Fantasy Premier League Gameweek 1: Hints, tips and our expert's final team ahead of Man Utd v Fulham
Haaland v Watkins and figuring out the final details - our resident FPL expert offers his first advice column of the season.
The time has come at last. From 18:30 BST on Friday, we will no longer be able to spend hours deciding between £4.5m defenders, we will no longer be able to agonise over whether Erling Haaland is worth the money, and we will be freed from the tyranny of trying to figure out Brighton’s starting line-up. By tomorrow evening, we will all have clicked ‘submit’ for the final time and a new season of the Fantasy Premier League will be underway.
Fortunately, as 3 Added Minutes’ resident FPL expert, I’ll be here to help. Once again, I’ll be offering up hints and tips in these weekly columns in the hope of passing on some of the wisdom that helped me to register a Top 2,000 finish last season – and in the build-up to the new season, I’ve already written about how to build the perfect team and shared some draft teams for your perusal. Hopefully, the advice will help a lot of you to do some of that crucial fine tuning before Manchester United take on Fulham on Friday night.
For today, I’m going to be revealing my final team for Gameweek 1 (subject to the two dozen minor tweaks us FPL players can’t help but making over the final hours, of course, I’m only human) and discussing some of the more detailed elements of the thought process that led me there, in the hope that it gives you some inspiration and helps to highlight some possible mistakes you might have made.
The final cut
After a lot of agonising, I’ve settled for a team which starts Erling Haaland and goes heavy up front, with Alexander Isak (for my money, the best pound-for-pound player in the game) and Dominic Solanke alongside the Norwegian death robot in the front three. Haaland’s £15.0m cost is prohibitive, but I think I reached a place where I’m happy with the strength of the rest of the squad. Here’s how it looks:
Fixtures played a big part in a lot of my final decisions. Liverpool have what should be a relatively soft start to the campaign, so I’ve tripled up there, and Newcastle shouldn’t hit too many snags early on either, so in comes Anthony Gordon and Marc Guéhi, who could very easily be strutting his stuff at St. James’ Park in a couple of weeks. Arsenal, meanwhile, have a pretty rough ride early doors, so I’ve only got Bukayo Saka in there for now.
Similarly, there are no Wolves or West Ham players for now, because they have a tough start too, and I feel that I can, say, move from Diogo Jota to Jarrod Bowen easily enough after week six, when Liverpool run into tougher games as West Ham’s ease off a little. I’ve also planned ahead to make sure I have at least three defenders and four midfielders that I’m happy with for each of the first half-dozen weeks – if I can roll over a bunch of free transfers, I will. Some players are intended as ‘set and forgets’ (Saka, Isak, Jordan Pickford and so on) but I know changes will happen and I’d rather make sure I don’t leave myself looking too weak in any give gameweek.
Pre-season information has been important, too. I’ve not worried too much about results but about who’s playing – although I will note that I’ve skipped Chelsea players entirely as their distinctly wonky friendly form, combined with another chaotic transfer window and a brand new head coach, means I just don’t trust them to do the business. I’ve also found space for Jota because he’s been playing as the number nine in Liverpool’s warm-up matches.
The only thing I don’t love about this line-up is that there’s a risk that I’ve picked the wrong budget-friendly enablers in Emile Smith Rowe and Morgan Rogers – I will have to carry one almost every week if I want to avoid playing more than three defenders, which is absolutely the case for me. But I think Haaland has enough chances to score big early doors that I didn’t feel comfortable starting without him, and if he once again doesn’t do any better than Ollie Watkins it’s easier to move off such an expensive player than to bring him in down the line.
A few notes on specific decisions that could have gone another way – certainty is really important to me in terms of minutes and likelihood of scoring points, so I decided to push the finances a little to include Solanke up front instead of Brighton’s João Pedro. The £5.5m Brazilian is a great enabler if he plays every week but with the Seagulls spending a lot on new forwards and a brand new manager in the dugout, I didn’t feel confident enough that he’d start every game. For similar reasons, I dislike the cheap but risky defender Valentín Barco.
I was also very tempted to pick Kevin de Bruyne or Phil Foden over Saka, because I could easily make good use of the £0.5m elsewhere and they have better early fixtures than the Arsenal man, but with questions over fitness and early-season minutes, it once again felt safer to stick with Saka, one of the most consistently reliable assets in the FPL. That need to feel certain players will be on the pitch and scoring is also why I decided against the Christopher Nkunku gamble.
The big decision, of course, was whether to go for Haaland or not. There’s every chance that Watkins goes big again and if that’s the case, it’s almost certainly not necessary to have Haaland. But Manchester City simply have an easier start than Aston Villa and as mentioned earlier, it’s far easier to go one way than the other if I get it wrong, so I decided that it’s best to kick off with Haaland and change if I need to. Frankly, I also felt that you could build a good enough team despite losing that extra £6.0m, but if it turns out that going with a ton of premium players is the best route to take then I’ll accept I was wrong and move before too long.
A few more players that didn’t make the cut but who I like if they fit your structure – Dean Henderson, Ian Maatsen, Joachim Andersen, Jacob Murphy, Son Heung-Min, Cole Palmer, James Maddison and Marcus Rashford. Yes, Rashford, he’s £7.0m and if he gets his touch and confidence back, that will be a ridiculous bargain. I’ll be keeping a close eye and I’m prepared to pounce if he shows any signs of recapturing his 2022/23 form.
Captain calls and panic buying
With just hours before the deadline, a lot of you probably want to know who to captain as well – I’m going with Isak as a home fixture against Southampton should be pretty positive, but if you have Haaland then be aware that he scored three against Chelsea in pre-season. Any of the usual big names should be fine, but I think Salah, then Isak, then Watkins, then Haaland, then Saka is my top five among heavily-owned assets in the game. Just play it safe for week one.
One final word before I leave you all to your FPL fate for the weekend – no matter how badly Gameweek 1 goes, try not to panic and start making bad transfer decisions. Unless you get smacked over the head with a string of injuries and red cards, it’s almost certainly not worth spending -4s from the start and chasing players whose prices rise and fall is a fool’s errand. The prices will go crazy for the first few weeks as everybody panics, but that’s just part of the game. Try to hold the course and keep the faith with your team for the first two or three weeks, and don’t let one great or awful performance convince you that a bad player is suddenly good or a good player suddenly bad.
The 2020/21 season offered up a perfect example and a sobering lesson for a lot of players. Going into the first week, Son was one of the most popular assets in the game – but Spurs played badly on the opening weekend, losing 1-0 at home to Everton. Suddenly, people were desperate to sell Son, and his price and ownership tanked. So what happened? The very next game, he scored four, and everybody panicked and lost a bunch of money buying him back. Don’t be the person who sells Son this year.
That’s all from me this week – I wish you all the very best of luck and hope that all of the last-minute changes you make pan out well. Let’s go take down some mini-leagues…