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Our resident FPL expert offers his hints and tips and looks at why we should get ready to bet on Chelsea and sell our Spurs players.
Another deadline looms and that means it’s time to dip back into the world of the Fantasy Premier League and to find out what our resident FPL expert thinks we should do with our transfers this week.
Today our man Matthew Gregory, the owner of a Top 2,000 finish from last season, takes a look at some changes we might need to make to our teams in the near future and looks at clubs we need to buy into and sell out from – but before we hand over, it’s our duty to remind you that it’s a Friday deadline this week, and you’ll need to get your Gameweek 13 decisions done by 18:30 GMT on 29 November.
Selling Man City or all-in on Arsenal?
I’m going to kick things off which a short, simple piece of advice which is probably the most important I’ll give you in this entire column – you probably shouldn’t make any transfers this week.
Partly, that’s because very few teams see a significant shift in the difficult from their last fixture to this, so if your team was set up sensibly then there probably won’t be too many problems facing you this time around. Crucially, though, several teams do start to swings in the strength of their schedule coming up soon, and that makes this a really good time to roll a transfer and save it for when it’s needed more urgently.
With that in mind, this is a good time to look at which teams (and therefore which players) we should be buying and selling over the coming weeks – and which to prioritise.
Let’s start with Chelsea and Arsenal. Both teams are moving rapidly towards a run of relatively gentle games, especially from GW16 onwards. Chelsea, in particular, have an extremely soft string of matches (by Premier League standards, of course) which runs from GW16 all the way to GW23, when they visit the Etihad. That’s a run in which most teams will want, at a minimum, two Chelsea players and probably the full three.
Cole Palmer and Nicolas Jackson are the obvious places to start and moving towards them makes a lot of sense. That doesn’t mean they need to be in place this week, just that I’d strong recommend mapping out your transfers to get there. The next best Chelsea player depends on your team structure, but if Noni Madueke keeps getting minutes then he’ll be a solid buy, as will Levi Colwill.
With Arsenal also entering a gentler run of games and with a morale-boosting win over Nottingham Forest in their back pocket meaning that their recent poor form feels like a while ago already, I’d also want to invest in their assets – Bukayo Saka will always be at the top of the shopping list, but Gabriel and William Saliba are sensible investments too, along with maybe Martin Ødegaard now he’s back in the game.
I’m also looking at Liverpool assets after the next couple of weeks – some tough games out of the way will see them into much less choppy waters for the long haul, so after Chelsea and Arsenal players, that’s where I’m headed. Brighton & Hove Albion players are starting to look good too, although aside from João Pedro their points come from all angles, which makes picking individual players trickier.
Of course, you also have to figure out who to flog to make room. Teams whose opponents get harder soon include Brentford, Forest, Manchester City and, to a certain extent, Tottenham Hotspur. So I’m looking at a future where Son Heung-Min becomes Saka or Palmer, for instance, or where Chris Wood turns into João Pedro – after Forest’s home game against Ipswich Town this weekend, of course. I must admit that I’m still not advocating for selling Erling Haaland but if you disagree and do want to get rid of him, then do it now.
One of the trickiest things when figuring out forward planning, however, isn’t just who to sell and who to buy but who to prioritise. Short of using a wildcard, it’s relatively unlikely that we can sign everyone we want, after all. So if you calculate, for instance, that you can only get one of Palmer or Jackson, how do you know which is more important?
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A key element is replaceability. Ideally, you want a midfield with Saka, Palmer and Mohamed Salah all at the same time, but you may not be able to do the financial gymnastics necessary to make that happen. At that point, the difference in likely value between any given two of them is relatively similar.
But the difference between Jackson’s likely output over the course of that soft run of games and that of, say, Chris Wood or Yoane Wissa when their opponents are much harder is likely to be considerably greater.
The same logic means that replacing defenders is much less important that replacing midfielders or strikers. Defenders score far fewer points and have a much lower ceiling to what they can realistically do – the occasional Trent Alexander-Arnold notwithstanding – than players further forward, so you will have a much higher chance of making a difference in other positions. It might be lovely to pick up Levi Colwill or maybe Malo Gusto for your squad, but switching over to a Jackson is more likely to make a big difference.
You’re more likely to experience a big swing in points – positive or negative! – with deals with see players changed for considerably more or less expensive options at the same positions and by prioritising midfielders, then strikers, then defenders, approximately. It’s for that reason that while it might be tempting to sign Fraser Foster as a cheap goalkeeper who will now play because of Guglielmo Vicario’s fractured ankle, it’s only worth it if you either desperately need a new goalkeeper or if you have the transfers to burn. Given how many priorities you probably have coming up, it’s unlikely that you have that many.
Another point worth making that may be obvious to many is that you can less value out of transferring players out when the outgoing player still has good fixtures. For instance, if you have Son and want Saka, that’s a logical move but why do it when Son has a home game against Fulham? Maybe you want to switch Wood for João Pedro, but don’t do it when they have a game against Ipswich to come. Always try to drive the biggest possible wedge between the value of the player you buy and that of the player you sell.
Captain picks & 3 Added Minutes FC
This is very definitely one of the toughest captain choices of the season so far and I think if you asked 20 different players who they’d pick you’d get at least 10 different answers. Most of the usual suspects have a game that’s either tricky or at least a potential banana skin, and choosing between players like Haaland, Salah, Palmer and Saka is really a lottery.
Which means that this is the kind of week where going for a bit of a gamble has less of a cost. Bryan Mbeumo, for instance, is a great shout with Brentford facing a home game against Leicester City, and he’s scoring at the same sort of rate as the more expensive midfielders anyway. João Pedro is absolutely worth a punt, too. But if you’re feeling risk averse or are well ahead in your mini-league and don’t want a differential, go with form – and that means Salah or Saka.
As always, we’re going to wrap up with an update from my example team, 3 Added Minutes FC – and to be honest, that week was absolutely rubbish, my first real stinker in a while. Only Jarrod Bowen and Lukas Fabianski had the decency to offer me any returns, and all my star players blanked completely. I still think the process to get to this team at this point was pretty solid, but sometimes you just have the wrong assets for the wrong week. It will even out. Probably. Hopefully…
3 Added Minutes had a Gameweek 12 to forget3 Added Minutes had a Gameweek 12 to forget
3 Added Minutes had a Gameweek 12 to forget | Fantasy Premier League
Following my own advice, I won’t be making any transfers this week unless there’s a surprise injury issue. Son will become Saka very soon and I’ll probably move Wood and Wissa on too, but with them all having favourable matches this week I’ll leave them be and roll the transfer for now to maximise their value.
That’s all for this week – may all of your decisions work out better than mine did in Gameweek 12, and may all of your forward planning work out perfectly.
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