FPL Strategy, Player recommendations & Team Reveal

Content

1. Introduction

2. Game strategy

3. Rule changes

4. Chip strategies and examples

5. Player recommendations

6. My current team and strategy

Introduction

I’m Thomas (@FPL_Bronx on X) and a seasoned fantasy player. I’ve played the Danish fantasy games (holdet.dk) since the early 2000’s and over the past four seasons I have transitioned to Fantasy Premier League (FPL) as my primary fantasy game.

My first season I learned the game and was introduced to Twitter (X) halfway through the season with a final rank of 32,694.

My second season I finished 2,171 and this was the first season I started working with commercial analytics models - prediction data and solvers. My best rank is 1,007 in the 2023/24 season.

Over the past three seasons I am ranked 9^th overall and 1^st in Denmark. I aspire to become the best all time FPL manager.

Link to all time world rankings: https://www.premierfantasytools.com/best-fpl-managers-list/

Rank history:

My approach is very analytical, and I use several prediction data sources and solvers to generate ideas for how to set up my team for different scenarios.

Game strategy

The consensus across the FPL community is that historically patience is rewarded with good ranks. It still is.

“Putting yourself in the position to get lucky without putting yourself in a position to get f***ed”

Make sure you set up a robust strategy with robust players in most (if not all) positions. This will allow you to stack free transfers (up to 5) that can be used more aggressively the more you have accumulated. Making risky moves has much lower downside from a comfortable position with availability of more resources.

Other than that, your chip strategy (covered later) is very important along with captaincy and fixture rotation.

Seeking out which are the best captains for the coming horizon (5-10 gameweeks) is a good place to start to set up your premium players such as Salah, Haaland, and Palmer. Try and cover as many important weeks as possible. It’s not worth it using multiple transfers swapping them around for a single gameweek unless the captaincy difference is very large.

The “rotation pairs” are an important part of the team too, especially with cheap players, as you will be fine benching them in several gameweeks. The bench depth of the team is crucial for long term success. I would advise no more than one “dead” player (never expected to start in your team).

Rule changes

If you are already aware of the rule changes, you can scroll to “Effects of the changes”.

Short summary of the changes:

1.      Defensive Contributions Points: Players can earn 2 points if they reach a threshold of Clearances, Blocks, Interceptions, Tackles, and Recoveries.

2.      All chips in each half of the season, thus two of each chips (Wildcard, Free Hit, Bench Boost, Triple Captain)

3.      More fantasy assists and clearer rules for fantasy assists

4.      In GW16 every is bumped up to 5 free transfers due to AFCON starting

5.      Tweaks to bonus system

Overall, the effect of this is that a much wider pool of players are now worth considering, as the DEFCON points are significant enough that you can consider having players with very low goal contribution in your team. Just remember that pure DEFCON players are not as valuable in rotation than players with goal contributions.

Simply put – 2 players share 1 spot in the team:

Two players predicted to score 4 points each week is 16 points in 4 weeks

Two players rotating predicted to score 5 or 3 points in perfect rotation is 20 points in 4 weeks

The players are all equally good for long term value (assuming same prices for all four players), but the rotation pairing becomes very important.

On top of that, we will have more resources available – more free transfers in total across the season, an extra freehit, triple captain and bench boost compared to “normal”. This will mean many more paths that are very close to being “optimal” and we can seek to find the path that fits our playstyle the best.

More assists in general is nice – it’s fun to get points, but the change itself should not warrant a big shift in our thinking as the players other than assist focused players being boosted slightly.

The bonus system tweaks are interesting. The short summary is that penalty takers in general got weaker – mostly for forwards, tacklers got a small boost and goalkeepers too. Although the goalkeeper change seems small, it’s quite significant. In games with clean sheets, it’s often very few BPS between defenders and goalkeepers that make the difference on how many bonus points you get. By my calculation we should see a rise of about 25% in bonus points across the goalkeeper category, fairly evenly distributed across goalkeepers/teams.

Chip strategies

Chips need planning around to extract the most value from them, and they are a crucial part of managing risk in FPL as well. Normally the chips are used around double gameweeks, but we have a full set of chips to use in the first half, where we do not expect any doubles.

The downsides of getting it wrong is much lower in this first half of the season, so there is room to be creative. Just remember to try and be robust, so you don’t end up in a bad position.

The four chips (planning difficulty):

Triple captain (easy)

Pick whichever week you believe a player will be the highest scorer of the first half of the season. Salah, Haaland, and Palmer all have a home game against Sunderland in this period, and it’s easy to target one of those. Don’t prioritize this chip over the others and make your decision later.

Free Hit (medium)

This chip is very flexible. I’d advise to either save it for a rainy day or target the largest difference between Haaland & Salah to break captaincy rotation.

Salah teams: GW6 (Haaland)

Haaland teams: GW14 (Salah) or GW4 (Salah)

Salah & Haaland teams: GW11 (Palmer)

Wildcard (hard)

So many options this year. You can go early and aggressive, stay flexible and plan it later or you can deliberately use it late to set up for second half of the season and hope for an “unusual event” that will postpone games.

Wildcard windows I like:

GW2 - BB1 synergy and quick optimal structure

GW4 - Transfer window ended, LIV swing (early Haaland bet?)

GW13 - Haaland time

Late (16-19) - safe and prepares for 2nd half fixture bonanza

Not one right way, I like first and last.

Bench boost (hard)

Looks great on paper, comes with great opportunity cost.

I think waiting comes with greater risk than just getting it done GW1. If not in GW1-3 you shouldn’t plan it, just play it when decent.

The sooner you do it, the sooner you can get optimal structure for your team, as the bench boost should be played with 15 active players to maximize the value of it.

Examples

A short note on the examples – the chip strategies are likely heavily linked to your premium structure, especially if you like to play aggressively. If you like to bet on Salah like most people, find a chip strategy that plays well into that. On the contrary, if you would like to take a bet on Haaland to fly up the ranks, I really like one of the alternative aggressive styles.

Both premiums can be fit into a more balanced or defensive strategy.

I’m personally very inclined to playing the bench boost GW1, wildcard GW2 strategy as I find a lot of the players I want for the season are not attractive GW1 but very attractive from GW2. Also the players I like in GW1 are not very appealing from GW2 and onwards.

Player recommendations

Before I recommend specific players, it’s important to talk about team structure and value in the respective categories.

Historically, goalkeepers have always been very high value in terms of points per million, and they are now even better with the slight improvement of their BPS. Relatively, defenders have caught up more with the addition of DEFCON points. That is the cheap defenders especially, yet premium defenders are still valuable as you should prioritize spending as much of your budget into high value (per million) assets.

Midfielders are slightly lower than defenders in general per million, but they hold most of the captaincy alternatives such as Salah, Palmer and Bruno Fernandes, where value per million is not the most important metric to guide you.

Lastly, forwards now have a harder time scoring points with lower BPS from penalties and other BPS changes in favor of more defensive minded assets, that sees the forward category come to a level where you essentially must focus on minimizing losses.

I would genuinely not have a single forward in my FPL team if it was possible to not start any of them, that’s how bad it has become. But we must find the best of the bad alternatives so that we can set our starting 11s and not risk getting 0 pointers from bench options not getting minutes.

That leads to the structure of the team, and no surprise I find myself in a position where I want to invest budget into only two forwards and a 4.5 and utilize one forward each week and potentially two when the rotation across the team favors it. Other than that, it’s mainly a cover for the first forward to ensure at least one playing forward.

I would want both 5 defenders and midfielders that fit into my rotation plan and then mix the formation up from week to week.

For goal keepers I think there are plenty of options. Rotating 4.5s, going 4.0/5.0 or 4.0/5.5 can all be viable. Personally, I prefer the options with a 4.0 this season.

Let’s jump into the different categories. I’ve listed my order for relevant price points and marked my favorite players in bold.

The picks are based on my long term view and not necessarily GW1 recommendations as strategies may vary. As such, some players fit better into certain fixture rotations and will be better for a specific team than I’ve ranked them here.

Subject to full fitness and under the assumption the players stays at current club and without competition signed for the player.

If a player is not present I don’t see them as interesting for the longer term. They may still be interesting for certain periods or in very specific rotation strategies.

Goalkeepers

Defenders

Midfielders

Forwards

My current team and strategy

Currently I’m on the aggressive strategy of bench boost in GW1 onto a Wildcard in GW2 with a free hit in GW6. The fact a lot of the players I like long term are not great in GW1 and I can maximize the bench boost by wildcarding in GW2 is appealing to me when we have so many resources available this season.

Normally, I’m a very patient manager and would favor the late wildcard to take advantage of uncertainty. Although, based on my calculation and risk preferences, my current strategy is competitive, and if not this season, I will never end up with a BB1 WC2 draft.

Planned GW1 team:

Planned GW2 (wildcard) team:

That’s a wrap, hope you liked it. If you want to ask questions, feel free to ask on the posts on X that managerBotten (@Nicobisgaard) and I (@FPL_Bronx) will post.

Good luck with your season however you want to engage with FPL this current season. I’m sure it will be a fun and frustrating tide.

Don’t miss the deadline!