbed from 120k to 1.5k. I remember I took -8 hits two Gameweeks in a row to jump on a super midfield outfit (consisting of Salah, Bruno, KDB, Son, Grealish) earlier than most of my competition.

It paid off handsomely because the premium midfielders kept delivering for me, which is not always the case. It’s important to recognize when to jump off that train too as it can also hinder your team if you stay on those pricey assets for too long.

The biggest advantage I had with them was I had most of the captains covered for the future fixtures.

When some managers were selling one premium player to accommodate another for captain purposes, I already had all of them, or at least most of the key ones.

Talking of premiums and capitalizing on their points, I’ve not really touched upon captaincy. I have to say that the armband is probably one of the most important elements to the game. I just don’t mess around with captaincy picks when there is an obvious one in a certain Gameweek.

I understand you can make huge climbs when your differential captain delivers but it can go both ways and when it goes against you and it’s not a good feeling when it goes horribly wrong. Last season more than a quarter of my points came from my captains, which is huge. Nailing the captaincy can be decisive and we must not ignore this part of the game or take it for granted.

Final Takeaways When people ask me what they should do to finish in the Top 5k I have no simple answer.

I never know where I will finish when the season starts, so I can’t act like I know the answer. We are all students of the game; we’re always learning because every season throws something different at us.

So, I just try to adapt to the season as it goes along, which is a key part of the game play. I know what worked for me in the past and that’s what I’m planning to keep doing.

I’ll read a lot of FPL articles, I’ll do my research before every Gameweek, I’ll watch live games or at least the highlights. I’ll look at stats so I can compare them to my eye test, and I’ll try not to take many hits. And yes, I’ll plan at least four Gameweeks ahead and attack the fixtures.

As stated, I won’t mess around with the armband and crucially I’ll just try to enjoy the game as much as possible. There are so many ways to play the game and still finish high up. It shouldn’t have to be nerve wracking or excruciating from start to finish. Stay true to yourself and trust your decisions – that’s how you’ll get the most out of it.

FPL is my passion and I love it.

Sure, it can be an emotional rollercoaster sometimes but that’s probably one of the reasons I am addicted to this game. I always know I can do better or at least I like to fool myself in thinking that.

Don’t you?

Eagle

FPL Bald Eagle’s Stats!

FIXTURE DIFFICUlTY & Rotation Sequences For the past few years, I’ve devised my own Fixture Difficulty Ratings (FDR) which in turn also generates some useful rotation sequences that are worth considering for the initial Gameweeks. It usually acts as a reference point for me when I'm considering budget defensive pairings during preseason.

This time around, I will cover the first seven Gameweeks. I think my ratings should still be relevant up until that point, as new season performances will then eventually come into play. My ratings are heavily dependent on last season’s team form, so my spreadsheet won’t extend beyond the second international break.

MUN EVE LEI LIV WHU LEE MCI TOT ARS CHE NEW WAT AVL BHA WOL BRE BUR NOR SOU CRY

GW1 GW2 GW3 IB GW4 GW5 GW6 GW7 IB Max Rating = 21 19 LEE sou wol NEW whu AVL EVE 17 SOU lee bha BUR avl NOR mun 17 WOL whu nor MCI bha BUR cry 16 nor BUR CHE lee CRY bre MCI 15 new LEI CRY sou MUN lei BRE 14 mun EVE bur LIV new WHU WAT 14 tot NOR ARS lei SOU che liv 14 MCI wol WAT cry CHE ars AVL 13 bre CHE mci 1 NOR bur TOT bha 13 CRY ars liv AVL tot MCI SOU 13 WHU avl SOU mun LEE wat wol 12 AVL bha tot WOL nor NEW lee 11 wat NEW BRE che EVE mun tot 11 bur WAT EVE bre LEI cry ARS 11 lei TOT MUN wat BRE sou NEW 9 ARS cry avl BHA wol LIV whu 9 BHA liv LEE eve ARS lei NOR 9 LIV mci LEI ars WAT eve bur 9 eve MUN new WHU mci WOL che 8 che BRE whu TOT liv BHA LEI

3: Easy Top 4 team v team in bottom half Top 10 team v newly promoted team Finished at least 8 places above them

FPlHINTS RATINGS

2021-22 Season

To clarify, I’m not using any algorithms, complicated formulas or external stats – it’s all selfexplanatory and based on certain definitions with each game either being classified as being difficult, easy or reasonable. I hope you find it beneficial to your early season planning.

2: Reasonable 11-17 team v newly promoted team Close proximity in league (3 places ~) Home advantage v 5-17 team Top 4 team playing away v certain teams

1: Difficult v top 4 team Certain derby matches Away disadvantage / long travel distance Top 6 teams playing against each other New manager factor

FIXTURE DIFFICUlTY & Rotation Sequences Aston Villa Brighton

wat NEW bur WAT

BRE EVE

che EVE BRE LEI

mun CRY

tot ARS

2

Leeds Brighton

mun EVE bur WAT

bur EVE

LIV new WHU BRE LEI CRY

WAT ARS

3

Aston Villa Wolves

wat NEW lei TOT

BRE MUN

che EVE wat BRE

mun sou

tot NEW

4

Arsenal Newcastle

bre CHE WHU avl

mci SOU

NOR bur mun LEE

TOT wat

bha wol

5

Leeds Arsenal

mun EVE bre CHE

bur mci

LIV new WHU NOR bur TOT

WAT bha

1

6/7 home fixtures (86% reasonable)

4/7 home fixtures and two easy fixtures

4/7 home fixtures

Mostly reasonable run of games until IB2

Mostly reasonable run of games until IB2

Thoughts from FDR Based on my bespoke FDR, it seems as if Manchester United have the most generous run of games between Gameweek 1 and the second international break. With this in mind, I would seriously consider getting triple United cover for the start of the season. Of the top 4 teams it seems as if Chelsea have the trickiest run of

Illustrations based on fplhints.com defined fixture difficulty levels and isn't listed in any order x5 Defensive pairings / rotation sequences for up to 7 Gameweeks

Easy fixture based on 20/21 standings Reasonable fixture based on 20/21 standings Difficult fixture based on 20/21 standings Bench player suggestion International break

caps lock indicates home games lower case indicates away games

games – facing Arsenal, Liverpool, Tottenham and Manchester City within the first 6 Gameweeks which will pose a significant challenge to the newly crowned champions of Europe. Man City also have some tough opening games but that won’t put me off from having City assets. Two teams that finished just outside the top 4 that I would consider buying players from are Leicester and Everton based on their easier run of games.

On the flipside, Crystal Palace could potentially struggle with the initial games. They will also have a new manager at the helm and their current transition will not help them. Newly promoted Norwich will also have a rough ride as they once again face Liverpool in their opening game. Watford will avoid teams from the Top 6 before the second international break and could be worth considering for budget options. Surprisingly, Newcastle had a good finish to the end of last season and with their opening games I wouldn’t put it past them to have a good start so long as they haven’t lost any of their newfound momentum.

Thoughts from Rotation sequences I found it trickier to find defensive pairings this time around than previous seasons – especially with the fixtures of the newly promoted teams. This may be in part be due to me focusing on 7 Gameweeks, rather than 4 and with a stricter ratings criteria. I’ve identified 5 rotation sequences that I think are worth thinking over. As always, only consider benching budget defenders and avoid doing so with those that are in-form.

WORD SEARCH CHALLENGE

We all know that no FPL team is complete without a 4.0 defender. Often, they're easily forgotten with their lack of game time. But sometimes they can also become bona fide cult heroes.

I've hidden twenty-two defenders in this word search that have been listed with a starting price of 4.0 over the past 10 years.

Can you name them all? You won't get any clues. The first person to successfully crack this word search will win a prize! Submit your final answers here.

Jack’s Final Thoughts When Ash approached me about getting involved in the Magazine, I (like many) was incredibly sceptical about not only the logistics, but the longevity of something so outside of the confines of Twitter - where the FPL community thrives most.

But, as we discussed plans, ideas, and focussed more on what we want to achieve rather than what to avoid, we really got rolling on creative ideas.

pages of unique content which in turn doesn’t bore your eyes to tears.

Ash, thank you so much for giving me this platform – my god you micro-managed this to death – but I think, in the end, turned out alright, right? Ha!

Sure, this is issue #1, you’re going to find fault in my design per-page, but it’s a start!

It’s been a pleasure putting these pages together – writers, thank you so much for making it easy to slot in your pieces and giving me some incredibly interesting views on FPL I never thought existed. Ryan, thanks?

A start which is a result of many (many) long nights thinking of ways to create

On that note, I have to skiddly-doo, I’ll see you in Issue #2!

Click this picture for a surprise…

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