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Our resident FPL expert takes a look at how to get the most out of the new Assistant Manager chip.
Another Fantasy Premier League deadline looms, and that means it’s once again time for our resident FPL expert (who just so happened to finish in the global Top 2,000 last year) to offer up his advice.
This week, however, his column will be a little bit different – with the Mystery Chip finally revealed, he’s going to figure out how to get the most points out of it and discuss how it will tie in to wildcard strategy overall. But before we hand over for all of that, a reminder that this week’s deadline is a late one, and you only need to make your decisions by 13:30 GMT on Saturday 14 December. Enjoy the lie-in.
Signing Slot or picking up Pep?
Let’s get right down to business – we now know that the Mystery Chip is in fact the Assistant Manager Chip, and it’s undoubtedly the strangest chip in the game, one which will require some serious forward planning (and a bit of maths) to get the most out of.
Here’s how it works: From GW24 onwards, we will all get the opportunity to activate the chip and add a real-life manager to our squad, who will then rack up points for us according to the results their team puts up and the number of goals they score and concede – full details of the scoring system can be found here. We keep the manager for three weeks and can’t use any other chips during that period.
That last point is key – because now we need to start thinking about the weeks in which we want to use remaining free hit, bench boost and triple captain chips further in advance while we try to identify the ideal time to use the manager chip. As an example, thanks to the postponement of Liverpool v Everton last weekend, we now know that there will be a double gameweek at some point for both teams, and that suddenly becomes the best possible target for chip usage. Remember, with tweaks to this year’s fixture schedule, we don’t expect double gameweeks to be a regular occurrence otherwise.
A triple captain on Mohamed Salah looks pretty tempting, for instance, but there will be other doubles, albeit small ones. The EFL Cup final will create a double for two teams, and the FA Cup semi-finals will generate doubles for four teams – likely to be played on GW33 and 36. We don’t know when Liverpool’s fixture will be rearranged to just yet, but a likely candidate is GW25, when the Reds also face a struggling Wolverhampton Wanderers side at home. I do hope you still have that TC available…
In other words, we’re probably looking to use our assistant manager chips on a three-week period between GW26 and GW32, to avoid clashes with other prime chip-usage opportunities. That narrows things down considerably, and a daunting decision looks a little easier when there are only seven gameweeks to seriously consider – or more, if you’ve already used that triple captain. After all, getting an extra fixture out of Arne Slot makes sense too if you can’t triple skipper Salah.
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The biggest question, however, may be which manager we’re actually going to buy. To make things a little trickier, managers get a significant points bonus for getting positive results against teams at least five places higher than them in the table – so this isn’t as simple as picking out the best three-week run of fixtures for Mikel Arteta or Arne Slot. Managers of less successful teams who hit a few good results in a row will score far more.
To underline the point, FPL also released a table showing the total scores each manager has racked up so far and the best three-week runs each coach has come up with (or would have done had the chip been available). Arteta’s best three weeks would have earned 32 points, for instance, while Slot’s would get 31 – but Andoni Iraola would have been worth a whopping 47 points for the spell during which Bournemouth beat Arsenal and Manchester City.
Clearly, a score like that will be pretty close to the absolute ceiling and anything over 40 will be an exceptional return for your chip – only Iraola would have managed it so far – but it does make it tempting to look for runs from teams who are struggling now but are perhaps set to improve. Perhaps if Manchester United are still in mid-table but are showing signs of quality under Ruben Amorim, you could take him ahead of some games against top six teams. Maybe if a team like Wolves or Crystal Palace, currently stuck near the foot of the table, turn things around, then there will be some big opportunities there.
Those will, however, be the gamblers’ options, and running the numbers makes it hard to recommend going for Gary O’Neil or Oliver Glasner unless you’re struggling and in need of a differential, in which case you may have to take a few punts.
For starters, while most of the managers on the FPL’s list have about 30 points from their best three-week run, remember that’s not an average – 30 will be a very strong score indeed. Looking at the averages, most of the better managers are running in the 6-7 points per gameweek range, meaning you’re typically looking at around 20 points on average from your Assistant Manager chip.
Iraola may have had the best possible individual return from any coach so far, but he still only averages 22.6 points over any given three week spell – and while Slot may only be middle of the pack for his top end score, he averages 24.6 points every three weeks so far, the most of any coach. In other words, unless you need to roll the dice hard, the obvious choices actually will be the best for most players, and all things being even, you’re likely to get more points from Slot than from an Iraola. Targeting a specific run of games may change the equation but if the ideal run was Bournemouth against three members of last season’s top four, then think about how many equivalent three-week spells of games will score horribly. The hit rate will be tiny.
There’s one complication here – the coaches will all cost different amounts. You don’t lose a transfer for picking your coach (although you can use one to change them after playing the chip) but you do need money available to sign them, and they’ll cost between £0.5m and £1.5m. I suspect we can all guess where Slot will be on that scale.
That means that there will also be a balancing act. Sacrificing £1.5m of value on your team won’t always be that rough, but it will still be felt. For that reason, I’m also wondering if a good strategy won’t be to save up your second wildcard for use directly after the Assistant Manager chip has played out – it will make it easier to get the value back quickly in the way you want, and if you run the chip near to GW33, then you can use the wildcard to take full advantage of the impending double gameweeks.
There’s a lot of moving parts with this new chip, but for most players, I suspect that targeting a soft run of games for a good team will be the way to go, and the most likely path towards 30 or more points, while only those who really have to get 40 or more to stand a chance in their mini-leagues should take risks.
Captain picks and 3 Added Minutes FC
As always, I’ll wrap up this week with some thoughts about your captain for the gameweek and an update on my example team, and I have to be honest – it’s been a rough season. I’ve gone from Top 2,000 to barely being within the top three million, this has been my worst season in the game so far, and one of the main reasons is that my captain selections have been absolutely awful.
I’ve had eight two-pointers (and a three) from my captains across the first 15 gameweeks, which has been a major contributing factor to my woeful score (the other being keeping faith with Erling Haaland and not signing Salah). Still, it’s my duty to offer up some opinions, so all I can say is that you may want to do what I don’t.
For me, this a three-way debate – Salah, Bukayo Saka and Cole Palmer are the options. All of them could haul, and probably at least a couple of them will. Statistically, Salah has been better and more consistent than almost anyone else (if I’d just had him in my damned team, I’d not have so many two-pointers…), so he’s my first choice, and then I’m leaning to Palmer ahead of Saka due to Brentford’s awful away form. So flip that, and go for Saka, based on the way my luck’s been going…
Fantasy Premier League
As for my team, I had a good GW15 with 60 points (no thanks to captain Saka) but I now plan to finally correct my long-standing error and sell Haaland and sign Salah – Morgan Rogers is the man coming out and I’m leaning towards Evanilson coming in, although João Pedro is an option. Sadly, I’m £0.2m short of moving to Matheus Cunha. Given my luck this season, Haaland will probably start hauling immediately, of course… I’d love to get rid of Joško Gvardiol, too, but that will have to wait a week as I only have two free transfers.
So there we go – sign Salah, appoint Slot as your assistant, and it’s a much easier game. That’s all for this week – see you next time and until then, may all of you find the right man to stand next to you in the virtual dugout.
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