🧠 The secret to winning your mini-leagues 🏆

The stuff you should probably know 🚨

🔵 Kevin De Bruyne is feeling “much, much better” according to Guardiola. He was benched in their last friendly.

🤑 Elliot Anderson (£4.5m MID) scores 4 and assists 3 in 4 Newcastle friendlies.

🤝 Raul Jimenez joins Fulham, Anthony Elanga joins Forest.

👀 Divin Mubama (£4.5m FOR) told by Moyes he’ll be used a lot this season.

🤕 Heung-min Son reveals he was playing with a hernia last season.

⚽ Richarlison scores a hat-trick in latest Spurs friendly.

Keep reading to find out what differentials and popular brit-pop band Oasis have in common.

Alright?

Players get injured. Managers get sacked. Form changes almost as frequently as UK Prime Ministers.

But strategy is a constant. A lighthouse in the choppy seas. An Irish pub in foreign lands.

Some managers are just always good. We’re lucky enough to have one of them - The Professor - on the LazyFPL team. After eight seasons, he’s never finished outside of the top 100k; consecutively in the top fraction of a percentile of managers.

How is this possible? Is the Professor just incredibly lucky in life? Definitely not - you should see his face.

Instead, it’s down to a robust strategy that anyone can learn. This strategy won’t win you friends, but it will win you mini-leagues.

Ready to see how the sausage is made?

Luck vs Skill

First a quick note about the relationship between luck vs skill in FPL. It’s a tiresome debate, not least because the “right” answer is clear and obvious.

Let’s imagine FPL is a computer game, separated into 10 levels.

Skill determines the level you can regularly reach without breaking a sweat. Luck determines how many extra levels you get through after that.

The Professor will consistently reach a high level - in his case, the top 100k - because he has the skills to get there more often than not.

But an unlucky season might see him finish around 70-80k. A lucky season might see him finish in the top 10k.

Equally, former winners of FPL (a few of whom subscribe to this very newsletter) will be the first to acknowledge the role of luck in their victory.

If you want to win the whole thing, having lady luck on your side isn’t enough: you’re going to have to marry the woman. Skill is what gets you a first date with her.

Get unprecedented access to the Prof’s brain

The Professor sends out two emails every gameweek during the season, delving into his transfers, watch-list, captains and strategy. They’re solid gold.

You’ll also get an optional invite to our Premium WhatsApp chat group, entry to a Premium-only mini-league and, my personal favourite, access to our Broadcast WhatsApp group, which is sort of like having a PA whose only job is to update you on the need-to-know FPL news as it happens.

Oh, and it’s also how we fund the newsletter. It keeps these emails free.

Give it a go and, if it’s not for you, we’ll refund you immediately.

The importance of being boring

Boring wins leagues. Purists don’t like it, but it’s true.

The best, most consistent managers are boring bastards.

For the vast majority of the season, they’ll pick the popular players, and choose captains based on who is likely to be the most captained player.

Sheep mentality. Remember, they’re not trying to win the whole thing. They’re just after a solid rank, and perhaps the odd mini-league win too. It’s about consistency,.

Player selection becomes less about who they think is an excellent pick, and more about what the majority of other managers are doing.

There’s a reason for this: it’s because not owning popular players can expose you to significant rank drops.

Let’s consider a real-world example. Imagine the Professor has reservations about the 80%-owned Erling Haaland. He only scored 1 goal in City’s final nine games (in all competitions) last season, and perhaps teams have figured him out.

Regardless of these reservations, The Prof will still own Haaland in Gameweek 1. I haven’t even asked him, but I don’t need to.

This. Is. Boring. But owning popular players is an insurance policy that the top managers will almost always take out. If Haaland scores eight goals in his opening four games, the damage to the Prof’s season could be irreparable.

So, how do the best managers get ahead?

There are two things here.

Firstly, most top managers will still own a few “fringe” players (between 10-20% owned), and will know when to move to differentials as the season unfolds. We’ll talk about when and how to pick differentials shortly.

Secondly, it’s usually not possible to own every popular player, and the best managers are very good at recognising when they own the wrong ones and the right ones.

How do you spot a Tomkins from a Trippier?

The good, the bad and the unlucky. 

The most obvious sign that you own the wrong popular player is that he isn’t scoring enough points to justify his price-tag. But that’s the metric that every manager uses to judge a player’s quality. We can do better than that.

The best managers will consider a myriad of other factors. For example:

• Does the player have great fixtures on the horizon?

• Is he performing well from a stats-perspective?

• Has the manager changed recently?

• Is his heat-map where it should be?

• Is he managing an injury?

• Does he still play 90 minutes in the majority of games?

• In essence, have the circumstances that once made him popular fundamentally changed?

No doubt you could add your own to the list.

The aim is simple: to determine whether the player you own is a bad FPL pick, or whether he’s just having a run of bad luck. There is a big and sometimes season-defining difference, and the top managers are adept at spotting it.

As the season unfolds, we’ll encourage you to do the same.

When to pick differentials

It’s common for new or inexperienced managers to gravitate towards differentials. On a surface-level, the aim of the game looks like a case of who can pick ‘em the best.

This is why the chumps in your mini-league are picking players like Julian Alvarez and Dwight McNeil.

But whilst differentials are exciting to own, they should be used sparingly.

They’re a bit like Oasis songs at a wedding. Wonderwall, Don’t Look Back in Anger, Champagne Supernova...these songs are very popular, but you never hear them at the start of the night. Further, it’d be strange to only play Oasis for the whole evening.

They’re almost always used in the last 30 minutes. The best man has his shirt off, grandma has already made her excuses (probably the dog), and a conga line suddenly and inexplicably feels like a fantastic idea.

Oasis songs are far more effective when they’re deployed after everyone has polished off the free table wine.

Differentials are similar. Yes they can be incredibly useful, but they’re much more effective towards the end of the season.

That’s for three main reasons:

1) the manager buying them understands how many points they need to make up to achieve their season targets.

2) the consequences of a differential under-performing are less detrimental, because the season has almost concluded anyway.

3) the differential doesn’t have to perform over a long period of time.

An example will probably help:

Let’s imagine it’s Gameweek 34 and I’m ranked 110k, but my target is a top 10k finish. I can start to consider differentials because I need to make up a significant number of points in a relatively short amount of time.

If I pick the wrong differentials, it sucks, but it doesn’t really matter, because either way I don’t hit my target. But picking the right ones could propel me into the dizzy heights of a four-figured rank.

Thus, the question isn’t just “who to pick?” it’s “when to pick?”, and the answer will depend on your team and your targets. As a general rule, don’t even think about a “proper” differential (under 5% owned) until after Christmas.

Have a little patience.

When Take That sang “Have a little patience” in their 2006 hit, they were surely referring to a stalwart of top FPL managerial strategy.

Patient FPL management is simple, but it’s not easy. Sticking with a player who isn’t performing actually takes less effort than going to the trouble of finding a replacement. It is the lazy manager’s dream.

And yet very few managers can actually do it.

It feels natural - even wise - to respond to a bad gameweek with action. This, we tell ourselves, is what a real manager would do. If you suffer a bad result, you make changes. You punish the underachievers. You shake things up.

But in FPL, the best response is usually no response. Sometimes players fail to perform, and sometimes the combination of players you own fails to perform in unison. That doesn’t make them bad picks.

The grass is always greener (unless it’s Robert Snodgrass) when you manage a fantasy team, but we’d refer you to the “the good, the bad and the unlucky” section.

If you have evidence-based confidence in your player selection, patience is easy. Gut-feelings, hunches and punts are fun n’ all, but they’re usually the first lambs on the altar when the going gets tough.

Use stats, data, eye-tests and evidence instead and you’ll find it much easier to stick with the unlucky players that are due a big haul.

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Say, we happen to know a website that can help. Fantasy Football Hub has an OPTA stats tool specifically designed for FPL managers. Want to know which mid-priced midfielder has the highest expected FPL points for Gameweek 1? Click here to find out.

Other stuff we like this week.

• this pre-season form graphic from FPL Focal

• This Bryan Mbeumo “interview” that an FPL manager conducted at a recent Brentford training session.

• Our recent Twitter thread about the ICT index.

Blimey, Gameweek 1 is less than two weeks away. You’ll get two emails from us between now and then.

Next Sunday we’ll be running through everything that’s happened over pre-season that might inform your team selection. A “final briefing before the battle” of sorts.

Then, on Thursday, you’ll get our pre-Gameweek 1 email 24h before the deadline. This’ll include stats, news and, if you’re lucky, the Prof’s final team selection.

Stay lazy,

The LazyFPL team.