🚨 Breaking: DGW25 Announced 🚨

Alright?

Us again. Sometimes in life, you spend hours putting together a newsletter, and then the Premier League decides to make it completely worthless an hour after you’ve sent it.

That’s FPL for you.

But just like David Moyes at Everton, you can’t keep us away for long.

Let’s go through the big announcement.

The Stuff You Should Know

Double gameweek 25 has been announced by the Premier League.

In short:

If Liverpool get to the EFL Cup Final: Liverpool and Villa will double in Gameweek 25.

If Spurs get to the EFL Cup Final: Spurs and Fulham will double in Gameweek 25.

If Arsenal get to the EFL Cup Final: Arsenal and Chelsea will double in Gameweek 25.

As Newcastle are not in European competition, they will not double if they progress to the EFL Cup final.

For visual learners, here it is in infographic form:

Triple Captain Vs Assistant Manager Chip

This changes things.

Due to the fixture schedule now containing guaranteed double-doubles (Gameweek 24 and Gameweek 25), using your Assistant Manager chip is the preferred route.

That’s because the Assistant Manager chip covers three gameweeks, whereas the Triple Captain chip only covers one.

Assuming you want to play your Ass Man, you’re probably facing one of two scenarios that boil down to “Slot vs Moyes”. Let’s explore them both:

Scenario 1: You have 2 Liverpool players currently in your squad.

This could be called the “Slot him in” scenario. If you have two Liverpool players, it makes a lot of sense to bring in Arne Slot as your Assistant Manager and third Liverpool asset.

If Liverpool get to the EFL Cup Final, Slot will have two doubles across Gameweeks 24 and 25, and having Slot means you don’t have to spend a valuable FT hoping around other managers until Gameweek 26.

Scenario 2: You already own three Liverpool players.

So you can’t get Slot unless you sell a Liverpool player who potentially has two doubles - and that feels dirty and wrong.

Get David Moyes as your Assistant Manager for Gameweek 24, and then use an FT to move him to Marco Silva or Unai Emery (depending on whether Fulham or Aston Villa double) in Gameweek 25.

This would give you a run of four home fixtures across both doubles for your Assistant Manager including two fixtures of potential table bonus.

For both scenarios, the league table come Gameweek 26 will determine if you stick or twist with your manager.

There may be a further opportunity to attack the table bonus in Gameek 26, but given it’s 21 days away, it’s hard to predict right now.

What about your Triple Captain?

Mohamed Salah is still the captaincy pick this week, but if you still have your Triple Captain, the conventional wisdom is to save it for another Double Gameweek later down the line.

As a reminder, you cannot use it whilst your Ass Man is still active.

The move most managers will be making is to activate their Assistant Manager to bring in one of David Moyes or Arne Slot.

Naturally, this development has had the Professor in a right flap.

As a nocturnal being, he’s had to awake from his daytime slumber to restructure his team around bringing in an Assistant Manager.

He’ll be going for Arne Slot as his Assistant Manager.

Pick your favourite result from our Google Image search of “Slot”

Since the news broke, our WhatsApp groups have been exploding. Resident pundits, including the Professor himself, are still trying to understand what this means for their teams.

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Perhaps next, the Premier League will announce that the football is totally cancelled or that the rescheduled Everton vs Liverpool fixture will take the form of a Royal Rumble-style battle between the respective clubs’ backroom staff.

But assuming that doesn’t happen, we’ll see you on Feb 13th.

Stay lazy,

The LazyFPL Team.