🤕 Yankuba Minteh needs a scan after an injury in Brighton’s friendly against Roma. With Kaoru Mitoma injured, it’s looking good for £5.0m midfielder Diego Gómez’s minutes.

👀 Dominic Solanke may have an ankle injury.

🇧🇷 João Pedro scores a brace against AC Milan.

🎯 Florian Wirtz and Alexander Isak score in Liverpool’s latest friendly.

⚽️ Dominic Calvert-Lewin scores again for Leeds.

🧐 Arsenal lose another friendly, conceding three goals in consecutive games.

👟 Antoine Semenyo gets two assists in Man City’s latest friendly win.

➡️ Catch up on previous preseason newsletters and join our free mini-league here

Alright?

If FPL is a lasagne, the players we pick are the cheese we grate on the top. They’re the bit we can see when we look at the lasagne.

But beneath those players are layers of fixture planning (meat), underlying stats (pasta sheets) and chip strategy (the Béchamel sauce, obviously).

This season, the chip strategy is particularly important. It’s an extra saucy lasagne. Some of the more artisanal lasagne enthusiasts amongst you might even say it’s too saucy.

But once we understand our preferred chip strategy, it becomes much easier to make decisive player choices ahead of Gameweek 1. The cheese might as well grate itself.

So, in today’s bonus Lazy, we’re exploring the three most popular approaches. By the time you’re done with this newsletter, you’ll be no better at cooking a lasagne, but you might just be a little bit better at cooking up an FPL team fit for Gameweek 1.

Chip schedule:

- Bench Boost in Gameweek 1
- Wildcard after Gameweek 5
- Possibly play a Free Hit in Gameweek 4
- Possibly play a Triple Captain early on as well

On first glance, Loaded Chips looks a little amateurish. Spaffing your chips in the first gameweeks of the season is the sort of strategy you might see from the rugby fan in your work mini-league.

But there are plenty of good managers - including a few of the LazyFPL Premium experts - who are currently on it. It rests on three convictions:

1) We get two sets of chips now. We can’t use the first set of chips during a Double or Blank Gameweek, which means there’s no unanimously agreed-upon best time to play them.

2) Planning to use chips is actually a bit of a hindrance. It’s like when a distant aunt buys you an indoor skydiving voucher for Christmas. It’s a nice gesture that you feel you ought to use, but it’s also a bit of a pain in the arse to organise. Getting the chips out of the way early relieves the burden of use.

3) Gameweek 1 is effectively a Wildcard. We can optimise our team for a Bench Boost - e.g. by picking two £4.5m goalkeepers - and work from there. Nobody wants to waste free transfers on replacing a £4.0m non-playing goalkeeper later in the season.

Here’s a Gameweek 1 draft built for Loaded Chips:

Notice, here, that there are no passengers. This team is built to have a stronger-than-conventional bench, because we’re using the Bench Boost straight away.

We might, if we want, use other chips early too.

The Triple Captain could be used on Erling Haaland in Gameweek 3 (he’ll play Coventry). The Free Hit could be used in Gameweek 4 to navigate the Manchester derby.

It’s built for a Wildcard during the first international break after Gameweek 5, when we’ll have a better lay of the land.

Loaded Chips: The vegan option

There’s a variation of Loaded Chips where you play your Bench Boost in Gameweek 2. It’s exactly the same approach as the meat alternative, only your bench is optimised for Gameweek 2’s fixtures rather than Gameweek 1’s fixtures. The main draw is Coventry players, as they have Hull at home in Gameweek 2.

Chip schedule:

- Wildcard in Gameweek 5
- Every other chip after that.

Skinny Fries targets an international break Wildcard, but saves the other chips for later in the season. No Gameweek 1 Bench Boost, no Free Hit in Gameweek 4.

This strategy allows you to invest more money into your starting XI, because, in theory, you shouldn’t need to lean on your bench as much. The aim is to optimise your squad for the first five gameweeks, knowing you’ll have a Wildcard to reset it after that.

Here’s a textbook Skinny Fries squad:

You might downgrade Gabriel here if you want the funds to strengthen elsewhere, but the key with this strategy is that you won’t be Bench Boosting until some point after your Gameweek 5 Wildcard. That means the players on your bench only need to be good enough to fill in for any unexpected absences, and since when has FPL ever given us unexpected absences?

Chip schedule:

- There is no chip schedule.

This one is for the stoic. Marcus Aurelius famously used the Classic Cone when he came third overall in the 163/164 season.

In this strategy, we don’t claim to know the lay of the land before a ball is kicked; we just pick good players and see where the season takes us. Chips are used when deemed appropriate, but not scheduled in advance.

But this team still has some nuance. Crucially, it’s built to be flexible and strong. Like it’s made of carbon fibre, or something.

In this scenario, we need a bench that can be mobilised if needed, either for a Bench Boost or for some sort of injury/suspension crisis. Without our Wildcard penned in, it needs to be robust enough to weather the storm of a surprise benching or an early injury.

It’s pretty strong all-around. In theory, this squad doesn’t force your hand into playing an early Wildcard, or any other chip for that matter.

The strategies above are very different, but one thing remains consistent across each draft: the need for enablers. If the strategies are the chips, these are the crap wooden forks you get to eat them. They invariably snap eventually, but they’re handy to start with.

Enablers = cheap players that enable you to afford pricier options.

Our favourites:

Dara O’Shea (IPS, DEF, £4.0m) - An acceptable fixture in Gameweek 1 at home vs Sunderland, which makes him good early Bench Boost fodder.

Liam Kitching OR Milan van Ewijk (COV, DEF, £4.0m) - Perfect for a Bench Boost in Gameweek 2 (vs Hull), but definitely benchers in Gameweek 1 vs Arsenal. Bobby Thomas didn’t start their last friendly, which is why he’s not included here.

(Btw, we did a whole newsletter about budget defenders which you can read here.)

Diego Gómez (BRI, MID, £5.0m) - Looks set to start in Gameweek 1, which makes him a good option for an early Bench Boost. A cheaper option than Pascal Groß.

Matt Crooks (HUL, MID, £4.5m) - Currently the best bargain-basement midfielder for expected minutes. Don’t expect much else.

Jack Rudoni (COV, MID, £5.0m) - An alternative midfielder to Gómez for anyone looking at a Bench Boost in Gameweek 2.

Christian Nørgaard (EVE, MID, £5.0m) - Best suited to the Classic Cone, Nørgaard is cheap, will likely play and could be a magnet for DefCon points. A season-long keeper, not an explosive pick.

If you’re up to date on who's playing who and when in the Premier League, but still find yourself needing an extra footballing fix, you should do as we do and read The Assist. It’s the free newsletter from the football-dedicated live score app FotMob.

Each weekend, they'll guide you through the top fixtures and the storylines to watch out for from the key leagues around the continent and the wider footballing world. If you never want to miss a Derby, a Cup Final, or a title decider ever again, this is the Friday email for you.

See you Thursday for a look at pricier defenders.

Stay lazy,

The LazyFPL Team.