FPL: Our expert’s perfect team for Gameweek 1 – featuring new Arsenal & Man Utd signings

As part of my duties as 3 Added Minutes’ resident Fantasy Premier League expert, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks offering up all manner of advice ahead of the start of the new season – but now, with less than a week to go before we submit our final team, it’s time for me to stop drafting and offer up my final team.

Well, my likely final team, anyway. This is the FPL, after all, and even those of us blessed with conviction in our opinions can’t help ourselves from making tweaks and assessing alternatives. But today, I’m going to reveal my team, the rationale behind it, and look at the alternatives I’m considering.

There’s my team, in all it’s glory. It follows the basic principles I generally adhere to – as cheap as possible at the back, with as many heavy hitters up front as I can find, due deference paid to fixture difficulty and a plan to bench boost in Gameweek 2. But how did I arrive at this specific squad? Let’s dive in…

Goalkeepers & Defenders

If there’s one position I feel uncertain about, it’s my first-choice goalkeeper. As I explained in an article looking at the best budget shot-stoppers, Wolves’ José Sá comes out of the statistical analysis as the best £4.5m goalkeeper, but there are irritatingly persistent rumours that he might leave for Turkey or Saudi Arabia before the end of the window.

If I trusted Bournemouth’s defence more after the transfer window, I’d probably pick Djordje Petrović, but at least the likelihood that I’ll have £4.0m back-up who actually plays in Martin Dúbravka makes me feel better. Should it look like Sá is leaving, I’ll switch it up.

At the back, I gradually persuaded myself to hold fire on Jeremie Frimpong until I’ve had a proper look at him and went as cheap as humanly possible. The likely starters at centre-back for Burnley enable me to spend far more in midfield and up front, while the Clarets’ amazing defensive record in the Championship offers hope that they won’t just be making up the numbers.

I explained in my article about the best budget defenders why I think players like Marc Guéhi and Emmanuel Agbadou appeal to me (cheap but with significant defensive contribution potential in good back lines), while Ezri Konsa is in due to Aston Villa’s early fixture difficulty, although I doubt he lasts the season.

A part of the appeal of the triple Burnley set-up is that with a home game against Sunderland in Gameweek 2, in theory their softest game of the season, I can now use my first bench boost that week. Every player in my squad has a promising fixture in the second week of the season and there’s only one attacker v defender clash (Chris Wood against Guéhi, who may well have moved by then). Normally, bench boosts go hand in hand with wildcards, but this offers me more flexibility with my most valuable chip. Of course, if Dúbravka ends up being Burnley’s back-up or somebody gets injured, that could end up looking stupid, but that’s always the risk. I’ll backtrack if the Slovakian seems set to warm the bench.

Midfield

Starting from the top – I think Mohamed Salah is an automatic and compulsory inclusion, at least for the start of the season, as his points ceiling is simply higher than any other player in the game. I prefer him to, say, Erling Haaland (a decision I explained in this article) and can’t imagine excluding him. Salah is one of only two players in my starting squad that I consider to be completely nailed and beyond question.

Cole Palmer is the other. His scoring potential is through the roof, Chelsea have a gentle enough run of fixtures to start the season, and he was excellent in the Club World Cup. That dry spell last season seems to be well behind him, and I trust him to pile up the points early doors.

I like Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall as the best cheap midfield enabler in teams which intend to play with three strikers as their default, and Kaoru Mitoma has a massive ceiling at just £6.5m. Moisés Caicedo and Tomas Souček are among the players I considered at the budget midfielder position, and I’ll be keeping a keen eye on Georginio Rutter at just £6.0m, but I think Mitoma is too good to pass up at that price point and while Dewsbury-Hall is something of a gamble, I like the potential.

If there’s one decision in this team that I’m still less than happy with, it’s the inclusion of Bryan Mbeumo. He’s a brilliant player but Manchester United are one team I really don’t trust, he could be caught in an awkward rotational system with all the new signings, and if I could find a way to shave £0.5m off any other position that I was truly happy with, I’d like turn him into Florian Wirtz.

At the end of the day, though, I didn’t love any of the compromises I’d have to make to make that change and Mbeumo is still a brilliant, proven FPL asset. If there’s one central decision that’s likely to change before the start of the season, though, it’s this one. One thing that I don’t love about Wirtz, by the way? He looks set for a massively high ownership. If he starts slowly (and Liverpool’s early games aren’t easy) then he could be sold in droves and his price could plummet.

I’m always trying to avoid players whose price has a higher chance of dropping, which are usually players who are widely owned by have a high minutes or performance risk attached to them. Early price drops can be brutal, and it takes a while before they stop mattering too much. Mbeumo isn’t risk free on that front, but signing Wirtz is taking a bit of a chance. He would need to start quickly.

Forwards

For a while, I was debating whether to include Ollie Watkins (safe pair of hands with great fixtures) or Viktor Gyökeres (massive ceiling but ultimately an unknown quantity) but eventually settled on both, simply because I just don’t love many of the mid-priced or budget options up front.

A lot of people expect Nottingham Forest to struggle this season but failing to follow up over-achievement isn’t automatically impossible and they’ve kept the core of their squad together. Wood is a reliable scorer with good early fixtures, and I much prefer him to the alternatives at £7.5m.

All of the cheaper forwards are a minutes risk right now. We don’t know who will start up front for Everton, it’s impossible to say how many minutes Liam Delap will get, and so on and so forth. The only forward below £7.5m I like is at all is Jørgen Strand Larsen, and I just think Wood is the better pick to kick the season off, especially when fixtures are factored in.

If I do crack and go to Wirtz over Mbeumo, it’s likely that swapping Wood for Strand Larsen is my starting point. It’s also possible that a £7.5m striker convinces me to pick them over Gyökeres for the first few weeks, enabling me to improve my defence and bring Wirtz in at the same time. But the ceiling on Gyökeres is just so high that I don’t want to miss out, and I trust Wood more than most players appear to.

I won’t promise that I don’t go back to the transfer screen before next Friday evening – but this will be very close to my final squad and hopefully highlights the thought process I use and the philosophy behind it. It’s all about finding players with low floors and high ceilings, planning ahead, maximising spending where the most points will be scored, and trying to avoid expensive fail cases.

No doubt I will be proven wrong in a few areas and some of my assumptions will be wide of the mark. The key is to be in a position in which I’m not losing too much money early on so that I can use my free transfer efficiently to correct my errors – and putting myself in a good spot to be ahead of the curve when the players I really wanted make themselves known. Best of luck to all of you this season.