Fantasy Premier League Gameweek 26: it’s time to drop some Nottingham Forest players - but not Chris Wood
Our FPL expert returns with his Gameweek 26 advice column - and explains which Nottingham Forest players you need to sell.
Another big double gameweek is in the bag and the Fantasy Premier League temporarily returns to normal this week, as Gameweek 26 features the usual ten fixtures with no bells or whistles – not that there aren’t still plenty of difficult decisions to make. Happily, our resident FPL expert is back with his regular advice column to help make those tricky decisions a little more straightforward.
Before we hand over to Matthew (who finished well inside the worldwide Top 2,000 last season, just to offer his credentials), it’s our duty to remind you that this week’s deadline is on Friday once again, at 18:30 GMT ahead of Leicester City’s game against Brentford.
Why it may be time to move on from Chris Wood or Ola Aina
On the face of it, this is a pretty good week to do precious little. Opportunities to roll transfers over are few and far between, especially towards the end of the season with blanks and double gameweeks starting to become a factor, and every transfer becomes more valuable because of the number of changes that you’ll need to make to maximise those weeks. That doesn’t mean you should do nothing, however.
The vast majority of top players have at least two and often three players from Nottingham Forest right now, with Chris Wood, Matz Sels and Ola Aina among the most popular. There’s a good reason for that, as they’re cheap (or at least were at the start of the season) and keep racking up the points – but it might be time to sell some of them.
That’s because Forest have a pretty hideous run of fixtures coming up – Newcastle away, then Arsenal and Manchester City at home. Their chances of making the top four may hinge on the next few weeks, but betting on their players to haul seems a little foolish.
That means that players with triple Forest probably want to thin their ranks a little bit – but who to get rid of? Is it best to move the defenders on, or is it time for Chris Wood to say goodbye?
Aina started the season as a £4.5m defender but now costs a massive £5.4m. Wood, meanwhile, has gone from £6.0m to £7.1m. That means that for a lot of players, if you sell them it becomes horribly expensive to buy them back – once they’re gone, you have to plan for them to be gone for good, and given how good Forest have been this season, that could turn out to be a mistake down the home stretch.
That means you need a plan to replace them – and as it happens, Aina is much easier to replace than Wood, even though there are plenty of strikers around the same price point. That’s because although Aina is the best performing Forest defender, he isn’t all that much better of a bet than Nikola Milenković, Murillo or Neco Williams, who has earned a regular starting place now and only costs £4.4m.
Replacing Wood, on the face of it, isn’t hard either – Matheus Cunha is right there, for instance, at £6.8m, Yoane Wissa and Jean-Philippe Mateta are good options, and so on. So which should you sell? It comes down to whether you think Wood will continue to rank as the single best striker in FPL or regress slightly to the average – or whether Cunha or Mateta will keep their current form up.
A key difference is that if you sell Aina, you can replace him like-for-like at some point and pocket the financial difference to spend further upfield. Midfielders and strikers score more points overall, and you always want to invest more up front than at the back. With Wood, meanwhile, replacing him efficiently means spending everything you get from selling him straight away. In other words, unless you firmly believe that Aina will score way more points than his peers in the Forest defence (he doesn’t have more goal contributions than the others, as you might assume) then you get a better financial deal selling him than Wood.
Because transfers are so precious going forward, I don’t recommend going wild on getting rid of Forest players. My own team has Sels, Aina and Wood – and I’ll be selling Aina only, with the plan of buying one of his peers in and spending the profit somewhere else.
Defensive replacements and captain calls
Of course, selling Aina means working out which defender to buy in his place. It may seem contrary to my previous advice, but I don’t mind spending the profit to sign a more expensive player – because like most players, I’ll be using my wildcard in a few weeks because of the big blank in Gameweek 29. That means I can spend the profit further forward later on, with Bukayo Saka potentially coming back around that time.
What I’m really looking for, though, is a team with decent fixtures, ideally at home, over the next three gameweeks, and Brighton and Fulham catch the eye. Antonee Robinson is a proven performer with relatively gentle fixtures, and I don’t mind taking a punt on Jan Paul van Hecke, although Brighton’s injury issues give me pause when it comes to trusting their back line. Robinson is my personal choice, if he isn’t in your team already.
The advice about keeping hold of transfers also applies to players who are in the final week of their assistant manager chip. Whether you have Arne Slot, David Moyes or Unai Emery – the three most popular choices for people who, like me, went for it straight from the start, I wouldn’t move on. You’d be using a transfer to get points from one week and one week only, and it simply isn’t worth it. That transfer could make all the difference down the home straight.
The last topic that needs to be covered this week is your captain choice – for once, it isn’t glaringly obvious that it should be Mohamed Salah, as Liverpool face an away game against Manchester City, and depending on which version of City turns up there is every chance that it could be a difficult match for Salah’s side.
I still don’t blame anyone for sticking with him, but there is merit in going for Alexander Isak (home to Forest) instead despite Newcastle’s indifferent form, or even Ollie Watkins given that Chelsea, his next opponent, are struggling too. Still, I’m leaning towards Salah. When it doubt, it’s the Egyptian. It’s a rule which has stood me in good stead for months now.
That’s all for this week – best of luck, and may the players you sell not come back to bite you on the backside. See you next week.